Google AI Has Access To 1.6M People's NHS Records (newscientist.com)

Hal Hodson, reporting for New Scientist:It's no secret that Google has broad ambitions in healthcare. But a document obtained by New Scientist reveals that the tech giant's collaboration with the UK's National Health Service goes far beyond what has been publicly announced. The document -- a data-sharing agreement between Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind and the Royal Free NHS Trust -- gives the clearest picture yet of what the company is doing and what sensitive data it now has access to. The agreement gives DeepMind access to a wide range of healthcare data on the 1.6 million patients who pass through three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust -- Barnet, Chase Farm and the Royal Free -- each year. This will include information about people who are HIV-positive, for instance, as well as details of drug overdoses and abortions. The agreement also includes access to patient data from the last five years. According to their original agreement, Google cannot use the data in any other part of its business.

Comments

Re:Yawn

[countach44]

As a service provider, Google is not equivalent to those other researchers.

The article didn't say, but it would be interesting to know if dates/times were anonymized out (they aren't in the datasets I've seen). With Google calendar and gmail, it's pretty straightforward to deanonymize a rather large set of those patients.

EMRs are becoming more prevalent and some patients start using email for communication (not always that best, but you know it happens). It sure seems like that whole "let's offer an email service" can be quite the treasure trove for this and other kinds of information.

Re:Is it anonymized?

[mi]

See? All you had to do was to cite your reference with the original claim...

Oh, wait, the very title of your link says: "your-nhs-data-is-completely-anonymous-until-it-isnt"...

My point is that there are already publicly available databases in the U.S

And yet, the NHS data covers the entire nation, whereas the US databases (if they are, in fact, as detailed and dangerous to privacy as the NHS) cover only some of the patients.

Just another reason why "single payer" is such a wet dream of Statists...