Google’s holding company, Alphabet, has been investing in its Verily Life Sciences initiative over the last seven years with the aim of revolutionizing healthcare. Operating largely out of the public view, and where talking to a reporter has been a fireable offense, Verily is now in the news with COVID-19. In particular, Verily is building a website to help triage Americans for COVID-19 testing.
In the usual tension between data as a corporate asset vs. privacy as a basic human right, the emerging issue with Verily is the need for the user to log in with his or her Google account to access all of the site’s functionality. This has been said to be “excessive and intrusive,” given that “… Google’s track record on respecting privacy is already dismal.” Furthermore, the user’s personal data, “could be used for purposes including ‘commercial product research and development’ … and could be shared with health companies,” some of the latter of which might not be the subject of the United States’ sector-based privacy legislation.
While few would have an issue with creating commercial opportunities out of data, it is when this interferes with privacy as a basic human right—in other words, where respect for the individual constituting that data are relegated—that things get complicated.
Respect for the Individual?
I worked on a data analytics project a few years ago, where I came to realize that each datum represented different stages of decision-making in an individual’s life, that each datum was a reflection of someone’s life events, both good and bad, both happy and sad. Handling people’s life events surely demanded a level of respect. Data was therefore not merely a sequence of bits and bytes, and it was certainly not merely an asset for exploitation. Indeed, decisions made as an outcome of an analysis not only have the power to enhance lives, but to negatively impact lives, too. There is thus a clear need to respect the individuals constituting our data if our humanity is to remain intact, starting by respecting privacy as a basic human right.
Bringing it home, if you were in the unfortunate position to have been diagnosed with a critical illness, to what extent would you be happy with how these data about you are used by an uncountable number of organizations that would ultimately seem to have access to them? What if any of them suffered a breach, and your associated personal data leaked onto the dark web for untold abuse? What if this happened to one of those you love? Your mother, father, brother or sister? If you are concerned about the apparent lack of respect and dignity of the human subjects of data, our latest ISACA Journal article, “Whose Data Is It Anyway?,” is just for you.
Editor’s note: For further insights on this topic, read the recent Journal article: “Whose Data Is It Anyway?” ISACA® Journal, volume 2, 2020.