Big Tech has come a long way from basic platforms that hosted our high school reunion photos or searched for the nearest takeout place.
Big Tech now tracks our locations, our purchasing habits, reads our emails, follows where we go on the internet and how often, what we say in our homes, and theyâre trying to gain access to our financial data, as well. Now, thanks to a partnership with hospital-chain Ascension and the purchase of the fitness tracker company, Fitbit, Google owns the health data of tens of millions of people.
Chillingly, they did this on the Ascension side without the consent of the patient or the doctor.
Google and Ascension claim they are both following the privacy regulations outlined under HIPAA, which allows medical providers to share patient data, including entire medical records, with âbusiness associates,â who are then required to abide by HIPAAâs policies. Should Google violate HIPAAâs laws, the liability would fall on Ascension.
Individuals would have very little knowledge if their rights were being violated, however, considering that neither they nor their doctor gave consent, or were even informed, that their complete health history, name, and date of birth was being entrusted to Google.
Google has not said how many of its employees have access to the medical files of tens of millions, but the Wall Street Journal has reported that âat least 150 Google employees already have access to much of the data.â
The partnership with Ascension and the acquisition of Fitbit speak to Googleâs larger ambitions to become an ever-present, omniscient, algorithmic force in the daily lives of people across the globe. Their executives talk of âambient computingâ as a company goal â âthe technology just fades into the background when you donât need it. So the devices arenât the center of the system, you are.â
In other words, a central Big Tech brain around which billions of individuals hover, their every online and offline move being collected, tracked, parsed, and packaged â all to make massive amounts of money for Silicon Valley.
Because, at the end of the day, that is the goal here. While the demigods of Silicon Valley like to assign themselves altruistic motives of acting as everything from the new digital public square or solving healthcare inefficiencies in the medical space, the end goal is far more terrestrial than angelic: making money.
That should give both lawmakers and consumers pause.
From Facebook to Google, Big Tech has repeatedly demonstrated they cannot be trusted with our data. Facebook has been fined for failing to implement basic privacy protocols like password encryption or barring individual employees from accessing user data.
Google, for its part, has said for years that its search results are objective. But new reporting has uncovered the extent to which the company manipulates and edits what users see. Google has also admitted that it continues to track users’ location data, even after the user believes they have turned off the tracking feature. Facebook was recently busted collecting the text messages and phone calls of users on Android phones. And, lest we forget, Google built a censorship regime that passed data on individual Chinese users to the Chinese government, all so Google could gain entry to that lucrative market.
Making society better may indeed be a goal, but itâs subordinate to the primary goal, which is commoditizing and profiting off of you and me, regardless of our consent.
Google has said they will not use Fitbitâs data for advertising. So what, then, are they planning to do with it? The answers are unsettlingly vague.
âWe arenât commenting on specifics, but we take privacy and security very seriously,â said their representative.
Forgive us if we are not all quite so reassured.
Rachel Bovard (@rachelbovard) is a Senior Adviser at the Internet Accountability Project.
