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Comment by allovernow | Hacker News Reader

Why would you trust a literal corporate mouthpiece? You think Zuckerberg cares about your privacy too?

No way in hell Google isn't going to use this for advertisement. It's exactly the kind of huge free money that drives everyone else to collect data totally unrelated to their core business. Even if the intentions are benign now, there's no reason to trust they'll be so later, based on Google's track record and the typical tech mindset.

Just imagine the kind of profiles you could build on people with medical data. Beyond targeted drug advertisement, medical devices, and the like, you know which people are sedentary, which play sports, who probably smokes, and I'd bet good money there are correlations between certain conditions and shopping habits, religious preference, and even political preferences. Just begging to be clustered with the latest hot neural net.

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> No way in hell Google isn't going to use this for advertisement.

There are ample ones: It's illegal, it's highly unethical, and you wouldn't be able to keep something like that a secret.

> Even if the intentions are benign now, there's no reason to trust they'll be so later, based on Google's track record and the typical tech mindset.

What track record?

Why do you say it's illegal? Google is not a covered entity under HIPAA as far as I can tell, is it something else?

I was under the impression that HIPAA applies to anyone in possession of private healthcare information (medical information tied to personally identifiable information)

https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/covered-entities...

It doesn't appear to be as broad as you (and I) imagined. Google might qualify as a "Health Care Clearinghouse" in this case, but it's far from clear.

At least from the last time this came up on HN, it was about Google's software being used via a server actually owned by the partner hospital, and google's access was "only via a few employees"; IIRC it wasn't data stored on their servers, or it was only stored via Google Cloud Storage (and I doubt they'd compromise security on GCP buckets for advertising purposes).

As that link states, HIPAA extends to "business associates". Google isn't a "covered entity" as that has a specific definition, but it is a business associate in relation to a covered entity (e.g. health care providers). The reason for the two different terms is because covered entities deal with patients directly, thus have certain rules that only apply to them in relation to interacting with said patients. Since Google is a business associate that does not directly interact with patients, only the rules specifically in relation to PHI and other business activities apply as others (e.g. patient interaction) are moot.

Protected Health Information is protected under HIPAA for both covered entities and business associates alike. Otherwise, HIPAA would be pointless if covered entities could just pass the PHI to business associates or shell companies unfettered.

Note: I would not consider myself a "HIPAA expert", but I'm a clinical researcher that has to ensure HIPAA compliance for my lab.

>What track record?

Tech company. Automation. Advertising.

Do they need to be skinning puppies or something?

Right so how does "Tech company. Automation. Advertising." become "Google has a track record of collecting data totally unrelated to its core business and using it to inform advertising."

If there's a track record of this, you can give other examples of how Google has done that, right? Where they've gone out and collected data under the guise of doing something benign and then used it for advertisements.

The track record is that of them being morally bankrupt. Not a track record of having applied their moral bankruptcy to this particular scenario as of yet.

The how does "Tech company. Automation. Advertising." Imply morally bankrupt?

Tech company = making the world more digital. Perverting humanity. Moving us further away from our natural state. Ripping away any innate semblance of purpose we had.

Automation = Removing the stand in sense of purpose people had found in the modern world. Increasing inequality. Increasing the needed level of education to be productive.

Advertising = creates and reinforces wants. Makes people unhappy with what they already have. Causes them to then have to seek to be productive which is bad because of the previous two.

One wonders what pleasure austhrow743 might derive from reading HN if not interested in tech.

I am interested in tech. I don't believe it's morally good.

I sure do hate how technology moved me away from my natural state of... checks notes... dying in childbirth.

I think the net this criticism casts is too wide.

If you died in childbirth then you wouldn't be around to dwell upon it would you?

This would be a net negative for me. But then, if this technology weren't all here we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

Wouldn't be the first time Google did something illegal or unethical or tried to keep it secret, like secretly trying to build a censored search for China, firing labor organizers, etc.

> Beyond targeted drug advertisement, medical devices, and the like, you know which people are sedentary, which play sports, who probably smokes, and I'd bet good money there are correlations between certain conditions and shopping habits, religious preference, and even political preferences.

Well, I can tell you that Google's advertising profile for me would already have a pretty good idea for all of those attributes you listed based on my search history, location history, google maps usage, youtube usage, etc.

The healthcare market is an ~8.5 Trillion market globally [1]. Advertising is ~ 1 trillion [2,3]. I admit that I don't know the exact quality of the data cited in these - but they do clearly demonstrate that healthcare is a huge industry. Given that Google wants another profit source besides advertising I think it just conspiratorial to suggest they would throw away the medical opportunity for some marginal advertising gains. Dragonfly leaked, employees are otherwise frustrated with certain things. If employees are talking about what you say then I'll listen to them. But you are just making senseless accusations.

1 - https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190625005862/en/11....

2 - http://towersofzeyron.com/the-advertising-industry-is-now-wo...

3 - https://www.statista.com/topics/990/global-advertising-marke...

>you know which people are sedentary, which play sports, who probably smokes, and I'd bet good money there are correlations between certain conditions and shopping habits, religious preference, and even political preferences.

They could already do this with data from Android, Chrome, Google, Maps, or Youtube.

But they can do it better with more accurate data, which they can get from this.

> They could already do this with data from Android, Chrome, Google, Maps, or Youtube.

Not everyone uses Google websites.

> Even if the intentions are benign now, there's no reason to trust they'll be so later, based on Google's track record and the typical tech mindset.

I have never heard of Google doing outright illegal things. They make very liberal interpretations of the law in their own favor, but patient data protection is very clear and well understood so there isn't much room to play there.

1. How would you know? How many engineers does it really take, in a massive company with billions of dollars to waste and tens of thousands of employees, to break the law for profit in secret?

2. Do you really trust that the law is sufficiently protective? Do you believe it to be crafted for the novel dangers that come from mining aggregations of data and building individual profiles with next generation ML?

3. What stops Google from throwing it's weight around to lobby for changes to the law which allow it to make use of data in ways that laws protect against now, once it has the data?

Sure, that's a lot of what ifs. But this particular scenario is dangerous because it effects all of us, and it only takes one ambitious authoritarian to turn all of this adtech fun and games into the most comprehensive and fine grained surveillance apparatus that has ever existed. Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot; just imagine the temptation of being just one "lawful" seizure away from such power...that's what slimy adtech companies are building, they don't care and the average person doesn't understand.

Last I checked, Zuckerberg worked at a different company.

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