More on Google Health: two reasons to be wary

(For the impatient: if you read nothing else of this, be sure you read David Hamilton's Seven Reasons Google Health Is Overblown.)

As the Google Health story has fleshed out in recent days my view has become clearer and stronger. Then, yesterday at work I saw a demonstration of Google ethics that annoyed the crap out of me.

The crux of it is trust and trustworthiness. The Federal HIPAA law puts strict penalties on a provider who leaks your data, but Google's not subject to HIPAA. And their password security is really weak, unlike bank web sites.

A) Bloggers' views

• The best commentary I've seen is David Hamilton's Seven Reasons Google Health Is Overblown.
• The discussion on the e-patient blog continues.
• Hamilton's second post,
Google Health Privacy: All Talk, No Teeth?, includes the tip that Google Health's terms of service say you will defend or settle any lawsuit by a third party, e.g. your state's attorney general, about your use. And Google's penalties in any case are limited to $1,000.

B) What happened at work

My company gives Google thousands of dollars a month for Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. (We bid to have our ads displayed when someone "googles" specific phrases, such as 'online appointment software'.) Every time someone clicks one of our ads, we pay Google, regardless of whether it turns out to be a legitimate buyer. If carefully managed, it's worth the risk, and we put a spending cap on it, which we rarely reach.

Well, yesterday my PPC consultant noticed that Google just added a feature without telling anyone that will spend our unused budget to display ads for phrases we didn't bid on.

Details in this post.

I'm all in favor of modernizing healthcare, particularly making it easier to do what I want with my data. But I think it should be done by a non-profit entity, using open source software.

What's next - Google Health??

Well, what won't Google dip its (extremely large) toe into next? My, it's Google Health. Download your medical records from hospitals and pharmacies, and just give it all to Google and they'll take real good care of it.

Some of us get the creepies just THINKING of how much Google knows about our private stuff. Now "privates" could be more literally true than before.

Mind you, there's a large and legitimate move afoot to create some sort of universal (but private) form of medical records storage, some universally accessible database so when there's an emergency, physicians can treat you accurately and rapidly. (Heck, accurate and up to date information would be useful in non-emergency situations, too. It's amazing how difficult that is to achieve. Many healthcare bloggers have talked about it.)

When I attended a dinner meeting at BI-Deaconess last fall, we saw a new gadget that a patient can wear, a little USB disk drive containing all their medical records. If you were to be away from your usual care when an emergency befell you, this could be immensely valuable. It's a good thing. And if you read my cancer journal last year, you know I love online access to my medical information.

At work I spend a lot of time dealing with Google tools, particularly their "search engine marketing" tools. They write some amazingly good software.

But it'll be a cold day in hell before I hand them my medical data. Sure, they say I'll "own" it. But who could possibly police what they do with it?

Of course, the site says:

Google Health privacy policy: Google respects the privacy of your health information.

But I'm not comfortable that there's integrity behind that. See, there's this motto "don't be evil" that's espoused by CEO Eric Schmidt when discussing issues of privacy when Google reaches into your online underpants and reports its findings to the world. And I'll never forget 2005, when Google (particularly Schmidt) showed its real stripes on that issue.

CNet.com wrote a fairly balanced article about Google and privacy under the uncritical title "Google Balances Privacy, Reach." To illustrate the topic, the writer Googled Eric Schmidt himself, for just a half hour, and published what she found - about him, his salary, his neighbors, his political donations, etc.

And what was the response of The Goog? Why, CNet.com got its goolies chopped off by ... let me see... my, it was CEO Eric Schmidt! This CNN article relates how Schmidt banned CNet from getting any access to Google employees for a year. And when you're a tech news site, that's a major punishment.

GOOG's stock is doing great and I love their free tools, but there's no way in hell I'm giving them sensitive personal data, regardless of what their policy says. New motto for 2008: Don't Be Stupid.