A partnership between Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence company and the U.K.’s National Health Service means the company will have “real-time access” to more than 1.6 million citizens’ health data, Motherboard reports. The alliance, dubbed Patient Rescue, makes privy “historical patient records from the past five years, as well as … data on hospital visits, test results, diagnoses, addictions and more” to DeepMind, the report states. Privacy advocates like Aral Balkan are nonplussed, saying the government “giving a corporation that farms people access to personal health records” is problematic “beyond belief.” While it hasn’t been specified whether patients can opt-out of the program, the data sharing agreement did specify that data collection must cease at the project’s conclusion in September 2017.
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