If Google has nothing to hide about NHS data, why so secretive?

THERE is an apocryphal story in technology circles: Google and Facebook could do things with our data that would make our heads spin, but they don't because it would freak everyone out. Apocryphal it may be, but data companies do not have to do much to freak us out. Some people will be extremely unnerved by our revelation that Google's subsidiary DeepMind has access to healthcare data from three UK National Health Service hospitals (see "Revealed: Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data"). People who use the hospitals now know that DeepMind has intimate – albeit anonymised – details of their medical history, including HIV status, past drug overdoses and abortions. It doesn't help that DeepMind is very unwilling to talk about what it wants to do with this data.