Privacy Concerns As Google Absorbs Deepmind's Health Division telegraph.co.uk

Privacy advocates have raised concerns about patients’ data after Google said it would take control of its subsidiary DeepMind’s healthcare division.

Google, which acquired London-based artificial intelligence lab DeepMind in 2014, said on Tuesday that the DeepMind Health brand, which uses NHS patient data, will cease to exist and the team behind its medical app Streams will join Google as part of Google Health.

It comes just months after DeepMind promised never to share data with the technology giant and an ethics board raised concerns over its independence.

A separate research team at DeepMind will continue to function independently of Google, but under the umbrella of its parent company Alphabet.

A DeepMind spokesman said: “All patient data remains under our partners’ strict control, and all decisions about its use lie with them.”

DeepMind health has already come under scrutiny from data watchdogs in the past. Last year, the Royal Free hospital in London was found to have breached the Data Protection Act over its handling of NHS patients’ data when using the Streams app, which was developed by DeepMind.

Streams is an application that aims to help doctors spot patients who may develop kidney disease. It was developed using data from the Royal Free Hospital.

In July, an independent ethics board said DeepMind needed to do more to prove its independence from Alphabet. The board was drawn up at the request of DeepMind’s founders when it was purchased by Google for £400m.

The latest report read: “To what extent can DeepMind Health insulate itself against Alphabet instructing them in the future to do something which it has promised not to do today? Or, if DeepMind Health’s current management were to leave DeepMind Health, how much could a new CEO alter what has been agreed today?

“We appreciate that DeepMind Health would continue to be bound by the legal and regulatory framework, but much of our attention is on the steps that DeepMind Health have taken to take a more ethical stance than the law requires; could this all be ended? We encourage DeepMind Health to look at ways of entrenching its separation from Alphabet and DeepMind more robustly, so that it can have enduring force to the commitments it makes,” a report by the ethics board stated.

“The relationship with Google is a constant question that runs through many areas of DeepMind Health’s business.”

South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol reviews the match after finishing the second match of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match against Google's artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo in Seoul, South Korea
Deepmind was famed for creating an AI program that beat a human Go champion in 2016 CREDIT: AP
DeepMind has come up against accusations from critics who accused the company of selling out. Co-founder Demis Hassabis said that the announcement would “accelerate scientific progress for the benefit of everyone”. Mustafa Suleyman, who created DeepMind with Hassabis while at university, said: “It’s been a phenomenal journey to see Streams go from initial idea to live deployment, and to hear how it’s helped change the lives of patients and the nurses and doctors who treat them.”

However the news has divided opinion. Dr Julia Powles, of New York University School of Law, said: “For two and a half years now, at every available opportunity, DeepMind has stated unequivocally that it will never connect the health data it collects under Streams with Google.

"Today, it exposed this as a lie. The firm's canned response about its ongoing commitment to its NHS projects and partners is an unapologetic distraction and diversion from brazen deception. This move completely demolishes trust in Streams, an application whose progress has been marked by misrepresentations, obfuscation and, as found by the British data protection authority last summer, illegality. At what point do we say enough is enough?"

Carissa Véliz, an ethics researcher at Oxford University, said: "Technology companies are too used to having terms and conditions which they can change as they please. The latest developments (with Google, Facebook, and others) suggest that we cannot trust tech companies’ promises.

"Their promises are no longer credible. Technology companies have shown that they are incapable of holding themselves to ethical standards, so we have to make sure regulatory bodies and ethical committees are in place to guarantee users’ rights are respected.

"We cannot be assured that DeepMind is independent from Alphabet. It seems that all we have to vouch for its independence is their word, and their word is not good enough when promises have been broken, when the stakes are high, and rights may be in danger, as they are when it comes to the management of sensitive data.

"Even if the people working at DeepMind were completely sincere about their desire to remain independent, it is far from clear that they would be able to fight off Alphabet if push came to shove."