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There seems a compromise possible on the "with patient consent" bit. Maybe by default researchers could have some sort of anonymized data and patients can opt out if they want no data sharing or in if they don't mind researchers seeing it all.

Personally I don't mind Google or similar seeing my not very interesting data.

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Imho there is no such thing as anonymized health care data. If the data is meaningful each dataset contains enough bits of information to de-anoymize the data when combined with other data sets. This makes Google especially dangerous as they have already much or all of the data required for de-anonymization.

Patient consent would make the data much less meaningful as it would remove datasets in a non-random way (better educated people might more likely opt-out). So that's no good solution either. I had recently a doctors visit and was asked exactly that. I opted out as I have no control over the data when released.

With patient consent I don't see why there would be an issue (although patients would need to be well informed - T&C's like we have for websites on health information would be terrible and abused). I'd say it should be opt-in though.

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