Do you life with something chronic? Something were not a lot of people are doing research and we're there was no real discovery in the last 20 years?

Because I do and you know how scattered the field of medicine is?

There is one realistic way of getting more people with chronic issues new threatments and it's data. Lots and lots of it.

IF someone can pull that of while protecting the individuals I believe it's alphabet. Together with deep mind and all the other research they do.

> IF someone can pull that of while protecting the individuals I believe it's alphabet. Together with deep mind and all the other research they do.

What makes you think they will protect the "individuals"? From a privacy persepctive, I would say they have no clear incentive in doing that, given individuals are the product they sell to companies that need to push ads into society.

Checkout their last Google Io.

They know how they make their money and don't hide it. But they make you as an individual disappear.

It's a much better compromise than from any other company and they drive this topic for years.

you dont disappear. you become embedded. they are metaphorically assigning you a number and stripping you of an identity. It is dehumanizing.

At the end of the day, it's just you by a different name. Instead of owning it and claiming "we have this information on Gehlitio" they say things like "We have these generalizations about anybody who happens to use HN, speaks in English, bought X Y and Z, subscribes to A, <insert 100 more details that effectively fingerprint you>"

It sounds to me that you put a negative empathis on 'dehumanizing' but you only talk about an ad id.

I disagree on this sentiment, I don't care if there is an dehumanizing number for me in a ad context. I would prefer it over a personal id.

Anyway I still care much more for having a cure for my chronic pain.

Good for you if you don't need this.

My post wasnt clear on this, but I support doing whatever we can to ease chronic pain.

I just disagree with the position that Google can do so while preserving privacy. If we are going to trade privacy for cures, let's at least do so openly.

I wonder how this will play out in court when a neural net that underpins the tech of a company also can't properly handle health data. Start over?

The right to be forgotten would have to be built into it all right from the get go, wouldn't it? Neural nets embed things, like you said. If Facebook pivoted towards being a hub for healthcare data as oracle seems want to do, could they use all of their facial recognition tech trained from profile pictures now that it is supposed to be detached from any one identity? I'm thinking of the equivalent of github's co-pilot spitting out comments alongside the code.

>I'm thinking of the equivalent of github's co-pilot spitting out comments alongside the code

yes exactly. I am having trouble articulating my underlying point but this is along the lines of it.

A facial recognition algorithm is ultimately saying "you look similar to this specific set of people". If the training set was 1 person, for example, then the algorithm would pretty much just be saying "you look like this photo of this 1 person". Scaling that up does not improve privacy - it only blends you into a population. Additionally, it is distilling out the things about you that separate you from that population (things that make you, you) since those distinguishing features are exactly what the model needs to use as the line to draw on whether or not new data points are similar to the population set or not.

Have you lived with chronic pain, or expected to live the rest of your life disabled?

Because privacy doesn't seem all that important once you actually are going through it.

If you had to pick between being a cripple (say, with your arms or your legs useless) and forgoing your privacy are you really sure you'd give more value to privacy?

Do actually consider what life is like under these circumstances before answering. I don't think there are many quadriplegic people out there who'd pick privacy over being healed.

"X is more important than Y" isn't honest if you never lacked Y and can't even consider a future where you lack Y

I am not sure where I argued that privacy is more important than health. I am saying call it what it is. You are arguing privacy is worth trading for health. I actually agree with that. I dont agree with claims that what google is doing is preserving privacy.

My beliefs are quite the opposite of what you implied about me. I think we should move away from all this embedded bullshit and keep peoples identities intact because the generalizations will never be perfect and it might be useful to know who the actual people are that those generalizations are based on. Maybe that would facilitate human connections. Maybe that would make it easier to reward individuals for sacrificing their privacy in order to improve healthcare. Instead of just pretending they arent sacrificing privacy and are just a drop in the ocean of data providing results.

You are not a drop in the data ocean. Your data is important. There are not a lot of people like you. Google emphasizes generalization because it cheapens the value of your individual data point. Their policy creates an illusion I aim to dismantle.

Also, I do have chronic illness but that is not relevant here. Mine does not directly cause pain, though, full disclosure

All statistics are dehumanizing. I'm no data scientist but I'd imagine including the whole human when doing statistics would produce a pretty low signal to noise ratio.

Statistics are dehumanizing, you are correct. We do not judge individuals based on the statistics of their categorical groups for this reason. Doing so under the obfuscation of a ML model doesn't change that.

Health is very personal. Family history is usually pretty relevant. I am not sure what we gain by pretending we arent talking about actual people, or that by removing your name from all your specific health details it somehow means you cant still be personally targeted. I know Google gains the benefits of less regulations, though.

That's the possible upside. The possible downside is "if you ever search for a disease in Chrome, or on your Android device, or at google.com, we will notify your insurance company who will raise your rates".

So if one of my friends has Crohn's and I search for it to understand what I should be aware of, my rates would go up? HIPAA specifically prohibits the sharing of medical information unless needed for care. If there is any one here that we should be annoyed at it's the insurance companies. Hospitals are losing money and the insurance companies are posting record profits.

HIPAA only applies to "covered entities" and "business associates". Covered entities are health care providers, health plans, and health care clearinghouses. Business associates are parties that a covered entity engages to help carry out the covered entities functions.

If you give your medical information to someone/something that is not a covered entity or business associate they do not have to follow HIPAA rules.

More information here [1].

[1] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/covered-entities...

If the goal is to have society subsidize a subgroup, then either government funding or laws requiring the exclusion of the subsidized criteria for purposes of insurance pricing are the better method. Like ACA did.

So higher insurance rates versus getting better research into life saving treatments? When you put it that way…

Higher insurance rates seem likely, and significantly better research seems unlikely.

Ah, I disagree. Google is a very good steward of personal data, IMO. And I’m pretty sure health care would be markedly improved if all the data were centralized.

So I guess it boils down to a difference of opinion is all.

not even if you search; if you searchED in the past!

Free medicine, but we alter your gene code to put ads in your poop.

Seems like a fair trade.

I'd expect that Google would be more likely to sell your data on your chronic condition and make you unemployable and uninsurable. They are highly unlikely to worry about protecting individuals.

>Do you life with something chronic? Something were not a lot of people are doing research and we're there was no real discovery in the last 20 years?

I do, but I can think of no more obvious examples of a Faustian pact than having Alphabet get involved in this field.

Easy for me: Facebook, apple, lots and lots of small and normal size companies without even any ethics committee or regulation bodies.

Step 1) Allow Gov to build up regulations so complex that it requires a force of nature to over come. Step 2) Big Tech builds technology around those regulations and sells it to people. Step 3) Viola! we have a giant massive ocean-like moat that surrounds the Big Gov + Big Tech castle. Never to be breached by the likes of Silicon Valley startups or otherwise.

We are already in a dystopian time.

I see it frequently here... I suppose it comes from French. Viola means rape(il la viola) or break the law(il viola la loi). The real one is voilà! And dropping the accent, is apparently acceptable in English. Voila! ;)

Because we're writing in English, "viola" is neither rape nor lawbreaking, though "violate" can mean either of those. In English, "viola" is the name of a stringed instrument.

Voila, behold a viola! One fourth of a string quartet!

But if you're irked by "viola", it could be worse, they could have written "wallah", which is all too frequent.

And in Hindi, Wallah means 'person'. Generally used in conjunction with their business. For example, a sweet shop owner is called a Mithai Wallah.

Violà! A wallah in Walla Walla with a wall a' wallabies!

https://wallawalla.org

> In English, "viola" is the name of a stringed instrument.

Or a flower.

Contextually the person is obviously trying to use the french borrow word voilà.

> il

Are you mixing French and Italian articles?

As an addendum wiktionary[0] is always useful when searching other meanings of a word

[0]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/viola

il is a pronoun[0] in French.

I haven't learned French since high school, but here's how I would translate the examples:

il la viola "He raped her"

il viola la loi "He broke the law"

[0](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/il#French)

oh, I did not know, but I studied about 6 hours of French in my life, so it is not surprising.

I laughed hard at this revelation

Lol. 100% this ^^

A merger of technology privacy invading, ai-guiding, rip off processes AND the ability to direct your health for profit. With government lobbyists in both pockets.

What could go right?!?

Which is exactly why they might be able to make healthcare cheaper.

Healthcare is not expensive for lack of huge government-entangled corporations monopolizing and commercializing patient personal information. At least not in USA, where healthcare legislation is written by and for the industry (e.g., https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/05/obamac...), and total healthcare expenditure is somewhere around double that of most other first world countries with more universal healthcare systems, for worse outcomes in many objective measures (at least of overall social health, I realize the standard of care in America is probably second to none if you can pay for it).

>total healthcare expenditure is somewhere around double that of most other first world countries

>the standard of care in America is probably second to none if you can pay for it

How sure are we that these two things are unrelated?

I'm not sure. I've heard people handwave about this before, but if health industry corporations and their congressmen and senators are going to argue that, it should be explained and funded and voted on explicitly, rather than the alleged massive indirect subsidies via overpriced medicare and medicaid government expenditure if they're going to claim that's somehow the way health corporations fund their cutting edge R&D and high end treatments and clinics.

There are still plenty of expensive threatments like cancer were the diagnosis is also costly just due to the tech used.

A proper MRI is expensive, the analysis is slow and need experts etc.

There are plenty of things to optimize.

And when we are done with us, it has to reach the next level to become so cheap and easy to use that everyone on our planet has access to it.

> There are still plenty of expensive threatments like cancer were the diagnosis is also costly just due to the tech used.

> A proper MRI is expensive, the analysis is slow and need experts etc.

I'm sure that's very true. A company that's struggles to keep a rudimentary chat app running for any length of time, spectacularly miscalculated its fiber project, to name a few obvious ones, does not instill any confidence that they would be the one to improve this. The medical industry is far more conservative and far more complicated than what Google has proven it is able to deal with IMO. You can't just move fast and break things, you can make shit up as you go along, you can't invent your own standards.

> There are plenty of things to optimize.

They've also not performed impressively on any kind of "AI" related thing, if that's what they're thinking. Their self-driving cars are still a curiosity and a long way off being revenue positive, if there is even a path to it, for example. Industry and legislative inertia and baggage aside, I don't even think a big old cumbersome dinosaur like Google has the chops to come in and make a big change. Put it this way if some revolutionary new startup company had a really great idea in healthcare, you would be disappointed if Google bought them.

Are we talking about the same company?

Google maps was and still is free, available and changed lives.

GCP is extremely innovative. From full end to end encryption including encryption on rest.

Google workspace works like a charm.

They have well working ML in all newer pixel phones for images etc.

They have tons of bleeding edge research papers on so many different ml topics (are you aware of their research blog?)

Google has one of the best / if not the best certified cloud env in the world. They already work with the biggest health service provider in the USA.

> Are we talking about the same company?

Yes.

> total healthcare expenditure is somewhere around double that of most other first world countries with more universal healthcare systems, for worse outcomes in many objective measures

I've seen this many times but it makes a meaningless healthcare = health correlation .

America has lots of systemic problems that affect health outcomes that are outside of healthcare. Low quality fast food, food addiction, industrialized farming, corn subsides, food deserts, deceptive food marketing to name a few.

> I've seen this many times but it makes a meaningless healthcare = health correlation .

It doesn't, it's just making an observation.

> America has lots of systemic problems that affect health outcomes that are outside of healthcare. Low quality fast food, food addiction, industrialized farming, corn subsides, food deserts, deceptive food marketing to name a few.

Sure, America has many issues and many more than you've listed. So do other countries. And they all have many differences in healthcare systems. All this makes it impossible to formulate a mathematical proof. Which fortunately I was not trying to do.

So we can't really measure the precise effectiveness of healthcare systems and health expenditure, sure. But surely the burden is on the people who would to claim that 2x healthcare expenditure for worse (or not significantly better) health than many other countries is a reasonable cost efficiency, to come up with some pretty strong evidence to support them.

> 2x healthcare expenditure for worse (or not significantly better) health than many other countries is a reasonable cost efficiency, to come up with some pretty strong evidence to support them.

yes we have healthcare system that treats disease, after that fact. Americans are a sickly group of people. Lionshare of expenditure goes to treating chronic metabolic illness. These people cannot be returned back health once they have metabolic syndromes. So matter how much money you spend on healthcare there is no real way to convert sickly ppl back into healthy people. No doctor has a way to fix diabetes or thyroid dysfunction.

Again, goes back to my original comment. "healthcare" has nothing to with "health".

There are already at least 2 better methods of making health care cheaper.

Price controls and disconnecting it from employment.