Google Should Not Be Allowed to Secretly Collect Private Medical Data

Pure and simple, this is hubris. And, I am sorry to say, it is reflected in how DeepMind has acted in acquiring the NHS medical data: not bothering to ask for people's consent and not following ethics rules and regulations. What these actions communicate is that DeepMind views people's medical histories merely as a bunch of data it wants to feed into a learning algorithm, in the same way as it used the old Go games for training the AlphaGo algorithm. And if a company treats people as pieces in a board game, why would it care about privacy and ethics? Well, that is precisely why we shouldn't give DeepMind and its parent company a free hand in using our private data without proper supervision.