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It's not quite so black and white. DeepMind didn't know what they were doing was illegal. It took the ICO a year to make a decision and they set the punishment
by peoplewindow 9y ago
It's not quite so black and white.
DeepMind didn't know what they were doing was illegal. It took the ICO a year to make a decision and they set the punishment to zero, so apparently they didn't really know either. It still isn't obvious even in retrospect - the NHS itself agreed to the data transfer, and they were the owners of the data, so presumably it was the NHS that broke the law rather than Google.
With respect to patient confidentiality, don't blow it out of proportion. The NHS does not have strong controls on patient data. Breaches are common:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2833960/NHS-data-snooped-six-times-day-Staff-caught-looking-records-friends-family-love-rivals.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2833960/NHS-data-sno...
The FOI data discussed there is of course a minimum. Real breach levels are surely far higher given that records are mostly still stored on paper (no real way to know how many people see it).
The NHS could protect data much more strongly than it does, but it chooses to invest its time and money elsewhere, which is probably the right decision.
Finally, leaks of patient data don't kill people, but absence of life-saving drugs that could have been developed via better data do. It's easy to argue that the default should be to make large-scale datasets available to drug and tech firms. The cost/benefit ratio seems extremely positive.
- a_imho 9y agoDeepMind didn't know what they were doing was illegal. How is that an excuse? From a company with hordes of lawyers? Dealing with privacy issues all the time? I'm not even sure Occam would point to a honest mistake either. The agreement — quietly signed in September 2015 and revealed in full by New Scientist in April 2016 — gave the Google-owned artificial intelligence (AI) lab access to 1.6 million NHS patient records across three North London hospitals without patient's prior knowledge.
- peoplewindow 9y agoApparently those hordes of lawyers told them it was OK, as did the government itself (the NHS is the government).
- a_imho 9y agoAssuming you are right, in that case firing their incompetent lawyers after ponying up a couple of billion pounds in fines would sound like the right course of action.
- DanBC 9y ago> the NHS is the government). No it isn't. For one thing health is devolved in all four UK nations, so there is a separate NHS for Scotland, NI, Wales, and England. And for England the Department for Health is the governmental department, and that's not NHS England. And NHS England isn't "The NHS" - the NHS in England is a bunch of clinical commissioning groups, and acute trusts, and mental health trusts, and GPs, and private providers selling service to the NHS (see eg lots of secure units, or lots of eating disorder inpatient provision). In this story one NHS Hospital Trust (10,000 people employed by that trust, vs 1.7m by the rest of the NHS) made the decision, independently of NHS England or the Department of Health.