Google DeepMind deal to use NHS patient files is illegal

A British hospital trust misused patient data when it shared information with Google for work on a smartphone app, a British data protection watchdog said on Monday. The Royal Free NHS Trust did not comply with the Data Protection Act when it passed on personal information of around 1.6 million patients to Google's DeepMind. DeepMind, which is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is the company's artificial intelligence and machine learning branch. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said it found'a number of shortcomings' in the way the data was handled, including that patients were not adequately informed their data would be used as part of the test. A British hospital trust misused patient data when it shared information with Google's DeepMind for work on a smartphone app, a British data protection watchdog has found.