Google Taking Over Health Records Raises Patient Privacy Fears

Three years ago, AI company DeepMind embarked on a landmark effort to transform health care in the U.K., according to Bloomberg. Now, plans by owner Alphabet to wrap the partnership into its Google search engine business are tripping alarm bells about privacy.

Data protection advocates cried foul when the company reversed course on an earlier pledge to keep DeepMind Health, which taps millions of British medical records to monitor and diagnose disease, separate from Google. This month Alphabet said it plans to consolidate the businesses.

While Google says it will continue to ring-fence the patient data, critics say the potential for abuse is significant: What if the company later backtracks and pairs medical records with its search engine and Gmail app, which harbor extensive information on users’ daily lives? That would present a formidable risk to privacy, they say, and could cost patients and providers dearly if the company converted the data into high-priced products.

Google will help bring DeepMind Health’s benefits to more people around the world faster than it could have ever accomplished on its own, said Dominic King, a former surgeon in the U.K.’s National Health Service who served as the unit’s top doctor and helped develop an app for tracking severe kidney injury. DeepMind Health is also developing systems for predicting eye disease and breast cancer risk.

DeepMind said it processes patient data only at the behest of the hospitals it works with and all records are held in a center not run by Alphabet, where it is “separated at all times from any other data.“ The merger wouldn’t change this arrangement without agreement from the hospitals. Google said it stands by DeepMind’s position. “We are currently talking to our NHS partners to plan for the transition of our contracts and this cannot take place without our partners’ consent,“ King said.