Google is being sued in a potential class-action lawsuit which accuses the tech giant of inappropriately accessing sensitive medical records belonging to hundreds of thousands of hospital patients.
The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday, is the latest example of how tech giants’ forays into the trillion-dollar healthcare industry are being met by concerns over privacy.
In recent years, companies including Microsoft, Apple, and Google have all pitched their services to medical institutions, promising that they can help organize medical data and use this information to develop new AI diagnostic tools. But these plans are often met with resistance from privacy advocates, who say that this data will give tech giants an unprecedented view into the lives of their customers.
The lawsuit in question, which was first reported by The New York Times, is concerned with a deal made in 2017 between Google and the University of Chicago Medical Center (also a defendant). Google was given access to patient records from the University of Chicago Medicine between 2009 and 2016, which it said it would use to develop new AI tools.
In a blog post at the time, Google said it was ready to start…
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/27/18760935/google-medical-data-lawsuit-university-of-chicago-2017-inappropriate-access
