>> 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.
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.