Here is a simple exercise: imagine these were your medical records and your former employer gave them to a third party for profit.
1. My data was anonymized.
2. At least in the Navy's case, that there was some assurance that some of the work would be made available back to the public, i.e. if all the data was tagged and organized in a way that an open source data set could be made (again, anonymized), but the analysis and any models built would be proprietary to Google.
I honestly don't understand why the knee jerk reaction would be to be upset at your simple exercise.
This data could lead to a discovery like “hey a statistically significant portion of people deployed at (x) between years y and z developed this type of medical condition - the military is responsible and needs to pay them.”
If there’s no value to digitizing this data, why is the military paying Google to do it? It’s not like Google is purchasing it
Or, the more likely case, someone figures out how to de-anonymize it and it could be used to hurt me later. That seems much much more likely to me.
2. I think de-anonymization not only hurts you but also could hurt a large % of the people you are directly related to.
Your former employer is paying a 3rd party service to digitize your old health records.
I’d much rather have digital records instead of paper files which can be trivially destroyed or lost. Imagine if I got cancer and had to sue this former employer and I could subpoena for this info.
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."
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).Now most consent forms explicitly call out the option of the data collector to share the data with more parties for further use beyond the scope of the original study.