14
votes
Google is an emerging health-care juggernaut, and privacy laws weren’t written to keep up
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- Title
- Google's Totally Creepy, Totally Legal Health-Data Harvesting
- Authors
- Sidney Fussell
- Published
- Nov 14 2019
- Word count
- 461 words
It seems like different concerns are being mixed here. First, health-related searches on Google. People do the all the time and it's certainly sensitive data. I couldn't say whether things are getting better or worse there. Certainly we're less naive and less trusting now.
When I joined Google more than a decade ago, some of the lobbies had a scrolling display showing the anonymous search queries people were submitting, just for the "gee whiz" aspect of it. Like, financial companies have their stock tickers and here's what we do. I heard they were heavily filtered due to the porn searches. I don't remember if I saw any medical terms. Later I suspected they weren't really live anymore (if they ever were), it was just fake data. But the interesting thing is that nobody really questioned this. Since you had no idea who was doing the searches it was considered fine, hardly creepy at all. Now, even if it somehow got past a security review, it would be considered a PR own-goal, like why would you want to even appear to be doing this?
So, times have changed and we know better now. On the other hand, I don't think the displays did any actual damage?
The second concern is the news hook about whatever Ascension and Google are up to. I think people vaguely know there is a lot of outsourcing in the medical industry for things like medical transcripts, and the other companies might be worse, but they're not Google so they don't make the news.
It seems like it's assumed that Google is connecting all the dots for targeted advertising purposes. I don't know but I suspect they could make a lot more money as a data processor for the health care industry than from making advertising a little better targeted, so they're probably more focused on reassuring Ascension that they're not doing anything sketchy, as well as getting more contracts like that. But everything Google does spooks people now, so it seems like any contract they do will come with PR risk attached.