{"id":169,"date":"2008-02-24T23:53:04","date_gmt":"2008-02-25T07:53:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cubist.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/2008\/02\/24\/google-to-store-patient-health-data\/"},"modified":"2008-02-24T23:53:04","modified_gmt":"2008-02-25T07:53:04","slug":"google-to-store-patient-health-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/2008\/02\/24\/google-to-store-patient-health-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Google to Store Patient Health Data"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>News article <a href=\"http:\/\/apnews.myway.com\/article\/20080221\/D8UUN0100.html\">here<\/a>, covered on Slashdot <a href=\"http:\/\/science.slashdot.org\/article.pl?sid=08\/02\/22\/0020211\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Google, with the cooperation of the Cleveland Clinic, is beginning a project to record medical history and other health-related data for patients. The stated goal is to provide patients with a way to access and manage their own health data, as well as to work towards a &#8220;more efficient and effective national health care system.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>While a common database of this information could indeed be useful for patients and healthcare providers, it raises some privacy and security issues.<!--more-->A person&#8217;s medical record is private information, and therefore should not be available to anyone. Google has stated that ensuring the privacy of the information in the database is a priority, but in any large system, security vulnerabilities are almost a certainty. Storing private information in more places creates a greater probability that the information will be compromised somehow. Google has already had occasional problems with the privacy of information in systems like GMail &#8211; will they be able to avoid similar mistakes in constructing their medical database?<\/p>\n<p>In addition to the potential that Google&#8217;s database might be compromised by outside individuals, there is the question of whether a single company (Google) should have such unprecedented amounts of information pertaining to private individuals. Google&#8217;s profit comes mainly from advertising, and such a tremendous amount of personal information gives them great power over consumers and advertisers alike.<\/p>\n<p>The patients in this trial are volunteers, but considering today&#8217;s trends towards more and more central storage of personal data and Google&#8217;s own goal of managing the world&#8217;s information, it may only be a matter of time before entry into this or a similar system is standard practice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>News article here, covered on Slashdot here. Google, with the cooperation of the Cleveland Clinic, is beginning a project to record medical history and other health-related data for patients. The stated goal is to provide patients with a way to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/2008\/02\/24\/google-to-store-patient-health-data\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,9],"tags":[115,113,114],"class_list":["post-169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-ethics","category-privacy","tag-databases","tag-google","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}