It'll make my job of saving lives/advance medical field more easy IS a good reasoning for wanting a more streamlined mechanism to share statistical data.
One directly causes harm to people. The other _potentially_ causes harm, only if that data gets into the wrong hands and/or is misused. I think saving more lives is worth considering the tradeoff and striking a balance somewhere in the middle (e.g. gathering consent, opting in/out, transparently seeing who what data is shared with, etc).
My point being that your twisting of my words to the point they are unrecognisable is silly. Some people may look at my policing suggestion as a positive you look at it as a negative. Same thing applies to privacy. You may trust doctors (and corporations) and mistrust the police, others feel the opposite way - or trust neither.
It is not that.
It’s "giving all information that exists about your medical history to a corporation that already tracks 70% of all payment processes and 96% of website accesses, and which aims to fully control your life". That’s a 1984 scenario if I’ve ever seen one.
I want my medical history to be analyzed, especially in aggregate of everyone else's: to find anomalies, develop new medications, advance science, better understand the genome, and a myriad other "positive" outcomes that come from a system like this. I don't care if the NHS builds their own data crunching system or they contract it out to someone else (although in this case I'd lean towards preferring someone else with a track record in ML already, e.g. a leader like Google) -- what's most important is the medical advances that are all but guaranteed to come from it, not the potential threats that could come from its potential misuse.
It can be argued that Google, specifically, is too biased to handle the data (in which case, it sounds like they just need to be more transparent with how they're using it). It could be argued that it could fall into malicious hands that would blackmail or do "evil" things like raise premiums (to which transparency and security are, obviously, very important). It could be argued that the chance of misuse outweighs the chance of it doing any good, and so on. Those are good arguments, and address vulnerabilities in a system that shares extremely private data, and each concrete criticism opens up the conversation to how to improve the approach. Just saying it'll be like 1984 isn't very helpful to argue. How will it be like 1984? How can we address that?
If technology can be used for good _and_ bad, we put checks in to make sure it's used for good and not used for bad; we (as a species) don't avoid creating it altogether. Transparency, security, accountability, verifiability, etc are all problems we've solved in similar situations throughout history to make sure a system benefits everyone, even when there is a risk of bad players. I assume you have a bank account, even though a bank manager could just bag up all the money and walk out with it any day (or not).
Not to be cliche, but: with great power comes great responsibility. Utopian goals like "solving disease" are always going to come with the risk of someone misusing some new panacea-enabling technology to spread an even worse disease. We should be making sure technology is properly checked and balanced so we can actually use it to do good, not fighting technology (or advancements in health or technology) from existing in the first place because of fears of "what if".
Independent research institutes, funded by endowments, taxes or donations should be able to.
But for-profit companies not, because they will find a way to abuse the data.
I’ve been running IRC bouncers for quite a while, and running stat services. Just the data you can correlate from that – when are users active, what’s their ping at what times, what’s their probable timezones, when do they go afk – allows you to correlate the location of users down to a town, without even having access to the IP. With access to that, it gets even better. Merely with IRC logs you can find out who knows whom, or interacts with whom, if you have detailed enough message logs. This is enough that most people get creeped out if you show them what you can correlate merely from that, and consider it a violation of privacy.
Google is orders of magnitudes worse. The data that you can correlate simply from what Google already has about you – I’ve decompiled quite a few Google applications for research purposes, and analyzed their analytics code – is enough to deanonymize any pseudonymous data. Better yet, it allows you to track where a person is at any time, who they know and talk with, what they read, see, what they listen to. What they pay money for, and who they love.
This dataset is already extremely extensive, and it’s in control of a private corporation that frequently violates antitrust laws to gain more and more power in more and more markets, and whose former CEO has said "privacy is dead". This power is far too much for any company to control, and it should be under democratic control, and not available to people who have something to gain from abusing it.