I, personally, would be 100% fine with this, as long as:
1. My data was anonymized.
2. At least in the Navy's case, that there was some assurance that some of the work would be made available back to the public, i.e. if all the data was tagged and organized in a way that an open source data set could be made (again, anonymized), but the analysis and any models built would be proprietary to Google.
I honestly don't understand why the knee jerk reaction would be to be upset at your simple exercise.
Because you served to help your country and then call it a day, not have your medical legacy live on in a Google product after you’ve left. Just another thumb in the eye for vets from a public that doesn’t care beyond a NFL game. That’s where the simple exercise could lead.
This data could lead to a discovery like “hey a statistically significant portion of people deployed at (x) between years y and z developed this type of medical condition - the military is responsible and needs to pay them.”
If there’s no value to digitizing this data, why is the military paying Google to do it? It’s not like Google is purchasing it
How is it for profit? The government is paying Google, not the other way around.
Your former employer is paying a 3rd party service to digitize your old health records.
I’d much rather have digital records instead of paper files which can be trivially destroyed or lost. Imagine if I got cancer and had to sue this former employer and I could subpoena for this info.
The JPC does not have documentation regarding any consent forms signed by patients or research participants whose data or specimens were submitted to the repository (Baker personal communication, 2011a). Such consents may have been obtained for clinical procedures used to excise specimens at facilities where people received medical care, but it is highly unlikely that they included notification that the specimens could be sent to a remote repository or used later for education or research purposes. Consents for research use may have been obtained for some materials gathered for the war or cohort registries, but the JPC has no documentation on these (Baker personal communication, 2011a).
The last statement is correct- up until about 10 years ago, the vast majority of consent forms didn't explicitly state that the specimens could be reused for other studies later, that hadn't been consented to.
Now most consent forms explicitly call out the option of the data collector to share the data with more parties for further use beyond the scope of the original study.
1. My data was anonymized.
2. At least in the Navy's case, that there was some assurance that some of the work would be made available back to the public, i.e. if all the data was tagged and organized in a way that an open source data set could be made (again, anonymized), but the analysis and any models built would be proprietary to Google.
I honestly don't understand why the knee jerk reaction would be to be upset at your simple exercise.