Five NHS trusts have transferred data processing agreements over to Google following the tech giant’s acquisition of British AI firm DeepMind.
Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust have now signed data commitments for various DeepMind projects over to Google Health.
Contracts for a number of coronavirus data deals that the U.K. government inked in haste with U.S. tech giants, including Google and Palantir, plus a U.K.-based AI firm called Faculty, have been published today by openDemocracy and law firm Foxglove — which had threatened legal action for withholding the information.
Concerns had been raised about what is an unprecedented transfer of health data on millions of U.K. citizens to private tech companies, including those with a commercial interest in acquiring data to train and build AI models. Freedom of Information requests for the contracts had been deferred up to now.
Google ousted from NHS coronavirus data project
Google has been dropped from a partnership deal with the NHS to populate its coronavirus database, posing a setback for the tech giant’s plans to integrate into the UK’s digital infrastructure.
The health service’s digital arm NHSX signed a contract with Google in April to consult on the project, but the deal was terminated last month.
An NHSX spokesperson told the Telegraph that Google had been let go “after an evaluation of their tools”, while Google declined to comment.
They do more than search my friend, they are quite aggressive in the Healthcare space
https://health.google/
https://health.google/partners/
https://www.digitalhealth.net/2019/09/google-health-ties-up-data-agreements-with-nhs-trusts/
https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/05/uks-covid-19-health-data-contracts-with-google-and-palantir-finally-emerge/
But one month later
https://www.cityam.com/google-scrapped-from-nhs-coronavirus-data-project/
https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/nhs-uk