Patent documents filed in 2018 suggest that Google aspires to predict or identify health conditions in people who haven’t even visited a doctor, via something called emergent medical data.
Posts containing religious language, such as the words God, Lord, and Jesus, were strong predictors of diabetes. Finding that connection would have been impossible without A.I. and access to health records.
Combined with Google’s expertise in A.I., courtesy of Alphabet’s DeepMind subsidiary, the Ascension deal gives Google unrivaled power to find correlations between behavior and health conditions.
Thus, Project Nightingale’s real danger is Google’s ability to leverage its cache of health data to build an unrivaled consumer health surveillance empire spanning numerous industries and technologies.
Everyone is asking the wrong question about Google’s Project Nightingale. (slate.com)
“Regulators should instead be focusing on something else: exactly what Google plans to do with all this data.”