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?
> [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.