Thier corporate records are none of your business
if we are gonna have no privacy, it should go both ways - companies lose privacy too
It is not our responsibility to make this public. Your logic is similar to the gov trying to get access to all exchanges over the web to scrape them for terrorism and violent behavior. Maybe take a step back and think about the harms that would come out of this?
I wouldn't want any future employers to see my medical data for example, as they may use this to discriminate (theoretically anyway; my medical history thus far is essentially non-existent).
Also: in the late 90s my mother worked for the city to digitize a lot of social security records and such. She had a good friend who had trouble walking (crutches, wheelchair); the story she told was that she was hit by a car, but my mother read her records during her job and found out she had simply fallen and was never hit by a car. Much drama ensued. I have no idea why anyone would lie about that and I'm fuzzy on the details as I was about 12-13 at the time, but fundamentally I think people should have the right to lie about things like this, if they so choose, for whatever reason.
If you're ""Patient b15-2gty", then the data isn't aggregate. Aggregated data means that there are no individual data points at all, only aggregated ones, so there is no need for any sort of individual identifiers.
If there's any sort of individual identifier, then the data cannot be effective anonymized. If the data is aggregated, and the original records that were included in the aggregate figures is deleted, then I think that's adequately anonymized and I would have no problem with it.
Short of that, though, "anonymization" is a thing that doesn't actually exist.
I don't agree about anonymization; "true" anonymity is probably impossible in most areas of life, even for simple things like a walk in the forest as there's always something a significantly advanced sleuth can use.[1] There are no "true" one-way hashes either – you can always brute-force). It's about it being too infeasible to actually do that.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/05/human-genomic-bycatc...
My first job involved a one hour lecture about how people had repeatedly accidentally deanonymized and accidentally leaked data at other institutions, leading to divorces and worse.
We had somewhere between 10 to 100 bytes of entropy on each patient, and it would have been enough for any of their acquaintances to map back to real names and also severely violate privacy.
Instead of taking the information by force (which health care conditioned on opt in certainly is), we should figure out how to build a trustworthy medical research and care industry.
For instance: They could only make this information available to universities, and ensure the results of the research were public domain.
Or, they could create separation of concerns for companies involved. If google wants to store medical data, then they have to spin off their ad business.
I don't think I'd find that sufficient.
What you're calling "collective hangups" are, in fact, real and serious risks. I am distressed at how many people have forgotten (or perhaps were never aware) of the real abuse and harm that was happening with the sharing of medical data before legal protections were enacted. Heck, those harms still happen now, but to a reduced degree.