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by threatofrain 2288 days ago
> A Google account is needed to access the Baseline Platform. The information you provide will be stored in a secure, encrypted database. Verily personnel who need to contact you, such as staff to schedule your testing, will have access to direct identification information (your name, street address, phone number, and email).

> The information you provide may also be shared with the health care professionals who collect your specimen, the clinical laboratory that processes your specimen, the California Department of Public Health, and potentially other federal, state, and local health authorities, and other entities that assist with the testing program. Information may also be shared with certain service providers engaged to perform services on behalf of Verily, including Google, which Verily leverages for certain technology and services, including cloud services, security services, data storage, website hosting, and other support functions.

1 comments

This is infuriating, I am visibly shaking. Why can't Google act out of the interest of user privacy and stop collecting data in these dire times for once? Charge me $5, but stop collecting data about me.

Edit: Sorry about my language.

Imagine you worked at Google. Imagine you were tasked with building this website as quickly as possible. You have available internal tools designed to work with Google accounts. These tools have already been tested and validated. They have already gone through some level of security and privacy review. They have already scaled to high QPS production uses.
I think most of us could do this without Google signin in about 15 minutes.
I'll get the stopwatch and generously double your time limit to 30 minutes. Maybe if they've covered California you could do some of the other states.
Security is part of the launch review. An ad-hoc user system would require significantly more effort to properly review and get approval. I doubt the website would have finished the PRR if it's not using the existing user system.

Disclaimer: engineer working for Google but not in Verily.

Do something yourself.

Get out of the way of people who are actually doing something.

Not everything is a conspiracy.

lol, you're shaking?
You haven’t stopped to think why it might be a good idea to collect this data? You really think it’s being done for profit?
Based on the kind of things the Ad-tech industry does [1], without proper laws protecting users, I have absolutely zero...zilch trust in any advertisement company - I am not partial to Google, rope in Microsoft, Viacom, Amazon, Adobe, Oracle, all of them [2] (these are the top ad aggregators and auctioning houses).

The last company I am willing to give my health information is an advertisment company. Nothing to worry, the fox is doing a great job at keeping the hens safe.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/technology/internet-adver...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advertising_technology...