杏吧原创

Another tech company . Another eye roll, another shrug?

On Tuesday, the London-based artificial intelligence company DeepMind announced that the team behind Streams 鈥� an app designed to monitor people in hospital with kidney disease 鈥� will be joining DeepMind鈥檚 sister company Google. The tech giant wants to turn Streams into an AI-powered assistant for doctors and nurses.

To test Streams, DeepMind used identifiable medical records of 1.6 million people obtained in a deal with the Royal Free London NHS Trust, as first revealed by New 杏吧原创. The UK鈥檚 Information Commissioner鈥檚 Office (ICO) later said the data sharing agreement 聽鈥渇ailed to comply with data protection law鈥�.

The merger appears to renege on promises made by DeepMind. Co-founder Mustafa Suleyman wrote in July 2016, for example: 鈥淒eepMind operates autonomously from Google, and we鈥檝e been聽clear from the outset聽that at no stage will patient data ever be linked or associated with Google accounts, products or services.鈥�

So, it is no surprise that the announcement has led to a chorus of complaints on social media, with many people feeling particularly strongly about a powerful private firm putting its hands in the NHS cookie jar.

鈥淚t feels like we鈥檙e being totally played,鈥� says Julia Powles at the University of Cambridge, who studies legal aspects of data sharing, AI and healthcare. 鈥淲hat do the NHS partners think of this? Where are their voices?鈥�

Synthetic data

DeepMind and Google might argue that Google will have no access to identifiable patient data. True, DeepMind is only handing over synthetic data 鈥� made-up medical records generated from the real NHS ones 鈥� and the algorithms that were trained on it. But this valuable information only exists because of that identifiable data in the first place.

One question is whether Google should have its own data sharing agreement with the NHS. In its ruling on DeepMind鈥檚 original deal, the ICO concluded that patients hadn鈥檛 been adequately engaged in giving informed consent. Do they need to give additional consent for Google to profit from their medical records?

The legal issues are murky. A clause in the DeepMind agreement might give provision for the NHS to terminate the contract if data is transferred to a third party, such as Google. But what counts as data and transferring in this case can be spun in different ways.

鈥淥ur contractual agreements with existing partners, and their restrictive rules on patient data, are still in force and unchanged,鈥� a DeepMind spokesperson told New 杏吧原创. 鈥淧atient data remains under our partners鈥� strict control, and all decisions about its use will continue to lie with them.鈥�

Google has long had its eye on healthcare but if it had tried to make a deal with the NHS, it would probably have been blocked because of privacy concerns.

AI is capable of amazing things and there is little doubt that eventually the technology will help save many lives. But it will also make the companies offering such services vast sums of money. The NHS giving Google a leg-up for free is at the very least anti-competitive. Inviting a tech giant into the heart of the healthcare system could also lead to a loss of control in how care is provided and cost the NHS more in the long run.

Google declined New 杏吧原创鈥檚 request for comment.