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Comment by supdatecron | Hacker News Reader

> For example Google does live transcribing of the conversation on meet/hangouts.

Can you provide a link to this? I was unaware of it and can't find the feature. I did find that Hangouts Meet offers video recording...

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Hangouts Meet lets you turn on closed captions that are generated on the fly. I'm not aware of any way to save that transcription, so I don't see how it's a privacy concern.

That's the distinction I mean though: You don't see a way to save it, but it doesn't mean Google doesn't keep the record. What prevents that from happening on calls on amounts which didn't sign HIPAA contracts?

> You don't see a way to save it, but it doesn't mean Google doesn't keep the record. What prevents that from happening on calls on amounts which didn't sign HIPAA contracts?

Google's regular G Suite already has terms of service and a privacy policy that appear to me to rule out any obviously HIPAA-violating use of data. If they collect anything from Hangouts Meet, the terms are clear that you still own the data and Google can only use it as necessary to provide the service to you. Absent any evidence to the contrary, it seems reasonable to take Google's legal documents at face value and conclude that there's no functional difference for G Suite core services whether or not you sign a HIPAA agreement with them. It certainly strains credulity to suggest that Google would offer stronger privacy guarantees to HIPAA covered entities than to ordinary enterprise customers, and not even advertise as such.

It's fine to say you don't trust Google. It's not reasonable to insinuate that they violate their published terms of service and privacy policies. It's absurd to suggest that the extra penalties associated with HIPAA would be the deciding factor for them to refrain from committing those crimes only against that narrow slice of their customers.

It's not only the company violations that we need to worry about. "provide a service" can mean different things. Are phrases where the transcription wasn't clear sent to people for verification and training? Are transcriptions saved for unsupervised learning? Even if they're not shared with third parties explicitly, what happens when the company itself is breached?

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