Google is being sued over its use of confidential medical records belonging to 1.6 million individuals in the UK. The company's artificial intelligence arm, DeepMind, received the data in 2015 from the Royal Free NHS Trust in London for the purpose of testing a smartphone app called Streams. The claim is being brought by Andrew Prismall in a representative action in the High Court. It alleges that Google and DeepMind "obtained and used a substantial number of confidential medical records without patients' knowledge or consent". Why did Google get access to patient records?

It is not often that one witnesses a transformational advance in medicine. But the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the early detection of disease is exactly that. I was a co-author of the paper recently published in Nature showing that an AI system developed by Google was better at spotting breast tumors than doctors. Now, researchers in the US have reported that AI-supported laser scanners are faster than doctors at detecting brain tumors. These are very exciting developments that will, ultimately, have a big impact on the accuracy, logistics, and speed of diagnosis.

It is not often that one witnesses a transformational advance in medicine. But the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the early detection of disease is exactly that. I was a co-author of the paper recently published in Nature showing that an AI system developed by Google was better at spotting breast tumours than doctors. Now, researchers in the US have reported that AI-supported laser scanners are faster than doctors at detecting brain tumours. These are very exciting developments that will, ultimately, have a big impact on the accuracy, logistics and speed of diagnosis.

As a society, we are finally acquiring a healthy scepticism about the use and abuse of our personal information. New polling conducted by YouGov for the Institute for Public Policy Research shows that 80% of the public want to see tighter rules applied to how the likes of Facebook and Amazon use their data. Over the weekend, it was revealed that US pharmaceutical companies have already been sold data relating to millions of NHS patients and that Amazon, incredibly, has been given free access to NHS data Hidden away in the secret US-UK trade papers, leaked and revealed by Labour in November, is perhaps the biggest single threat to public data yet seen. Instead of the encroaching privatisation of publicly held data, we should be looking to create a "digital commons" The potential threat to the NHS from a post-Brexit US trade deal is clear, and has become a major election talking point. But alongside the well-known dangers of accelerating privatisation and drug price hikes, there are risks to one of the UK's most prized publicly owned resources.

In a world-first, Amazon has partnered with the UK's health service, the NHS. From this week, its voice-controlled device, Alexa, will give out health advice, and answer common questions such as'Alexa, how do I treat a migraine?' and'Alexa, what are the symptoms of chickenpox?' In response to health-related queries, Alexa will now search the NHS Choices website for health information (and there you were thinking Amazon was all about Prime Day deals). The aim is to ease pressure on the NHS and help those who can't easily access information on the internet – such as the elderly or blind people. Will this partnership with Amazon really end up easing pressure on the health service, or will it lead to data protection issues and misdiagnoses? As we've previously explored, the use of voice interfaces is one of the fastest growing web design trends in recent years, but so far the news has been met with concerns over the appropriateness of using Alexa to deliver this kind of important and sensitive information.

Unless you have been living in a cave for the past month, you will know that the NHS has recently had its 70th birthday. However, you could be forgiven for not knowing that artificial intelligence (AI) is celebrating the same anniversary. It was in July 1948 that Alan Turing's Intelligent Machinery report was delivered to the National Physical Laboratory. It started with the words: "'You cannot make a machine to think for you.' This is a commonplace that is usually accepted without question. It will be the purpose of this paper to question it."

A wide-ranging, UK government-commissioned industrial strategy review of the life sciences sector, conducted by Oxford University's Sir John Bell, has underlined the value locked up in publicly funded data held by the country's National Health Service -- and called for a new regulatory framework to be established in order to "capture for the UK the value in algorithms generated using NHS data". The NHS is a free-at-the-point of use national health service covering some 65 million users -- which gives you an idea of the unique depth and granularity of the patient data it holds. And how much potential value could therefore be created for the nation by utilizing patient data-sets to develop machine learning algorithms for medical diagnosis and tracking. "AI is likely to be used widely in healthcare and it should be the ambition for the UK to develop and test integrated AI systems that provide real-time data better than human monitoring and prediction of a wide range of patient outcomes in conditions such as mental health, cancer and inflammatory disease," writes Bell in the report. His recommendation for the government and the NHS to be pro-active about creating and capturing AI-enabled value off of valuable, taxpayer-funded health data-sets comes hard on the heels of the conclusion of a lengthy investigation by the UK's data protection watchdog, the ICO, into a controversial 2015 data-sharing arrangement between Google-DeepMind and a London-based NHS Trust, the Royal Free Hospitals Trust, to co-develop a clinical task management app.

The UK's National Data Guardian (NDG) has criticised the National Health Service (NHS) for its partnership with Google's artificial intelligence company DeepMind. According to a letter published by Sky News yesterday, Google DeepMind has received personal health data from 1.6 million NHS patients on a legally inappropriate basis. An investigation is currently being carried out by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), with the ICO telling Sky News that it is "close to conclusion." The letter from Dame Fiona Caldicott of the NDG was sent to NHS Royal Free Trust medical director Stephen Powis on February 20th. DeepMind was given access to NHS records in 2015 to test a smartphone app called Streams on the legal basis that it was offering "direct care."

What are tech titans Google, Amazon and Uber agitating for to further the march of machine learning technology and ultimately inject more fuel in the engines of their own dominant platforms? Specifically, they're pushing for free and liberal access to publicly funded data -- urging that this type of data continue to be "open by default," and structured in a way that supports "wider use of research data." After all, why pay to acquire data when there are vast troves of publicly funded information ripe to be squeezed for fresh economic gain? Other items on this machine learning advancement wish-list include new open standards for data (including metadata); research study design that has the "broadest consents that are ethically possible," and a stated desire to rethink the notion of "consent" as a core plank of good data governance -- to grease the pipe in favor of data access and make data holdings "fit for purpose" in the AI age. These suggestions come in a 125-page report published today by the Royal Society, aka the U.K.'s national academy of science, ostensibly aimed at fostering an environment where machine learning technology can flourish in order to unlock mooted productivity gains and economic benefits -- albeit the question of who, ultimately, benefits as more and more data gets squeezed to give up its precious insights is the overarching theme and unanswered question here.

Google wants to apply its machine learning technology to NHS patient data within the next five years, TechCrunch reports. The search giant's London-based artificial intelligence research lab, DeepMind, announced a partnership with the Royal Free NHS Trust in London in February but the full extent of the arrangement is only just becoming clear. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between DeepMind and the Royal Free shows that the pair envisage a "broad ranging, mutually beneficial partnership, engaging in high levels of collaborative activity and maximizing the potential to work on genuinely innovative and transformational projects." The MoU -- obtained via a Freedom of Information (FoI) request from New Scientist -- states that DeepMind hopes to gain access to "data for machine learning research under appropriate regulatory and ethical approvals" within the next five years. Machine learning -- a subfield of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed -- has the potential to speed up patient diagnosis and optimise their treatments.