Hacker News Reader

Comment by jkn | Hacker News Reader

Why is that? The data are anonymized.

But then even if they weren't anonymized, I think Google would be one of the company I would trust the most for that. They know what they're doing in terms of security and of all the companies that know a lot about me, they're the one who consistently delivered great value from the data they have. I'm thinking of things like search, Google Now and the maps interface for my location history. Plus I'm happy that the monetization of my data serves to fund great projects like this one. It didn't have to be so...

View on HN

Even anonimized data that seems very generic and nonspecific, when corolated with other data points paints a very precise and specific picture of an individual, including enough to accurately identify them. This is Google's entire business model.

Health data is very far from this idealized anonimization-friendly case. It is some of the most specific data avalible about you, and it can easily be abused to disadvantage you in ways you can do nothing about (insurance, job prospects, social standing, even as far as getting your life threatened by people who disagree with things like sexuality and abortion)

Im sure Google appreciates your faith in them. But you should carefully consider the consequnces. Once the information is out there, there is no getting it back.

You're making a good point with the "there is no getting back". I kind of trust Google based on their track record but you can never be sure about the future[1]. But all in all what matters is not whether I can trust them perfectly, it's that to me the expected benefits are concrete and vastly outweigh the theoretical risks. I guess I'm in a privileged position such that I wouldn't even mind having most of these data made public to help with this kind of research[2]. To me it is more about progressivism vs. conservatism than about faith in a particular company (though I do worry that one company might concentrate too much power).

[1] Although Google's direction is arguably more stable than is usual for publicly traded companies, given the particular share structure designed to keep control in the hands of the founders.

[2] Mostly, being in generally good health and living in a country where basic health insurance is guaranteed and good enough, with premiums that don't depend on your health.

Anonymizing data is a lot harder than it seems at first glance. So far any large enough dataset that was deemed to be properly anonymized has been used to prove the opposite by identifying individuals.

The only way you can properly anonymize such data is by reducing it to aggregates but then most of the utility is lost.

Taking the combination of google search data and medical data it would not at all be hard to tie some of the searches (and thus identified users) to medical records. Especially not if the diseases / symptoms are rare.

Others have pointed out the issues and difficulty of anonymizing the data, but I'd also be concerned about Google having that kind of data because of their existing business relationships. Google's current customer base is large and small corporate advertisers the world over. If they have a new set of data available internally, I find it difficult to believe that they would not try to sell some kind of service based on that data to their existing customer base. Without extremely strong corporate governance the temptation would be just too high for someone to say "I know - let's make some of our anonymized health records available to this existing large customer of ours."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com