I, personally, would be 100% fine with this, as long as:

1. My data was anonymized.

2. At least in the Navy's case, that there was some assurance that some of the work would be made available back to the public, i.e. if all the data was tagged and organized in a way that an open source data set could be made (again, anonymized), but the analysis and any models built would be proprietary to Google.

I honestly don't understand why the knee jerk reaction would be to be upset at your simple exercise.

Because you served to help your country and then call it a day, not have your medical legacy live on in a Google product after you’ve left. Just another thumb in the eye for vets from a public that doesn’t care beyond a NFL game. That’s where the simple exercise could lead.

Yeah but that data can be used to make things better for you later. For example, with the burn pits in Iraq where soldiers no longer have to individually prove harm: https://www.publichealth.va.gov/docs/exposures/ten-things-to....

This data could lead to a discovery like “hey a statistically significant portion of people deployed at (x) between years y and z developed this type of medical condition - the military is responsible and needs to pay them.”

If there’s no value to digitizing this data, why is the military paying Google to do it? It’s not like Google is purchasing it

> Yeah but that data can be used to make things better for you later.

Or, the more likely case, someone figures out how to de-anonymize it and it could be used to hurt me later. That seems much much more likely to me.

1. I dont think DNA can be sufficiently anonymized.

2. I think de-anonymization not only hurts you but also could hurt a large % of the people you are directly related to.

The military members served the public. Google is profiting. You have it backwards.

Imagine I'm a dead guy from the 19th century?

They have much more than just 19th Century records. Where'd you get 19th century as an upper bounds from?

It seems hard to find date ranges for what they exactly collect and store, but I found this relevant line that gives 2002 as an upper bounds:

  "More than 99 percent of the 338 specimens from 1917–1969 were completely desiccated, as were over 72 percent of the 218 from 1970–2002."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236827/

Also, this gem:

  The JPC does not have documentation regarding any consent forms signed by patients or research participants whose data or specimens were submitted to the repository (Baker personal communication, 2011a). Such consents may have been obtained for clinical procedures used to excise specimens at facilities where people received medical care, but it is highly unlikely that they included notification that the specimens could be sent to a remote repository or used later for education or research purposes. Consents for research use may have been obtained for some materials gathered for the war or cohort registries, but the JPC has no documentation on these (Baker personal communication, 2011a).

The last statement is correct- up until about 10 years ago, the vast majority of consent forms didn't explicitly state that the specimens could be reused for other studies later, that hadn't been consented to.

Now most consent forms explicitly call out the option of the data collector to share the data with more parties for further use beyond the scope of the original study.

Good to know, thanks. Though, that's still a pretty shoddy state of affairs.

The deeper you go in medical data, the shoddier it gets.

Can you think of a less obtuse way to interpret the comment? You may be missing a good point.

How is it for profit? The government is paying Google, not the other way around.

Your former employer is paying a 3rd party service to digitize your old health records.

I’d much rather have digital records instead of paper files which can be trivially destroyed or lost. Imagine if I got cancer and had to sue this former employer and I could subpoena for this info.