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Even though this happens... Google still makes me nervous because... - Other large companies with other big agendas have violated rules on data sharing to impr

by mfer 5y ago

Even though this happens... Google still makes me nervous because... - Other large companies with other big agendas have violated rules on data sharing to improve performance in other areas. Amazon comes to mind with how they used markeplace data on vendors to produce their own competitive products. Rules are regularly broken. - Will Google let auditors really have enough insight to make sure data is kept in a controlled manner? Google is so secretive. If a data broker started a secure file sharing service I wouldn't trust them. That's how I feel about this.

tedivm 5y ago
I 100% agree- I'd rather see a small company with various security policies than see a company like Google with the data.
QuercusMax 5y ago
As someone who actually works at Google Health (on an unrelated project), it pains me to see folks suggesting that this type of thing could happen. I can tell you with 100% certainty that there is no way in hell that any of the health data for a project like this could possibly ever be used for advertising to patients. Someone on an eng team with access to this data (which is VERY tightly controlled) who have to write a data export pipeline and deliberately export that data to Ads, and someone on the Ads side would then have to deidentify that data and join it with advertising data. Getting someone to write an export pipeline that will be consumed by other folks in Health, and actually get it used in practice is hard enough, when dealing with all the data restrictions. What you're suggesting is just not going to happen. You shouldn't think of Google as one giant org with a big pot of shared data. It's really dozens of orgs, each with their own sub-orgs, which all have their own databases, file storage, etc. Getting access to data owned by a team the next aisle over is hard. Getting access to data from another org is basically impossible without a ton of oversight.
- tedivm 5y ago
  Google has proven before that they can't be trusted this way. Even when accidents happen their first instinct is to cover it up. > Google exposed the private data of hundreds of thousands of users of the Google+ social network and then opted not to disclose the issue this past spring, in part because of fears that doing so would draw regulatory scrutiny and cause reputational damage, according to people briefed on the incident and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-exposed-user-data-feared-repercussions-of-disclosing-to-public-1539017194 https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-exposed-user-data-feared... The Google reputation is so bad that my previous company was actually asked by customers if we used Google Cloud, with the implication that they wouldn't work with us if we did.
- justsometwerp 5y ago
  project nightingale
  - QuercusMax 5y ago
    What about it? There was definitely not any use of healthcare data for advertising.
    - pilotneko 5y ago
      The concern wasn't about ads, it was about patient privacy. You guys basically put together a search engine for medical encounters, allowing physicians to access medical records they shouldn't be able to: https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-googles-project-nightingale-a-health-data-gold-mine-of-50-million-patients-11573571867 https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-googles-project-nighting...
      - throwaway3699 5y ago
        Can you elaborate more? I don't believe the search engine produced did not let physicians access anything they weren't supposed to. This is well stated in their public documentation.
        QuercusMax 5y ago
        The feature which seems to be freaking people out is sound-alike searching based on patient name. This isn't a new feature at all; it's been specified as an optional feature in the DICOM standard for literally decades.
- saulrh 5y ago
  Seconding this as another Google engineer (I work on data quality for Google's Knowledge Graph). There would have to be at least four utter failures and drastic-divergences-from-past-behavior spread across multiple organizations, multiple bureaucratic and technical processes, and potentially even multiple companies. My experience has been that Google's internal culture has always been extremely serious about restricting access to privacy-relevant data. On top of that, there's recently been a big push to defend against malicious internal actors, things like engineers intentionally creating backdoors or the like. You'd have to work to specifically and intentionally override defaults to mislabel the data and every piece of code that works with it, actively defeat multiple layers of access-control tech, get the code to accomplish that past privacy-and-security review by engineers from the privacy and security team, lie continuously and fake a bunch of supporting evidence when requesting about four different kinds of quota, hide your column names and API definitions from infrastructure engineers doing migrations and routine load-management stuff, lie to a bunch of lawyers and general Search+Ads PMs during launch reviews, and more. It's just not going to happen. It's also not going to happen because "someone at the top told everyone to do it and nobody complained", either. Googlers pitch shitfits like no employee body I have ever seen, and using health data to drive ads would instantly cause internal messaging to explode into a tornado of hatred. I've seen it happen for less. Like QuercusMax said, using totally-aboveboard anonymized-and-aggregated-and-scrubbed query logs is already hard enough, enough so that my team has a policy of just plain not doing it. I have a coworker whose account is irrevocably tainted because he used to work on a project that used data from the "This result is wrong" button on search results with biographical information about public figures. Misusing health data like this would be so obnoxious and difficult as to be unbelievable.
- pilotneko 5y ago
  Even if we don’t worry about ads, Google doesn’t exactly have a good track record with patient privacy. Look at what you guys did with Ascension, allowing physicians to access medical records from other hospitals within the system based on similarity. To be clear, just because something represents a common-sense workflow improvement or might be useful to the physician doesn't mean you can just go and do it. While it might be a good idea to pull similar cases (or counterfactual examples) from your vast set of patient records, it doesn't mean it's LEGAL. Medical records are not like case briefs, you can't just crack open someone's record without proper consent.

by mfer 5y ago

tedivm 5y ago

I 100% agree- I'd rather see a small company with various security policies than see a company like Google with the data.

QuercusMax 5y ago

As someone who actually works at Google Health (on an unrelated project), it pains me to see folks suggesting that this type of thing could happen. I can tell you with 100% certainty that there is no way in hell that any of the health data for a project like this could possibly ever be used for advertising to patients. Someone on an eng team with access to this data (which is VERY tightly controlled) who have to write a data export pipeline and deliberately export that data to Ads, and someone on the Ads side would then have to deidentify that data and join it with advertising data. Getting someone to write an export pipeline that will be consumed by other folks in Health, and actually get it used in practice is hard enough, when dealing with all the data restrictions. What you're suggesting is just not going to happen. You shouldn't think of Google as one giant org with a big pot of shared data. It's really dozens of orgs, each with their own sub-orgs, which all have their own databases, file storage, etc. Getting access to data owned by a team the next aisle over is hard. Getting access to data from another org is basically impossible without a ton of oversight.

tedivm 5y ago
Google has proven before that they can't be trusted this way. Even when accidents happen their first instinct is to cover it up. > Google exposed the private data of hundreds of thousands of users of the Google+ social network and then opted not to disclose the issue this past spring, in part because of fears that doing so would draw regulatory scrutiny and cause reputational damage, according to people briefed on the incident and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-exposed-user-data-feared-repercussions-of-disclosing-to-public-1539017194 https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-exposed-user-data-feared... The Google reputation is so bad that my previous company was actually asked by customers if we used Google Cloud, with the implication that they wouldn't work with us if we did.
justsometwerp 5y ago
project nightingale
- QuercusMax 5y ago
  What about it? There was definitely not any use of healthcare data for advertising.
  - pilotneko 5y ago
    The concern wasn't about ads, it was about patient privacy. You guys basically put together a search engine for medical encounters, allowing physicians to access medical records they shouldn't be able to: https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-googles-project-nightingale-a-health-data-gold-mine-of-50-million-patients-11573571867 https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-googles-project-nighting...
    - throwaway3699 5y ago
      Can you elaborate more? I don't believe the search engine produced did not let physicians access anything they weren't supposed to. This is well stated in their public documentation.
      - QuercusMax 5y ago
        The feature which seems to be freaking people out is sound-alike searching based on patient name. This isn't a new feature at all; it's been specified as an optional feature in the DICOM standard for literally decades.
saulrh 5y ago
Seconding this as another Google engineer (I work on data quality for Google's Knowledge Graph). There would have to be at least four utter failures and drastic-divergences-from-past-behavior spread across multiple organizations, multiple bureaucratic and technical processes, and potentially even multiple companies. My experience has been that Google's internal culture has always been extremely serious about restricting access to privacy-relevant data. On top of that, there's recently been a big push to defend against malicious internal actors, things like engineers intentionally creating backdoors or the like. You'd have to work to specifically and intentionally override defaults to mislabel the data and every piece of code that works with it, actively defeat multiple layers of access-control tech, get the code to accomplish that past privacy-and-security review by engineers from the privacy and security team, lie continuously and fake a bunch of supporting evidence when requesting about four different kinds of quota, hide your column names and API definitions from infrastructure engineers doing migrations and routine load-management stuff, lie to a bunch of lawyers and general Search+Ads PMs during launch reviews, and more. It's just not going to happen. It's also not going to happen because "someone at the top told everyone to do it and nobody complained", either. Googlers pitch shitfits like no employee body I have ever seen, and using health data to drive ads would instantly cause internal messaging to explode into a tornado of hatred. I've seen it happen for less. Like QuercusMax said, using totally-aboveboard anonymized-and-aggregated-and-scrubbed query logs is already hard enough, enough so that my team has a policy of just plain not doing it. I have a coworker whose account is irrevocably tainted because he used to work on a project that used data from the "This result is wrong" button on search results with biographical information about public figures. Misusing health data like this would be so obnoxious and difficult as to be unbelievable.
pilotneko 5y ago
Even if we don’t worry about ads, Google doesn’t exactly have a good track record with patient privacy. Look at what you guys did with Ascension, allowing physicians to access medical records from other hospitals within the system based on similarity. To be clear, just because something represents a common-sense workflow improvement or might be useful to the physician doesn't mean you can just go and do it. While it might be a good idea to pull similar cases (or counterfactual examples) from your vast set of patient records, it doesn't mean it's LEGAL. Medical records are not like case briefs, you can't just crack open someone's record without proper consent.