https://www.wired.com/story/google-is-slurping-up-health-dataand-it-looks-totally-legal/
Google is stirring up further ethical concerns with their recent increased interest in personal healthcare information. The data collectors joined forces with Ascension, the second largest health system in the United States, to create a program which will work toward individualized treatment plans. This procedure would be extremely beneficial to the well-being of patients and their ability to cope with specific ailments. This being said, this technology comes with a glaring cost. Google can legally take personal information from each and every patient in the Ascension system without consent from said patients. Even further, Ascension can release the actual names of patients rather than identification numbers, meaning that Google could potentially use this information for targeted ads or a more personalized experience.
Some people will accept this as just another facet of major corporations gathering data for their own secret means while others should question the ethics of this situation. As we discussed in class, engineering is surprisingly reliant on ethics and this situation definitely hangs on the boundary of inacceptable. We even examined Google’s current policy and many students noticed that the policies seem extremely forgiving and only look to not get the company in trouble. The article acknowledges that Google’s endeavors in the healthcare field are entirely legal but does that they are ethical? Personally, I feel Google is crossing a line in which we no longer have to pretend to read the terms of service before agreeing to giving away information. At least in this situation, we are in control of our own destiny. If Ascension gives away complete medical details without patients’ consent, this could lead to largely negative implications. Google likely does not have any malevolent or evil intentions for the data they collect but it still serves as a breach of privacy in a country where we highly value this right.
Google is funding this project for free in hopes that other healthcare providers see the benefit of the system and decide to partner with the company in the future. If Google can partner with most major healthcare networks, they could collect highly sensitive data on the majority of Americans. Facebook and Apple will likely follow closely in Google’s footsteps as each company searches more and more desperately for large-scale health data. A Google Cloud worker emphasized that this data would not be combined with existing consumer data, however this will largely be dependent on how much society truly cares about their privacy. As discussed in class, as long as people do not protest the potentially violating actions Google and other companies perform, they will continue to push the boundary. I am not necessarily a proponent of active protest in this scenario, however a stand should be made at some point. I believe this point lies at the threshold where our data gives the data collectors greater benefit than their services reciprocate to consumers but this is a gray area that not everyone supports. As we move through further decades, consumers must heavily consider what control big businesses have on personal life.