Reminds me of the time I was browsing through a scrap yard in a large mid-western city for art supplies and happened across an oil drum filled to the top with discarded chest x-rays. Kind of disturbing both from the sheer number of xrays as well as the deformities visible in many of the images.

Point being, hospitals have a very poor track record regarding their disposal of medical equipment and records so a motivated individual could probably easily find this data in a recycling center.

Why indeed. The article also stated that Google had twice attempted to broker access to the dataset and twice been turned away.