In a shocking revelation made by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Monday, Google is accused of illegally accessing the health records of American Populace without the consent of the respective populace or their doctors.
Going into the details, Google is reported to be working on a secret project titled ‘Project Nightingale’ for which it has been using health data of US Populace without their consent. The objective of this project is said to introduce a new AI-driven product to the world for which tons of data will be needed to feed the AI algorithms.
For the project to attain success, the web search giant has taken the help of Ascension, a leading healthcare service company. In a press release done last week, Ascension agreed to move its data to Google Cloud Platform from where the Google servers will capture the data and will be utilizing it for its AI project needs.
According to sources reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders, the data includes diagnosis results, hospitalization history and records, and patient test results. Speculations are ripe that data from the populace of over 21 states was shared by Ascension with Google.
News is out that over 150 employees from Google have been formed as a team to work on the Project Nightingale and have succeeded in harvesting the vast amounts of data from Ascension to Google servers last month.
However, Google has condemned data privacy concerns on this issue and stated that the project is aimed for the welfare of the American Populace and the accessed data will be used to suggest changes and innovations to patient care. The American Technology company also said that the data share took place as per the rules compliant with HIPAA.
Ascension is not showing interest in clearing the air on the inner-workings of the deal and is also disinterested in clarifying whether the data was sold to Google- as specified by the WSJ.
