Information released about Google’s mishandling of public health data is horrifying
03/20/2017 / By JD Heyes
In a recent interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live, comedian and actor Tim Allen decried the data collection and surveillance of two of the world’s biggest corporations: Amazon and Google.
Saying that Amazon knows “way too much about us,” he also said this:
If the government drove down the street in a gray sedan with a camera on it, you’d be rioting, going to Washington. But if it’s white, with emojis and ‘Google’ on it, ‘Yay! You’re waving at it! They’re taking pictures of your house!
Who are these people? I wanted to put FU on the top of my house.
Allen appears to be referring to Google Maps and Google Street View, both of which contain databases of physical locations of our homes and businesses, which he rightfully intimates is a huge privacy issue. (RELATED: Google And Facebook Are The New NSA)
Well, that’s not the only database that Google maintains and, apparently, abuses. As noted by Motherboard, Google subsidiary DeepMind, an artificial intelligence firm that jumped into healthcare data storage in 2015, has been lambasted in a new report critical of the firm’s patient privacy approach regarding the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).
“DeepMind had not built a piece of healthcare software in its entire existence, and so, to have it just be walked over to by physicians and have an entire hospital’s worth of identifiable patient data given to them on trust seems a bit much to me,” report co-author Hal Hodson told Motherboard.
At issue, Hodson found, were a number of occasions where DeepMind compromised personally identifiable information (PII) on millions of patients.
In July 2015 physicians with Great Britain’s public hospital system requested that DeepMind create software using patient data supplied to it by the NHS. Around four months later, the PII on 1.6 million patients found its way to third-party servers within firms processing data for DeepMind’s software development project supposedly tied to patients at risk of acute kidney problems.
An April 2016 probe by Hodson, who was employed by New Scientist at the time, found that DeepMind had much more access to patient data than the company had revealed publicly. The firm was handling data and other information related to patients with HIV, who had suffered through drug overdoses and women who had gotten abortions dating back five years.
Hodson wrote in his academic report that it was only after a New Science article revealed as much “that any public conversation occurred about the nature, extent, and limits of the DeepMind-Royal Free data transfer.”
He concluded in his paper that the fact that DeepMind actually obtained access to more data than it claimed should serve as a warning.
“By doing so badly at the start, it will be harder for them going forward, but I also think potentially it’s good,” Hodson told Motherboard. “There’s now a lot more scrutiny, people are paying more attention to this stuff.” (RELATED: WATCH OUT: Google Is Recording Everything You Search And Say)
How much data does Google have, exactly? Apparently enough that it fronts as a data hub for the CIA, as noted by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, in February:
One of the fascinating things that’s happening as a side effect of Natural News being blacklisted by Google is that thousands of people are contacting us with information about the hidden history of Google. As we are coming to discover, Google isn’t an innocent, friendly search engine created to help humanity… it’s actually an extension of the deep state that seeks to dominate and enslave all of humanity.
He noted a separate report by Insurge Intelligence which found that the CIA essentially made Google by funding, nurturing and incubating it as a means of dominating the world through control of information. The search giant was apparently seeded with money from both the CIA and the NSA, “merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by U.S. intelligence to retain ‘information superiority,’” the investigative journalism project reported.
J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.
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Tagged Under:
compromise, Google, healthcare, personally identifiable information
This article may contain statements that reflect the opinion of the author
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