8 ms·

Google’s quest to digitize troops’ tissue samples

101 points by nateb2022 4y ago

arkadiyt 4y ago
> “The chief concern,” Google’s liaison in the military warned the leaders of the repository, “is keeping this out of the press.” Just once it would be nice if companies were actually held accountable.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  That seems like an intentionally misleading sentence structure. The phrase was said by the guy from the navy, not anyone from Google.
  - bclemens 4y ago
    It doesn't seem misleading at all tbh. Misleading would by "liaison to the military", not "liaison in the military".
  - flandish 4y ago
    Which, I can argue, makes the statement much much worse.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      Maybe. But the whole article seems to me to be centered around bozotic behavior by the Navy, not questionable actions of Google. 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.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    The guy from the Navy was under Google's NDA.
- Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
  What law do you suggest here? Or do you mean consumers should vote with their wallets? (or eyes, in the case of ads.)
- fallingknife 4y ago
  Accountable for what? What wrongdoing are you alleging and what is your evidence?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
voz_ 4y ago
Evil does as it will. If Google has it, the ccp does too.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  It took me this comment to realize that for some people we’re really in a kind of cold war state, where everything happening in the US comes back to China.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - voz_ 4y ago
    Except the USSR was not nearly as evil as the CCP.
    - kodyo 4y ago
      They held first place for a good while, though.
    - makeitdouble 4y ago
      The “evil” part is really the core of it to me. You didn’t go for “menacing” or “powerful” or “aggressive”, the primary angle is not what they could do, it’s their morality.
- emmelaich 4y ago
  What's evil about improving health?
  - voz_ 4y ago
    This question is not being asked in good faith. Google's intent is not to improve health - it's to get their hands on as much data as possible to then turn around and sell ads.
    - 4y ago
dundercoder 4y ago
Google has proved many times over how willing they are to sacrifice ethics to profits. It surprises me that anyone thought this was a good idea.
- tkinom 4y ago
  As Dr. Ian Malcolm said it: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
- dekhn 4y ago
  Let me help expose the thinking here. Since I was an engineer who worked for Google over a decade and helped launch several health projects while there and wrote one of the docs that ended up convincing the leaders at Google Brain and Research to work on health problems (after the Google Health records debacle), the thinking is relatively straightforward: 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.
zzz345345 4y ago
Too bad Google dropped the "don't be evil" mantra... only downhill from then... Why would anyone with common sense believe this to be a good idea?
- SquareWheel 4y ago
  For as many times as this has been debunked, it's rather frustrating to see this particular misinformation persist. https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/ https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/
  - zzz345345 4y ago
    They removed it from their code of conduct in 2018. That article is from a year ago... I guess they put it back.
    - SquareWheel 4y ago
      I just linked you the code of conduct where it is very clearly still present. It was at one time moved from the opening statement to the closing statement, but it has never been removed as you've claimed. edit: This was in response to the parent's original comment, prior to the edit.
      - zzz345345 4y ago
        It's easy for Google to re-write history.... https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393 https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do... But either way, the fact that they are evil today tells the whole story.
        DannyBee 4y ago
        I have been at Google 17 years. 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/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/ 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.
tick_tock_tick 4y ago
Nice! The is one of the big advantages of military project where you can have massive sample set collected using the same standards. Hopefully we'll see some real medical advancement out of this.
jeffbee 4y ago
Nothing in the article supports the submitted headline.
gretch 4y ago
disclosure: work for Google 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?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mike00632 4y ago
  Here is a simple exercise: imagine these were your medical records and your former employer gave them to a third party for profit.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    Imagine I'm a dead guy from the 19th century?
    - chaps 4y ago
      They have much more than just 19th Century records. Where'd you get 19th century as an upper bounds from? 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." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236827/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236827/ 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).
svnpenn 4y ago
Cookie nag and newsletter nag, fuck you.
infoseek12 4y ago
We need to be very careful about medical big data and the privacy/ethics implications, but the benefits of this kind of medical research seem so compelling and the risks seem so nebulous.
- make3 4y ago
  insurance companies are super powerful in the US, and some states are pro-business to some insane level. things such as this and businesses similar to 23andme really scare me. you need just one state to make it legal / one fucked CEO, and insurance company have your insurance data & your health data. Maybe there's a data leak & they use it without telling people, who knows.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Insurance companies being regulated per-state in the US doesn't mean "you only need one state to defect", it means that defection would only apply to people living in that state. 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.
  - hilbert42 4y ago
    "Maybe there's a data leak & they use it without telling people,..." 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.
- twelfthnight 4y ago
  I'm working at a health care startup whose business model is to work closely with at risk folks and help them avoid (expensive) emergency room visits. Since we don't have a lot of our own data, we need access to models pretrained on millions of patients to help us automate processes like discovering people with illnesses they haven't received treatment for yet. Unfortunately, these models are always licensed. So anyone with money can get them, but not smaller entities like small companies and hospitals. I think there must be a way to make this sort of anonymous data/model weights public and available to businesses in addition to research (researches can sometimes get data, but often are restricted from releasing models). Kind of like how MIT licenses wind up usually more beneficial to society than GPL. 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.
tony_cannistra 4y ago
Original source is here: https://www.propublica.org/article/google-human-tissue-jpc-military https://www.propublica.org/article/google-human-tissue-jpc-m...
- dang 4y ago
  Changed from https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-opens-medical-vault-for-google/ https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-opens-medical-vault-for-google/. Thanks! Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
DueDilligence 4y ago
DISCLOSURE: Previous DOD contractor, now retired DISCLOSURE: Retired Army Warrant Officer DISCLOSURE: Common sense with the facts as presented DISCLOSURE: Worked directly with a named party .. 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.'
- amf12 4y ago
  > google has nothing but nefarious interest in this project 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".
  - DueDilligence 4y ago
    .. surmise what you will. My intel states otherwise.
- astrange 4y ago
  Google clearly doesn't care about extracting maximum profit at all costs. All their products are free and their employees spend all day sliding down slides in microkitchens. 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.
amf12 4y ago
This is a clickbait title with a plagiarized article from Propublica. Propublica makes mention of the fact that this never got off the ground: > “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.
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  >Second, I don't see any harm in sharing public data (anonymized of course) with any private or public research organizations. 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.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    The military members consented to this when they joined (along with mandatory vaccinations and many other things) voluntarily. 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 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.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - thewebcount 4y ago
      > The military members consented to this when they joined 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.
LinuxBender 4y ago
The military are already having a very difficult time recruiting people. Not for a lack of interest but for a lack of physical qualification. [1] This behavior will not help them get more people. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWN13pKVp9s (2012)[video][16 mins]
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  Do they still use the old PT model for fitness upkeep? 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.
  - LinuxBender 4y ago
    Do they still use the old PT model for fitness upkeep? 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.
    - themodelplumber 4y ago
      > only so much they can do 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.)
dontreact 4y ago
The title is not correct and not supported by the article. The article clearly states that Google has not obtained any medical records. “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.”
- dang 4y ago
  Ok, we've switched the URL from https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-opens-medical-vault-for-google/ https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-opens-medical-vault-for-google/ to the original source, and corrected the title as part of that.
burner7 4y ago
Man, I’m a vet, work in tech, and the reactions here are why I hate the tradeoffs I make by being in the industry. 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.
- dekhn 4y ago
  It's like you're assuming bad faith while many people are trying to save lives.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  "It's just another example of how Soldiers are treated like disposable units..." 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.
dang 4y ago
Url changed from https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-opens-medical-vault-for-google/ https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-opens-medical-vault-for-google/, which points to this.

101 points by nateb2022 4y ago

> “The chief concern,” Google’s liaison in the military warned the leaders of the repository, “is keeping this out of the press.” Just once it would be nice if companies were actually held accountable.

jeffbee 4y ago
That seems like an intentionally misleading sentence structure. The phrase was said by the guy from the navy, not anyone from Google.
- bclemens 4y ago
  It doesn't seem misleading at all tbh. Misleading would by "liaison to the military", not "liaison in the military".
- flandish 4y ago
  Which, I can argue, makes the statement much much worse.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    Maybe. But the whole article seems to me to be centered around bozotic behavior by the Navy, not questionable actions of Google. 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.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  The guy from the Navy was under Google's NDA.
Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
What law do you suggest here? Or do you mean consumers should vote with their wallets? (or eyes, in the case of ads.)
fallingknife 4y ago
Accountable for what? What wrongdoing are you alleging and what is your evidence?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

voz_ 4y ago

Evil does as it will. If Google has it, the ccp does too.

makeitdouble 4y ago
It took me this comment to realize that for some people we’re really in a kind of cold war state, where everything happening in the US comes back to China.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- voz_ 4y ago
  Except the USSR was not nearly as evil as the CCP.
  - kodyo 4y ago
    They held first place for a good while, though.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    The “evil” part is really the core of it to me. You didn’t go for “menacing” or “powerful” or “aggressive”, the primary angle is not what they could do, it’s their morality.
emmelaich 4y ago
What's evil about improving health?
- voz_ 4y ago
  This question is not being asked in good faith. Google's intent is not to improve health - it's to get their hands on as much data as possible to then turn around and sell ads.
  - 4y ago

dundercoder 4y ago

Google has proved many times over how willing they are to sacrifice ethics to profits. It surprises me that anyone thought this was a good idea.

tkinom 4y ago
As Dr. Ian Malcolm said it: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
dekhn 4y ago
Let me help expose the thinking here. Since I was an engineer who worked for Google over a decade and helped launch several health projects while there and wrote one of the docs that ended up convincing the leaders at Google Brain and Research to work on health problems (after the Google Health records debacle), the thinking is relatively straightforward: 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.

zzz345345 4y ago

Too bad Google dropped the "don't be evil" mantra... only downhill from then... Why would anyone with common sense believe this to be a good idea?

SquareWheel 4y ago
For as many times as this has been debunked, it's rather frustrating to see this particular misinformation persist. https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/ https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/
- zzz345345 4y ago
  They removed it from their code of conduct in 2018. That article is from a year ago... I guess they put it back.
  - SquareWheel 4y ago
    I just linked you the code of conduct where it is very clearly still present. It was at one time moved from the opening statement to the closing statement, but it has never been removed as you've claimed. edit: This was in response to the parent's original comment, prior to the edit.
    - zzz345345 4y ago
      It's easy for Google to re-write history.... https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393 https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do... But either way, the fact that they are evil today tells the whole story.
      - DannyBee 4y ago
        I have been at Google 17 years. 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/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/ 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.

tick_tock_tick 4y ago

Nice! The is one of the big advantages of military project where you can have massive sample set collected using the same standards. Hopefully we'll see some real medical advancement out of this.

jeffbee 4y ago

Nothing in the article supports the submitted headline.

gretch 4y ago

disclosure: work for Google 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?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mike00632 4y ago
Here is a simple exercise: imagine these were your medical records and your former employer gave them to a third party for profit.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Imagine I'm a dead guy from the 19th century?
  - chaps 4y ago
    They have much more than just 19th Century records. Where'd you get 19th century as an upper bounds from? 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." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236827/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236827/ 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).

svnpenn 4y ago

Cookie nag and newsletter nag, fuck you.

infoseek12 4y ago

We need to be very careful about medical big data and the privacy/ethics implications, but the benefits of this kind of medical research seem so compelling and the risks seem so nebulous.

make3 4y ago
insurance companies are super powerful in the US, and some states are pro-business to some insane level. things such as this and businesses similar to 23andme really scare me. you need just one state to make it legal / one fucked CEO, and insurance company have your insurance data & your health data. Maybe there's a data leak & they use it without telling people, who knows.
- astrange 4y ago
  Insurance companies being regulated per-state in the US doesn't mean "you only need one state to defect", it means that defection would only apply to people living in that state. 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.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  "Maybe there's a data leak & they use it without telling people,..." 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.
twelfthnight 4y ago
I'm working at a health care startup whose business model is to work closely with at risk folks and help them avoid (expensive) emergency room visits. Since we don't have a lot of our own data, we need access to models pretrained on millions of patients to help us automate processes like discovering people with illnesses they haven't received treatment for yet. Unfortunately, these models are always licensed. So anyone with money can get them, but not smaller entities like small companies and hospitals. I think there must be a way to make this sort of anonymous data/model weights public and available to businesses in addition to research (researches can sometimes get data, but often are restricted from releasing models). Kind of like how MIT licenses wind up usually more beneficial to society than GPL. 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.

tony_cannistra 4y ago

Original source is here: https://www.propublica.org/article/google-human-tissue-jpc-military https://www.propublica.org/article/google-human-tissue-jpc-m...

dang 4y ago
Changed from https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-opens-medical-vault-for-google/ https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-opens-medical-vault-for-google/. Thanks! Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

DueDilligence 4y ago

DISCLOSURE: Previous DOD contractor, now retired DISCLOSURE: Retired Army Warrant Officer DISCLOSURE: Common sense with the facts as presented DISCLOSURE: Worked directly with a named party .. 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.'

amf12 4y ago
> google has nothing but nefarious interest in this project 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".
- DueDilligence 4y ago
  .. surmise what you will. My intel states otherwise.
astrange 4y ago
Google clearly doesn't care about extracting maximum profit at all costs. All their products are free and their employees spend all day sliding down slides in microkitchens. 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.

amf12 4y ago

This is a clickbait title with a plagiarized article from Propublica. Propublica makes mention of the fact that this never got off the ground: > “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.

StanislavPetrov 4y ago
>Second, I don't see any harm in sharing public data (anonymized of course) with any private or public research organizations. 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.
- dekhn 4y ago
  The military members consented to this when they joined (along with mandatory vaccinations and many other things) voluntarily. 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 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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - thewebcount 4y ago
    > The military members consented to this when they joined 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.

LinuxBender 4y ago

The military are already having a very difficult time recruiting people. Not for a lack of interest but for a lack of physical qualification. [1] This behavior will not help them get more people. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWN13pKVp9s (2012)[video][16 mins]

themodelplumber 4y ago
Do they still use the old PT model for fitness upkeep? 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.
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  Do they still use the old PT model for fitness upkeep? 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.
  - themodelplumber 4y ago
    > only so much they can do 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.)

dontreact 4y ago

The title is not correct and not supported by the article. The article clearly states that Google has not obtained any medical records. “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.”

dang 4y ago
Ok, we've switched the URL from https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-opens-medical-vault-for-google/ https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-opens-medical-vault-for-google/ to the original source, and corrected the title as part of that.

burner7 4y ago

Man, I’m a vet, work in tech, and the reactions here are why I hate the tradeoffs I make by being in the industry. 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.

dekhn 4y ago
It's like you're assuming bad faith while many people are trying to save lives.
hilbert42 4y ago
"It's just another example of how Soldiers are treated like disposable units..." 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.

dang 4y ago

Url changed from https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-opens-medical-vault-for-google/ https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-opens-medical-vault-for-google/, which points to this.