Recently, Google Inc. was exposed to secretly collect personal data from its users, and less than 48 hours after the revelation, the U.S. federal department began to investigate Google's medical data program. Google's "Nightingale Project" reportedly worked with ASUS, the second-largest health system in the United States, to collect medical privacy data from 2,600 U.S. hospitals and 50 million patients. At least 150 Google employees have access to this extremely private medical data, which is read, stored, and algorithmically generated in real time.
After the revelation, Ascension Group and Google quickly issued a press release formally announcing the collaboration between the two parties,and emphasizing the legality of the action, saying that the collaboration was intended to help healthcare organizations better assist patients and did not violate various U.S. healthcare regulations under the Health Insurance Accommodation and Accountability Act, which was issued in 1996.
In this case, once the patients' information was entered into the Nightingale program, they exposed their privacy to Google's system completely, and all the operations took place without the knowledge of either the patients or the doctors, thus posing a great risk. Data is a very important resource in the contemporary digital society. Google's own use of data to run its business without the knowledge of all parties is shameful. More worryingly, because this is medical data, what would be the consequences of a data breach?
Historically, Google has had a less-than-stellar history and cases of data leaks. This time, Google and Ascension signed a technology partnership nominally to improve the healthcare system as a whole, but if the data is leaked to other organizations, or leaked to other people who will take the data and do other things with it, the consequences of that are very serious.
How do you maintain private private data?
Private private data is ubiquitous in today's world. If this data is centralized, it will be a very important reference for devices such as medical, which can improve medical treatment and create new drugs to develop new markets. The commercial and scientific value of this data is enormous. But at the same time, the risks are also very high, because if privacy is exposed, there could be irreparable consequences. Even if we imagine it in the worst possible way, the consequences of passing this data, which contains all kinds of genetic information, to a hostile national research organization are unimaginable. From this perspective, data security is truly national security.