[chris_va]

You are making some implicit assumptions that they data access isn't highly controlled.

I have seen a few of these sorts of deals killed because of data access concerns, and/or computation requirements ("you can have access to anonymized data, but you have to run your code in a sandbox on our health servers").

And, this is why we have legislation.

[buro9]

Less implicit, from the originally linked article:

> The scale of the sharing program was apparently misrepresented to the public, originally announced as an app to help hospitals monitor patients with kidney disease with real-time alerts and analytics. But since those patients don't have their own separate dataset, Google has argued it needs access to all patient data from the participating hospitals.

No assumption there, they didn't have a separate dataset and so granted access to all patient data.

[chris_va]

"so granted access to all patient data"

Yes, but under what conditions? Many privacy laws apply here, and treating Google as some monolithic entity where everyone working there can now read anyone's personal health history is inaccurate.

[fweespee_ch]

Its psuedononymous data the NHS has previously admitted can be deanonymized given sufficient effort but such deanonymization carries criminal and civil penalties.