We all know, that leakage of personal data isn’t anything new nowadays. There are many reasons for collecting your data by big companies. Many of them focus on earning money, by targeting ads based on data concerning your behavior and interests. In Project Nigtigale’s case, however, Google aims at something much bigger.
Project Nightingale owes the name after Florence Nightingale who was an English social reformer and the founder of modern nursing in the 19th century. Project Nightingale is a data storage and processing project made by Google Cloud and Ascencion, which set on foot in early 2019. Their main goal is to design new software using artificial intelligence to predict or more quickly identify medical conditions and suggest changes to patients care. Additionally, the company aims to create a search tool that collects patients’ data into a central location. Google is said to be using medical records of more than 50 million American people from 2600 hospitals in 21 states. The shared data includes patient names and their dates of birth, along with doctor diagnoses, lab records, and hospitalization results. Health data was stored on an Ascension-owned virtual private space.
Despite its great purpose, patients and physicians across 21 states haven’t been informed about their data sharing. Because of this, there were many speculations about whether is this project morally equitable. David Feinberg – the head of Google Health – responded to all criticism. Due to his position – a physician – he said, that he understands that health information should be private and as he refers – Google is not permitted to use that for marketing or research purposes. However, we can’t be sure that the personal pieces of information were strictly sheltered. People are afraid of the potential break-in by hackers.
The Office of Civil Rights of HHS is demanding more details about Project Nightingale to ensure HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) protections have been implemented.
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Would you give up your personal data for the development of medical care in the future?
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Author: Maciej Dziurdzia
Sources:
https://geek.justjoin.it/projekt-nightingale-google-dane-medyczne/
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/cybersecurity/10-things-to-know-about-project-nightingale.html
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/14/google-healthcare-data-ascension
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/business/google-ascension-health-data.html