Project Nightingale
Project Nightingale ( German : "Projekt Nachtigall") is a data exchange program between the Internet company Google LLC and the North American non-profit healthcare provider Ascension . Since 2018, Ascension has provided non-anonymous patient data from its hospitals and treatment centers in 21 US states to the Internet company for evaluation without doctors or patients having been informed or given their consent to the data being passed on. Project Nightingale is the largest share of health data to third parties to date.
course
Journalists from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times were the first to report on the deal between the two companies in the fall of 2019. Ascension uploaded data to a cloud provided by Google . Approximately 150 Google employees have been given access to treatment data, real names and addresses of millions of patients who have been treated in Ascension facilities. According to the original agreement, the data will continue to be sent piece by piece to Google by March 2020. According to estimates, the data of up to 50 million people should have gone to Google by then.
A whistleblower had made the project public. The companies themselves did not go public with details of their cooperation until later.
According to Ascension, the purpose of the program is to improve the offer for customers and the affiliated companies and to integrate the company's own services into modern digital platforms, such as those used by those affected in everyday life. According to a statement from Google, the Ascension data records from Google may not be linked to data that Google has collected about the data subjects in the course of other activities. The aim is to develop services for the health sector. Regarding privacy concerns, Ascension said it was convinced that working with Google would not violate the privacy rules set out in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996.
Reactions
The United States Department of Health and Human Services announced an investigation into the matter after the collaboration became known.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e "Google's secret cache of medical data includes names and full details of millions - whistleblower" The Guardian of November 13, 2019
- ↑ a b c Anthony Cuthbertson: "Project Nightingale: Google secretly given access to medical data of millions of Americans" The Independent dated November 13, 2019
- ↑ a b "Google gets access to millions of patient data" Heise.de from November 13, 2019
- ^ "Project Nightingale: Google probed over US patient data deal" BBC.co.uk of November 13, 2019