Google’s quest to digitize troops’ tissue samples
propublica.org
propublica.org
> “Despite efforts from Google and many at the Department of Defense, our work with JPC unfortunately never got off the ground”
Second, I don't see any harm in sharing public data (anonymized of course) with any private or public research organizations. Isn't advancement in medicine good? Are these negative reactions only because its Google?
I'd have a problem if Google said that only they can have this data or something nefarious, but there is nothing in the original article to suggest that.
Your DNA isn't "public data". Further, those in the military didn't have a choice in the DNA collection. Anyone who chooses to give their DNA to Google, or anyone else, should be free to do so. Nobody's DNA should be harvested and given to a private corporation, no matter what the purported purpose.
DNA is public data (you're shedding it everywhere) although in many research situations, many pseudonymous genomes are available.
Heck, there are even ones tied to individuals; for example, https://my.pgp-hms.org/profile/hu80855C That's my genome. Google paid for it to be sequenced. I'm David Konerding. Have fun with it.
Did they clarify what time period the DNA covers? We’re all military subjects able to give reasonable consent? If it includes samples from before ~1953, did they even know the significance of what DNA was or how it could be used?
> voluntarily
I have uncles who served in the military via conscription in the Korean and Vietnamese wars. Is their DNA included? It certainly wasn’t voluntary.
Even if they did, I'll bet they didn't anticipate the raiding of their DNA and medical records by a pariah corporation.
Moreover, I'd lay money that many in the military would strongly object to such collection.
If the military were to go ahead with this then it deserves to lose recruiting numbers.
—
Edit: re your DNA. It's fine if you make a conscious clearheaded decision to put your DNA on line. The fact is that many people will have an absolutely antithetical view about this to you and their views must be respected. Problems arise when people like you who really don't care about privacy are put in charge of making decisions for those who do care.
This is not a criticism of you per se but those handling personal data on behalf of others are less likely to value it to the same extent as the owners of said data. That's why rules should be set up at the outset and they must be inviolate.
A final point, even though you have put your DNA on line you should do so anonymously as your DNA is a link to your relatives and it's highly likely that some of them will have antithetical views to you about the matter—you need to respect their privacy and wishes.
> Your DNA isn't "public data".
You shed DNA every day in dead skin cells; if you're in public then it's effectively public trash and most public trash is... well... public. If you eat or drink at a restaurant then you've left your DNA on the utensils and cups.
Even beyond that: Are you sure your relatives haven't given their DNA? It is possible to reconstruct your DNA using the DNA of your relatives.
> Nobody's DNA should be harvested and given to a private corporation, no matter what the purported purpose.
This much I fully agree on. Private businesses should have no business in DNA analysis. Private businesses aren't beholden to nearly as much public scrutiny. Unfortunately, DNA analysis is (or, was when I left) a growing private business.
This isn't just "public DNA" shed anonymously drifting about in the wind . . .
This is the conjunction of two sets - "public DNA" AND the identity and detailed health record of the body that DNA came from.
A bucket of "public DNA" is interesting, sure, if you're into that - but it becomes a whole lot more when classified by (say) those that contracted cancer Vs those that didn't - particularly when combined with environmental factors, etc.
If tomorrow we invented a tool to read your thoughts based on the electromagnetic waves your brain emits, that doesn't suddenly make your thoughts public data.
Fucking right! Google has an unmitigated hide to even contemplate such collection.
The 'no' in Google's 'do no evil' disappeared long ago.
Google's behavior in recent years is really beyond the pale, it's acting like a metastasizing cancer in everything it touches. It's high time governments brought it to heel.
You're absolutely right, DNA shouldn't be harvested by any private irrespective of purpose.
100% I do not trust Google to do remotely the right thing that is in the interest of anyone but themselves.
These people served their country for the government to give that data to a private company for profit? Google can talk all they want about doing it for good, zero trust in them to actually to anything remotely close to that.
And as we've seen with Google in the past, what they say they will do today does not mean that standard will still apply tomorrow.
And insurance companies obviously already have your health data. You might remember before the ACA they'd drop people based on it and now they don't because they're not allowed to do that.
Yes. ...And it'll take major data leaks of medical records put online by hackers before government takes note and fixe# it.
You can bet the moment some very prominent politician's medical records are put online for all the world to see the details of his piles operation and the fact that he's being treated for gonorrhea that legislation will then follow.
There is some risk to privacy, but I think the "risk of privacy" is used more as a way to justify charging money for data rather than a true concern over privacy/ public safety.
The amount of “what’s the big deal!” or just total blindness to the issue at hand is not surprising but severely disappointing in what it confirms.
These aren’t just random medical records, they belong to service members and extends the theme of the DoD owns you in service and the VA “helps” you after service to… and Google too! It’s just another example of how Soldiers are treated like disposable units and now apparently that extends into my civilian life.
The civilian/military divide lives and breathes in the so-what attitudes in this thread.
Tragically, this problem is not new. It's centuries old and few countries manage veterans well.
Unfortunately, young testosterone-driven men with lots of bravado have little concept of war until they're in the trenches when they quickly learn to regret past notions. Commitments made by governments to their fighting men quickly atrophy and the 'detritus' of war is all too often left to fend for itself.
Google spent heavily to build infrastructure and hire smart people. A small number of those people work on ads, which, while not "walled-off" from the rest of the company, does operate at arm's distance. A larger number of people work on other projects- many of them cloud, which is Google's other non-insignificant revenue source- doing all sorts of things, from building software and hardware infrastructure to do high performance computing (of many kinds) to optimizing models for growing products like Youtube through watchnext and Play Store through suggestions. Many of those people are ex-scientists who want to help use what they've learned to make life better for people- potentially through better medicines.
At the same time, most companies that work with health are incredibly low-tech, super-inefficient and mainly exist to waste patient's money. They fail to use ML and data engineering to maximize the value of their products, they run inefficient software and hardware, they can't explain why their products work or not.
So it stood to reason- at least in 2007, when I joined- that Google could use its technical prowess and ads $$$ to fund health research with the goal of providing a greater good for the world- while also making some revenue and profit from the products. While making the case for this I was extremely careful to repeatedly explain that Google had a serious reputational risk because people were skeptical that the company could both be a big tech advertiser, and a health research company. I said that we should always be up front and open about any deal we make, because eveyrthing is going to leak anyway and at least by being open you have some control over the narrative. And I also said that this work needed to be carried out ethically and in a way that was unrelated to existing consumer products (ads, search, android, etc).
Well, I was successful and managed to convince Google Research to get into health and Jeff Dean and Greg Corrado have been actively working in that area for some time. The work has had extremely modest success in terms of research output and products, but they're committed to it long-term. Later, as Google finally began to recognize Cloud as a business model, I began to engage with the cloud leadership, but with a slightly different pitch: Google, with its infrastructure, could be a great partner to pharma and EMR enterprises, as a service provider (servers and storage) as well as new ideas for data processing (Flume) and machine learning (this was pre-tensorflow; Sibyl was the system i wanted to sell).
This went on for some time and Google made a few products and published a few papers. Some are great and some are terrible, but I left because I came to the conclusion that Google simply can't provide the same level of innovation or success that Ads and Search had, when working in the health area. There are several reasons for this:
The data sources are not as rich as the web. The web provides copious data to make good Search and Ads systems. The data in health and research is ... terrible. Nobody gave any thought to featurization or any of the other important data engineering/ML engineering you need to be sucessful. A dataset like the one being discussed here is significant because it's homogenous.
Verily was getting going but at the time the focus was on medical devices, not machine learning for health research.
At the same time, Sundar has taken over and his approach... is not very enlightened. He was good at rapid growth in multiple products such as Android and Youtube, which were critical for Google to stay competitive when it looked like Facebook was going to own social. He has little to no understsanding of anything but growing consumer products (and when I say "consumer products", I mean the consumer is the product).
So my conclusion- after all of this- is that Google will ultimately fail to make the impact it could have, both because people don't trust google to handle this sort of data ethically, and because the upper leadership doesn't have the "DNA" (so to speak) to build products and do research in this area. Which is a real shame. But the good part is: there's nothing left inside of Google that makes them special in any way for health research. Everybody who wants to emulate the Google style has all the tools available in external open source repos and cloud systems (that includes TPU v4 which is a huge competitive edge for google).
Oh well.
I foresaw something like this when I served and had to fight them on DNA collection. I neither won nor lost but I stalled them long enough to get out. That was my commander's idea. It went all the way to Al Gore via FoIA and came back down as several boxes of paperwork that were worded more vague than a car commercial as to what the data/dna could be used for, how long they could keep it and who would have access to it.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWN13pKVp9s (2012)[video][16 mins]
Culturally that was like telling people you can walk to work...even if you work 20 miles away. Our society needs more interesting and subjectively calibrated brain food for fitness maintenance.
Ideally they could switch to a relatively flexible multi-model fitness system. Give a bit more freedom and education to people who showed they are willing to fight for it. And if somebody still wants PT? Go for it.
According to the General in the linked video from 2012 they have tried to make some improvements, though there is only so much they can do with someone that has been eating poorly and sitting still for most of their life leading up to enlistment. I have not kept up to date with what they are currently doing but there are others here that I believe are still in the military.
It's curious though. We also live in a couch-to-5K world now, so it'd be interesting to know how far "only so much" might go.
It also seems strangely commingled with lack of motivation, the way people complain about others sitting around, which teasing those apart is a good way to attack such problems.
(Especially factoring in the actual, likely fitness needs of a given individual in a given MOS being at war and maybe charging drones most of the day while periodically jogging for cover, or whatever the numbers show is likely-activity vs contingency-plan.)
That's kind of BS. Young people that enlist are not fully formed adults yet and have a huge opportunity to reshape themselves to be fit for military service. I can speak from experience here. Basic training sheds pounds and builds muscle, I've seen it first hand. The problem is that it lasts only 8 week which is not nearly long enough to create new habits or break old ones.
Lots of people have never done a push up or run outside of gym class by the time they serve, it’s not a new challenge. Couch to 5K is solvable and the military is pretty good at it.
I’d love to quantify your comment a bit more… how many young people have a disqualifying health issue like type 2 diabetes, heart problems or obesity? How much of a problem is it really?
People need to eat properly and exercise on a daily basis in to stay fit for service. Most 18-20 year olds have a hard time with discipline. Routine mandatory exercise is a must have for military service. Thus the people with the discipline and "who show willingness to fight for it" and basic competence are the ones that end up leading in the military.
Discipline is a lens though, not a binary state of having/not having a permanent heart condition. If it's hard, there are usually much better lenses for military levels of upkeep.
Just like there are better models than "willpower" for losing weight.
(As to whether anyone who is proud of their personal discipline level wants to admit that, on the other hand...)
Hmm, but this is different from saying "the military never changes its approach to things like this, to get better results with the people it works with" which it does.
In fact in recent years all branches have advertised their desire to "adapt".
Slow process, but it's there & needs to be. Change processes to get the results you need, as returns diminish. Some destabilization required--brass will survive
I read the article and I'm not really convinced that something bad is happening here. A lot of the comments here are purporting that something unethical is happening here - in the article I read: “Ultimately, even through negotiations, we were unable to find a pathway that we legally could do and ethically should do,” Simon said. “And the partnership dissolved.” (referring to a previous design proposal). So it seems like there's a rigorous review process here which demonstrably can shut down the project or prevent forward movement if there's something bad happening.
Also, I don't get this spin along the length of the article that Google is somehow bullying the US military around. I mean, I get that narrative when it's Google is working with smaller businesses and using capital as leverage. But do we really think that Google > DoD and that the US Navy is just getting strongarmed around? I choose to think they have agency here and _if_ there's blame (big if), how is it not mostly on the Navy who is holding the data and running the show?
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."
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).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.
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.
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
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.
2. I think de-anonymization not only hurts you but also could hurt a large % of the people you are directly related to.
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.
That does not impress me. China and North Korea will get it.
On one hand, the DoD playing chess with plug and play resources that Soldiers are. Tech employees being willfully blind to the ethics of this. No surprise either way, China got my data via OPM anyway.
On the other: sick! That’s great Google has the medical records detailing people’s worst moments from war (TBI, PTSD. amputations) or others (spousal abuse, drug abuse), all for a good product! A maxim vets are pretty good at following is your DoD past stays with you and the VA, but that’s great Google gets to poke under the covers too. Hope the product is useful for an OKR. This doesn’t stop with pathology slides from days of yore and we all know it.
Just once it would be nice if companies were actually held accountable.
To me the biggest red flag is that they eventually selected "small technology firm" to host the scanned archive, instead of a legit cloud operator like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. That is the most likely point of graft in this process.
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
“Ultimately, even through negotiations, we were unable to find a pathway that we legally could do and ethically should do,” Simon said. “And the partnership dissolved.”
You didn’t go for “menacing” or “powerful” or “aggressive”, the primary angle is not what they could do, it’s their morality.
Not that google is or will do that.
I read your (excellent) longer comment in here, but I think that we should recognize by now that the idea that Google is not doing it now will never equate to that they will not do it when they can. There's a great statement out there about how DoubleClick data wouldn't be connected with Google's existing targeting data... until, of course, it was. And since Google doesn't have the mindset to succeed in businesses other than ads, we should assume they will eventually pivot all data to selling ads eventually.
If you can imagine a scenario where Google could use data for ad money, the only correct take is to act on the assumption they eventually will. And the fact that supposedly reputable organizations like hospitals and the military keep bending over backwards to hand them people's private medical data should be crisis-level alarming.
Personally I love the feature where I can search for people- that pre-existed, in Picasa, for a decade and it was very popular. I guess the only answer is: decouple from Google as much as you can if you don't like the terms.
I'm Illinoisan, where Google illegally used facial recognition on people without their consent. And lines in a ToS about doing whatever they want with your data is not consent, especially because it isn't optional.
Note that settlements do not mean they didn't do something illegal: It means they did something illegal, but are agreeing to pay out money in exchange for not having to admit they did something illegal.
And yes, I've worked to minimize Google's access to my data since 2014. Unfortunately, they seem to like trying to get it from other sources. As mentioned in the article, they've appropriated personal medical data from hospitals without patient consent multiple times.
I don't really think much of these cases.
The case may be poor, but only in the reason that it fails to actually force Google to comply with the law going forward. Facebook was more successfully forced to shut down their facial recognition technology and delete all of the data: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/02/facebook-face-recognition-...
I think there’s a lot of real good that could come from such datasets, it’s unfortunate this effort is tied to Google somehow because it triggers the privacy zealotry brain off switch of HN.
.. having retired from the DOD, I can assure you on my mother's grave that google has nothing but nefarious interest in this project. All this incessant posturing, bullying and socio/psychopathic behaviour of "aforementioned parties" points to one internal memo: '...extract maximum profit at all cost.'
So Google wants to profit from it. Is that really surprising? It's a private company and will seek profit. It would be foolish of them to start a project if it only results in losses.
The research could potentially benefit humanity and the medical field, which means the interest isn't "nothing but nefarious".
What they do have is an ad monopoly they don't seem to be able to develop into anything else, and then a lot of passion projects the founders happen to like.
edit: This was in response to the parent's original comment, prior to the edit.
https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
But either way, the fact that they are evil today tells the whole story.
I have seen nearly all versions of our code of conduct in existence (IE there were some prior to me joining, but they all had the "don't be evil part")
It was never removed.
That article is clickbait, and it has been called out as wrong by other articles, repeatedly.
Others have pointed this out.
This is trivial to verify by looking at web history archives, of which there are many.
The first version that appeared on abc.xyz in 2018 has don't be evil in it (https://web.archive.org/web/20181202062954/https://abc.xyz/i...). The previous versions on google.com have don't be evil in them.
Rather than accept any of this, you are simply repeating yourself again and again, and citing a debunked clickbait source.
That will not make you any righter, and it will not make your claim any truer.
You've already had one comment now flagged as dead because you won't stop.
It is not interesting or a useful contribution to comments on this story.
Can you please just grow up and move on, and or make some actually substantive comment about the article, rather than continue to derail and detract from the broader discussion?
There is a thing worth discussing here, and this is not it.
A more nuanced and accurate description of the change seems to be written up here:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-dont-be-evil/2540...
>There have been click-baity news reports stating that “Google Removes ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Clause From Its Code of Conduct” but that is not entirely accurate.
>Google has not removed that clause. Google has removed it from the preface, resulting in more attention to the word respect. But it still remains at the end of the document as before.