> [data] "will never be linked or associated with Google accounts, products or services"
Streams is plainly a Google product and is probably using deep learning models trained on this data. Morever, patients were never given the option to opt-out of this data collection at all.
What is trained on what data? The point is that health care data will never be linked to your "Google account", e.g. your Gmail/YouTube/etc. or other Google services -- AdSense can't show you ads based on a hospital visit.
DeepMind is part of Alphabet, like Google is part of Alphabet. DeepMind can do its thing without ever touching Google accounts or Google data.
>> is [...] a Google product
> I can't tell what you're trying to say...
Surely it's clear...said it wouldn't be associated w/ Google products and became a Google product. You can bring up nuance or twist words or whatever, but it's clear that at the least they misled.
was true at the time but surely what people care about is data flowing between the medical app and existing Google services? i.e. what the wording could be revised and still keep to the original intended meaning.
Whether you think the company separation was critical to trust is a rather different question to whether they have broken the intent of their original promise. If you don't trust Google then you presumably also had suspicions about the previous arrangement.
> was true at the time but surely what people care about is data flowing between the medical app and existing Google services?
I would think people would care about the data flowing to any Google service. An understanding that it only applied to existing services like you're claiming would be meaningless. A hyperbolic example of this is Google/Deepmind would still be compliant if they came out with a brand new service, Google Privacy Destroyer 1.0, that puts all these people's private health data up for sale on the dark web.
The statement unfortunately has a secondary implied promise which Google has broken. But my point is that if we don't trust Google to keep the data separate then the initial promise was meaningless. And if we do then not much has changed.
If Google wanted to do bad things then they would have kept the companies separate to keep their promise superficially.
The wording was poorly thought out but unless you think the reorganisation is going to materially change Google's behaviour then I don't see it as hugely significant.
So the new promise is "Patient data remains under our NHS partners' strict control, and all decisions about its use will continue to lie with them." Except I can think of at least two or three good reasons off the top of my head why Google could renege on that without breaking the spirit of their promise too. Maybe Google decides that the information will be more secure on their servers, and the original point was to make it more secure anyway, right?
Yes, Google's original promise was kinda arbitrary and over-strict. But the way you build trust is you keep promises, even if they're arbitrary. When Google says they're not going to do something, they should not do it. Otherwise, nobody will trust them in the future when they say they're not going to do other things. Nobody wants to live in a world where we have to second guess what the intent is behind everything a company promises and are only able to hold them to that.
If Google can't keep its promises, then it shouldn't have made any promises in the first place. It should have just given a milk-toast answer like, "we care about privacy", which would have communicated exactly the same information without deceiving customers into thinking that there was an actual line in the sand somewhere.
How is this not the world we already live in?
Every agreement, obligation, promise, or contract I've read from my major tech 'partners' professionally and personally has had a clause that they can change it at any time with no prior notification.
That being said, at least they include the clause. If this promise had been phrased as, "we won't link with Google products, but we might in the future", I would honestly feel a bit more charitable towards them. It wasn't.
DeepMind went out of its way to describe this not just as a temporary promise, but as a legal one.[0] In their words, "...data will never be connected to Google accounts or services, or used for any commercial purposes like advertising or insurance. Doing so would be completely impossible under our NHS contracts and the law".
That is a full step beyond the crappy TOS that most companies use, and statements like that were given to ease consumer concerns and make it easier for DeepMind to form deep relationships with hospitals.
One other thing to note outside of legal obligations or technicalities is that even if you don't think Google did anything different from the companies you're talking about, companies who do 180s on their TOS still lose trust. The trust loss is separate from the legality.
I don't know if you can go to Google and say, "legally, you shouldn't be allowed to link your product," I'm not a lawyer. I do know that we as consumers and engineers should instinctively distrust any future promises that Google makes about privacy.
If what they're doing is legal, I'm still going to call them out for being untrustworthy and dishonest. Their earlier statements are still lies.
[0]: https://twitter.com/MalcolmMoore/status/1062394654702927873
May be it is the case at present. But I see zero probability that it will always be the case.
Assuming hyperbole: why do you believe that, over time, there is a low probability "DeepMind can do its thing without ever touching Google accounts or Google data?" What factors will contribute to that?
it doesn't say your google account or product. it is in general google products.
It seems to me that they are breaking this promise.
It's not like it was an existing Google product that the data is being moved to.
If Google Health was part of Alphabet but not Google, would you argue it was "plainly not a Google product"?
Or is that still a Google product?
(FWIW: I actually expect the article gets it wrong and that Google Health will be/is a separate LLC under Alphabet but not Google)
So now it's a Google product. And when they said [data] "will never be linked or associated with Google accounts, products or services", that was a lie. Seems very straightforward to me.
> If Google Health was part of Alphabet but not Google, would you argue it was "plainly not a Google product"?
It has Google in the name. I don't understand this claim. It's a Google product. From the official blog post that Streams released yesterday[0]:
"We’re excited to announce that the team behind Streams—our mobile app that supports doctors and nurses to deliver faster, better care to patients—will be joining Google."
They're not joining Alphabet; they're joining Google. I mean, I guess linking to Google is technically different than literally being consumed by Google?
Just because something has Google in the name does not mean it is part of the same legal entity as the rest of Google.
This is already the case in various situations.
Your view seems to be "branding" is what makes it a Google product, and that seems wrong. Branding has no effect on anything material at all.
If Google called it "Alphabet Chrome" but it reported into the Google entity, would it suddenly remove privacy concerns around chrome? As I asked, and you never answered, would you suddenly no longer call it a Google product?
What really matters is what entities it is part of and what walls/agreements/etc exist between the entities, etc.
They're joining Google. Representatives from DeepMind have said that they're joining Google[0]. Every source I can find says that they're joining Google. You're talking about a hypothetical that doesn't exist.
If Streams was joining Alphabet instead of Google, that would probably change things a bit. If they announced they were joining Mozilla instead of Google, that would change things even more. But based on all of the information we have now from both Google and Streams, neither of those things are happening.
Is your position that the blog post that Streams itself used to announce this about their own acquisition is wrong?
[0]: https://twitter.com/Dominic1King/status/1062755561727578113
That seems implausible but would make sense.
I wouldn't see any advantage to making it part of the same legal entity, and a lot of disadvantages.
Google does this in plenty of cases, actually.
https://icis.corp.delaware.gov/ecorp/entitysearch/namesearch...
Search for Google. A subset of the results are Google entities
That's pretty misleading. I wonder if the news leaked before a name was picked?
I don't get how people still try to defend Google. When you see what Google is doing with our data, they should be prohibited from accessing any health information on us. Google has just proven themselves to be one of the most data-angry and unethical company of the moment.
And how does that apply in this context? Are you conflating Google and their parent: Alphabet?
Also, comparing Google to Big Brother is disingenuous at best. Google isn't trying to control or limit what people think. They are merely trying to allow advertisers to target audiences precisely.
I hate advertising, for sure. But the anti-Google fear-mongering and hate based on nothing substantial and leveraging an inaccurate view of what Google does is harmful for everyone involved.
Alphabet isn't the result of a merger, or Google getting bought out by a different company. It's largely the same people and culture that Google was and is, just split out into a larger parent organization so they can oversee more products.
If I change my name to Eric, that doesn't make me a different person.
I think proactive censorship for authoritarian governments (e.g., China) falls into this category.
Google is missing out on the soon-to-be biggest ad market of the world - at least partially due to ethical standards. Apple does earn a significant part of its revenues in China and has no problems with working with the govt there.
(I am not affiliated in any way with either company - just don't understand all the hate against Google)
So the relevant product groups and leadership are, at least to some degree, implicated in deciding to go along with rules they knew would be morally objectionable from the start.
That said, Chinese folks are imo quite right to cry "hypocrisy" on the degree of moral outrage US citizens level at Western nations given how many ways western nations police dissidents and stifle anti-government speech.
If not, the clearly the principle isn't so solid after all. But I don't know what to replace it with.
(I've removed contextual text that I think is irrelevant for this discussion.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11504953
... Civil disobedience is the refusal to obey laws, not the refusal to uphold them. People participating in civil disobedience do it with the understanding that they can (and should) be prosecuted for such. They do so to act as martyrs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506428
...
The bottom line is, you need to be really, really careful when you start arguing for "ethics" and "morality" as a basis for execution of law. For instance, to make a concrete example: It could be argued that based on the ethics and morality of the Nazis, that the mass murders committed under the Holocaust were in fact them morally disobeying those supra-national human rights laws. Who are you to say that the Nazi morality is wrong? You can't point to the agreed-upon supra-national human rights laws, because you are in fact arguing that law should be violated based on morality!
In fact, one of the ways to view law is as an encoding of the morality of the society it covers. Sometimes laws, being fixed entities, and society, being ever changing, drift apart over time. Same as software drifts from the requirements of business if not kept up to date. It usually takes an example like this German one to point out the absurdity, and if the law really is no longer part of the society's morality, becomes fairly easy for lawmakers to fix. (As a reminder, this law being invoked is very old -- from when Germany was a monarchy and insulting dictator kings was morally a very serious crime!)
That is a valid conflation. Google became Alphabet in 2015. It began in 1998. The vast majority of its existence and brand persona is as Google.
The Web Spam team at Google is corrupt, such that a single person can affect rankings in ways that destroy or legitimize websites. And they do fully take advantage of this power.
It’s literally impossible to say that Google doesn’t control or limit what people think, given that there’s zero transparency and zero accountability.
(It’s too late for me to edit my comment.)
Advertisement is precisely trying to control what people think. Specifically, influence their economic and political decisions.
Google's efforts against "fake news" are exactly trying to do that.
And just because one agrees with them in this one instance doesn't change the precedent.
> anything and everything that google does or doesn’t do would be considered an effort to change beliefs
Absolutely. Google (like so many other organizations) is making efforts to change beliefs all the time. That's not a problem per se, except they have so much leverage to _succeed_ at it that it might be worth thinking about the implications a bit. And statements that they don't do it don't help with that step.
Did you mean proliferation? (just trying to avoid falsehoods on HN)
But I also understand why news media in a totalitarian regime toe the party line, say. And they are also damned if they do, damned if they don't.
Again, I am not claiming that Google should be doing something different. They may well not have any other options. I'm claiming that we should be aware of what they (and various other companies and governments!) are doing and act accordingly. If someone claimed that the US government "isn't trying to control or limit what people think", say, that would probably be met with a healthy dose of skepticism. Even more so for the Chinese government. My argument is that such claims about Google should also be treated sceptically. Not as sceptically as the Chinese government; hard to compare tothe US government.
Do you see the juxtaposition here?
Honestly, I don't think society as a whole has really come to grips with what advertising is or how to treat it ethically. Informing consumers has never really been what it's used for, even though that's a critical function of any proposed society that relies on open markets.
Wow, really? I must be crazy but I still honestly feel and believe Google is a good company following "don't be evil".
I think that would be a good start.
> Streams began as a collaboration with the Royal Free Hospital in London to assist in the management of acute kidney injury.
> However, it emerged that neither the health trust nor DeepMind had informed patients about the vast amount of data it had been using.
> DeepMind Health went on to work with Moorfields Eye Hospital, with machine-learning algorithms scouring images of eyes for signs of conditions such as macular degeneration.
> In July 2017, the UK's Information Commissioner ruled the UK hospital trust involved in the initial Streams trial had broken UK privacy law for failing to tell patients about the way their data was being used.
Still not super clear what happened but it appears that google simply failed to tell patients about how it was using their data, which seems to be a violation of UK privacy law.
I'm sure to some people this does not seem super concerning, and to others seems very concerning. In my opinion this is a mistake that should just not be made. The data privacy cultures in tech and healthcare are so incredibly different. Personal healthcare data is regulated arguably too heavily, while in tech it seems that privacy doesn't exist. It seems quite irresponsible to me that such a high profile company as google, that already has a reputation for lax privacy practices, would mess up such a seemingly simple compliance issue. It suggests they simply either dont care, are negligent, or think they can get away with whatever they want
That said, the reporting on this seems to be egregiously sensationalist and fearmongering, and potentially factually incorrect. My initial reaction to that kind of language is to recoil and it makes me side with google rather than the reporter, although upon further consideration it seems clear to me that google / both google and the journalist are in the wrong. But i am probably in the minority and other people may respond to this kind of journalism. If it takes this level of aggressive journalism to raise public awareness of privacy concerns in healthcare, then maybe i support it...
>Streams...hit headlines for gathering data on 1.6 million patients without informing them.
Ah, good to hear! Companies always keep their promises after all, especially when it is around user-data sharing and it's all left to good faith instead of a written, actionable contract. /s
Throwback to Facebook and WhatsApp anyone?
I'm not claiming one is better than the other and that's not a discussion to have today, but I agree with him 100%. Google, after all, invented the business does have a hell of a PR team.
The team is joining DeepMind/Alphabet, and it appears DeepMind promised that health data would never be joined to your Google account.
And there's zero evidence that they are joined or that they would be joined. As far as I can tell, fearmongering like this would suggest that Alphabet couldn't ever deal with health care info, which feels silly... There are plenty of very strong laws enforcing health care privacy (e.g. HIPAA in the US), so this really just feels like FUD.