The tech giant Google is facing a potential class-action lawsuit filed Wednesday for inappropriate access.
What We Know:
- This is just one example of tech companies’ reach into the medical industry becoming too aggressive for comfort.
- The lawsuit, first reported by The New York Times, has to deal with a 2017 deal between Google and the University of Chicago Medical Center (also a defendant). Google was given access to patient records from the University of Chicago Medicine between 2009 and 2016, which it said it would use to develop Al, the new artificial intelligence powered by Google.
- They stated that the information would be used to predict the health of patients and if they were in need of hospitalization or not in a blog post. They also stated that they would be using “de-identified medical records” from Chicago that would be “stripped of any personally identifiable information.”
- However, the lawsuit claims that these medical records were never stripped of this sensitive information.
- Even worse, the lawsuit states that the company received records of when patients were admitted and discharged from the medical center, a potential HIPPA violation. This information, says the suit, could be combined with location data stored by Google to find and store individual patients’ identities.
They need to get it together.
