Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data

You aren't giving up something of value to you. There's zero opportunity cost involved. The value is added after your data is collected, collated, analyzed, and used by researchers. Individually, it's meaningless. Together, it's priceless.

Will someone eventually profit? Sure, but they'll do so because society benefits from the work they've done. And eventually, the cost will decrease. Would you rather have drug treatments that exist in the first place even if someone profits from them or nothing? Those are pretty much your options. For all of its flaws, the current research model at least works. The only other option, besides doing nothing and letting people die from diseases we could eventually treat, is some sort of public financing and that comes with a host of problems. Would anyone really be so foolish as to want to subject medical research to the congressional budget process, even if there's an abstraction layer between congress and the researchers? That means tradeoffs, and lots of them: for instance, Drug option A would be pursued, and option B ignored because we're already funding A even if B might be more promising later on.

We already see it with federal applied research when critical work is jeopardized for the sake of political grandstanding. Every so often, someone will trot out a cherry-picked grant they don't like and wave it around like a red flag in front of a bull. Drug companies might be bad enough, but the politicians would be worse.

Getting access to private information in Google is hard - my experience as a researcher here is that there's a strong incentive to find an open-source or non-PII dataset before touching user data. I'll go through my year here without ever touching even the most innocuous PII data.

It's very unlikely to me that thousands of people will have access to this data. It's much more likely that a small handful will, and that they'll be supported by others with no access whatsoever. From the article, in fact:

"The agreement clearly states that Google cannot use the data in any other part of its business. The data itself will be stored in the UK by a third party contracted by Google, not in DeepMind’s offices. DeepMind is also obliged to delete its copy of the data when the agreement expires at the end of September 2017."

From an incentive perspective, the potential value-add of abusing the data is tiny compared to the potential costs and loss of user trust. Google's very aware of how important it is to maintain user trust -- http://www.techradar.com/us/news/internet/google-we-have-a-c...

Corporations don't have brains, but they have cultures, and Google's culture -- composed of those thousands of engineers -- is quite fanatical about protecting user privacy. It's one of the non-technical things that's impressed me most during my time here.

The risk with a company like Google is if the economic winds and culture changes, but that's a long-term process, and is also the reason for legally-binding contracts to do things like delete the data (see above).

tl;dr: Google has the technical means to protect the confidential data better than almost any other agency, including from its own employees. The most important question to ask is whether the NHS structured the data sharing in a way that provides for long-term protection, and (IANAL!) it sounds like it from the article.

Source: I'm a professor who deals with our IRB occasionally, have colleagues doing joint CS-medical research, pushed patients around a hospital in a younger life, and am on sabbatical for the year at Google.

So you will take this into account and emphasize the more reliable types of tests, like blood tests. Or you'll find ways of learning which doctors who do the tests more accurately(or train doctors to do so) and which people are more consistent/reliable with their relationship with their docs. Or maybe you'll get a few hypotheses which are relatively likely and that would incentivize the researchers/google to do small clinical trials on them.

It's worth a try at least.