Google’s quest to digitize troops’ tissue samples

https://www.propublica.org/article/google-human-tissue-jpc-military

by nateb2022 • 4 years ago

101 106 4 years ago

arkadiyt• 4 years ago

“The chief concern,” Google’s liaison in the military warned the leaders of the repository, “is keeping this out of the press.”

Just once it would be nice if companies were actually held accountable.

jeffbee4• 4 years ago

That seems like an intentionally misleading sentence structure. The phrase was said by the guy from the navy, not anyone from Google.

bclemens• 4 years ago

It doesn't seem misleading at all tbh. Misleading would by "liaison to the military", not "liaison in the military".

flandish• 4 years ago

Which, I can argue, makes the statement much much worse.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

The guy from the Navy was under Google's NDA.

Vt71fcAqt7• 4 years ago

What law do you suggest here? Or do you mean consumers should vote with their wallets? (or eyes, in the case of ads.)

fallingknife• 4 years ago

Accountable for what? What wrongdoing are you alleging and what is your evidence?

voz_3• 4 years ago

Evil does as it will. If Google has it, the ccp does too.

makeitdouble2• 4 years ago

It took me this comment to realize that for some people we’re really in a kind of cold war state, where everything happening in the US comes back to China.

voz_3• 4 years ago

Except the USSR was not nearly as evil as the CCP.

emmelaich• 4 years ago

What's evil about improving health?

voz_3• 4 years ago

This question is not being asked in good faith. Google's intent is not to improve health - it's to get their hands on as much data as possible to then turn around and sell ads.

pranau• 4 years ago

Google does not operate in mainland China.

dundercoder• 4 years ago

Google has proved many times over how willing they are to sacrifice ethics to profits. It surprises me that anyone thought this was a good idea.

tkinom• 4 years ago

As Dr. Ian Malcolm said it: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

dekhn13• 4 years ago

Let me help expose the thinking here. Since I was an engineer who worked for Google over a decade and helped launch several health projects while there and wrote one of the docs that ended up convincing the leaders at Google Brain and Research to work on health problems (after the Google Health records debacle), the thinking is relatively straightforward:

Google spent heavily to build infrastructure and hire smart people. A small number of those people work on ads, which, while not "walled-off" from the rest of the company, does operate at arm's distance. A larger number of people work on other projects- many of them cloud, which is Google's other non-insignificant revenue source- doing all sorts of things, from building software and hardware infrastructure to do high performance computing (of many kinds) to optimizing models for growing products like Youtube through watchnext and Play Store through suggestions. Many of those people are ex-scientists who want to help use what they've learned to make life better for people- potentially through better medicines.

At the same time, most companies that work with health are incredibly low-tech, super-inefficient and mainly exist to waste patient's money. They fail to use ML and data engineering to maximize the value of their products, they run inefficient software and hardware, they can't explain why their products work or not.

So it stood to reason- at least in 2007, when I joined- that Google could use its technical prowess and ads $$$ to fund health research with the goal of providing a greater good for the world- while also making some revenue and profit from the products. While making the case for this I was extremely careful to repeatedly explain that Google had a serious reputational risk because people were skeptical that the company could both be a big tech advertiser, and a health research company. I said that we should always be up front and open about any deal we make, because eveyrthing is going to leak anyway and at least by being open you have some control over the narrative. And I also said that this work needed to be carried out ethically and in a way that was unrelated to existing consumer products (ads, search, android, etc).

Well, I was successful and managed to convince Google Research to get into health and Jeff Dean and Greg Corrado have been actively working in that area for some time. The work has had extremely modest success in terms of research output and products, but they're committed to it long-term. Later, as Google finally began to recognize Cloud as a business model, I began to engage with the cloud leadership, but with a slightly different pitch: Google, with its infrastructure, could be a great partner to pharma and EMR enterprises, as a service provider (servers and storage) as well as new ideas for data processing (Flume) and machine learning (this was pre-tensorflow; Sibyl was the system i wanted to sell).

This went on for some time and Google made a few products and published a few papers. Some are great and some are terrible, but I left because I came to the conclusion that Google simply can't provide the same level of innovation or success that Ads and Search had, when working in the health area. There are several reasons for this:

The data sources are not as rich as the web. The web provides copious data to make good Search and Ads systems. The data in health and research is ... terrible. Nobody gave any thought to featurization or any of the other important data engineering/ML engineering you need to be sucessful. A dataset like the one being discussed here is significant because it's homogenous.

Verily was getting going but at the time the focus was on medical devices, not machine learning for health research.

At the same time, Sundar has taken over and his approach... is not very enlightened. He was good at rapid growth in multiple products such as Android and Youtube, which were critical for Google to stay competitive when it looked like Facebook was going to own social. He has little to no understsanding of anything but growing consumer products (and when I say "consumer products", I mean the consumer is the product).

So my conclusion- after all of this- is that Google will ultimately fail to make the impact it could have, both because people don't trust google to handle this sort of data ethically, and because the upper leadership doesn't have the "DNA" (so to speak) to build products and do research in this area. Which is a real shame. But the good part is: there's nothing left inside of Google that makes them special in any way for health research. Everybody who wants to emulate the Google style has all the tools available in external open source repos and cloud systems (that includes TPU v4 which is a huge competitive edge for google).

Oh well.

zzz3453454• 4 years ago

Too bad Google dropped the "don't be evil" mantra... only downhill from then... Why would anyone with common sense believe this to be a good idea?

SquareWheel3• 4 years ago

For as many times as this has been debunked, it's rather frustrating to see this particular misinformation persist.

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

zzz3453454• 4 years ago

They removed it from their code of conduct in 2018. That article is from a year ago... I guess they put it back.

tick_tock_tick• 4 years ago

Nice! The is one of the big advantages of military project where you can have massive sample set collected using the same standards. Hopefully we'll see some real medical advancement out of this.

jeffbee4• 4 years ago

Nothing in the article supports the submitted headline.

gretch3• 4 years ago

disclosure: work for Google

I read the article and I'm not really convinced that something bad is happening here. A lot of the comments here are purporting that something unethical is happening here - in the article I read: “Ultimately, even through negotiations, we were unable to find a pathway that we legally could do and ethically should do,” Simon said. “And the partnership dissolved.” (referring to a previous design proposal). So it seems like there's a rigorous review process here which demonstrably can shut down the project or prevent forward movement if there's something bad happening.

Also, I don't get this spin along the length of the article that Google is somehow bullying the US military around. I mean, I get that narrative when it's Google is working with smaller businesses and using capital as leverage. But do we really think that Google > DoD and that the US Navy is just getting strongarmed around? I choose to think they have agency here and _if_ there's blame (big if), how is it not mostly on the Navy who is holding the data and running the show?

mike006322• 4 years ago

Here is a simple exercise: imagine these were your medical records and your former employer gave them to a third party for profit.

jeffbee4• 4 years ago

Imagine I'm a dead guy from the 19th century?

hn_throwaway_99• 4 years ago

I, personally, would be 100% fine with this, as long as:

1. My data was anonymized.

2. At least in the Navy's case, that there was some assurance that some of the work would be made available back to the public, i.e. if all the data was tagged and organized in a way that an open source data set could be made (again, anonymized), but the analysis and any models built would be proprietary to Google.

I honestly don't understand why the knee jerk reaction would be to be upset at your simple exercise.

gretch3• 4 years ago

How is it for profit? The government is paying Google, not the other way around.

Your former employer is paying a 3rd party service to digitize your old health records.

I’d much rather have digital records instead of paper files which can be trivially destroyed or lost. Imagine if I got cancer and had to sue this former employer and I could subpoena for this info.

Gimpei• 4 years ago

With the caveat that I do not know the specifics of this case, I agree in principle with giving health companies access to large amounts of data like this. Research like this could save a huge amount of lives, but it needs lots of data, which is currently quiet difficult to collect. Ideally there'd be some sort of central, deidentified repository of data that all researchers can access for free. But in the absence of that, I'll take what I can get. I've lost too many people to cancer; I'd sacrifice a lot to see better diagnostics. Maybe I'm strange, but I don't care if Google or any other healthcare has access to all of the x-rays, mris, and blood tests that I've ever done provided that they're deidentified.

ectopod2• 4 years ago

Researchers don't need access to the data. They need to be able to run analyses on the data and get results. This can be achieved without handing over the data and in the UK the NHS actually built a system to do this. And then the corrupt Tory government handed the data over to Palantir anyway.

dekhn13• 4 years ago

The central repository is TCGA and dbGAP. It's pseudoanonymized but some datasets are restricted acces. When I worked for Google, we applied for access and downloaded the whole thing (petabytes) and then got an email from NCBI that we had to delete it all. Our idea was that we could serve a copy of it "for free" for researchers (internal to Google or external) to use in the cloud (without having to redownload it). This morphed a bit and became Public Datasets with User-Pays access. And AWS hosts it as well. Far more people use the data on AWS than anywhere else.

burner73• 4 years ago

Disclosure: I’m a vet and work in tech.

On one hand, the DoD playing chess with plug and play resources that Soldiers are. Tech employees being willfully blind to the ethics of this. No surprise either way, China got my data via OPM anyway.

On the other: sick! That’s great Google has the medical records detailing people’s worst moments from war (TBI, PTSD. amputations) or others (spousal abuse, drug abuse), all for a good product! A maxim vets are pretty good at following is your DoD past stays with you and the VA, but that’s great Google gets to poke under the covers too. Hope the product is useful for an OKR. This doesn’t stop with pathology slides from days of yore and we all know it.

svnpenn• 4 years ago

Cookie nag and newsletter nag, fuck you.

infoseek12• 4 years ago

We need to be very careful about medical big data and the privacy/ethics implications, but the benefits of this kind of medical research seem so compelling and the risks seem so nebulous.

make3• 4 years ago

insurance companies are super powerful in the US, and some states are pro-business to some insane level. things such as this and businesses similar to 23andme really scare me. you need just one state to make it legal / one fucked CEO, and insurance company have your insurance data & your health data. Maybe there's a data leak & they use it without telling people, who knows.

astrange2• 4 years ago

Insurance companies being regulated per-state in the US doesn't mean "you only need one state to defect", it means that defection would only apply to people living in that state.

And insurance companies obviously already have your health data. You might remember before the ACA they'd drop people based on it and now they don't because they're not allowed to do that.

hilbert424• 4 years ago

"Maybe there's a data leak & they use it without telling people,..."

Yes. ...And it'll take major data leaks of medical records put online by hackers before government takes note and fixe# it.

You can bet the moment some very prominent politician's medical records are put online for all the world to see the details of his piles operation and the fact that he's being treated for gonorrhea that legislation will then follow.

twelfthnight• 4 years ago

I'm working at a health care startup whose business model is to work closely with at risk folks and help them avoid (expensive) emergency room visits. Since we don't have a lot of our own data, we need access to models pretrained on millions of patients to help us automate processes like discovering people with illnesses they haven't received treatment for yet. Unfortunately, these models are always licensed. So anyone with money can get them, but not smaller entities like small companies and hospitals. I think there must be a way to make this sort of anonymous data/model weights public and available to businesses in addition to research (researches can sometimes get data, but often are restricted from releasing models). Kind of like how MIT licenses wind up usually more beneficial to society than GPL.

There is some risk to privacy, but I think the "risk of privacy" is used more as a way to justify charging money for data rather than a true concern over privacy/ public safety.

tony_cannistra• 4 years ago

Original source is here: https://www.propublica.org/article/google-human-tissue-jpc-m...

dang3• 4 years ago

Changed from https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-opens-medical-vault-for-google/. Thanks!

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

DueDilligence2• 4 years ago

DISCLOSURE: Previous DOD contractor, now retired DISCLOSURE: Retired Army Warrant Officer DISCLOSURE: Common sense with the facts as presented DISCLOSURE: Worked directly with a named party

.. having retired from the DOD, I can assure you on my mother's grave that google has nothing but nefarious interest in this project. All this incessant posturing, bullying and socio/psychopathic behaviour of "aforementioned parties" points to one internal memo: '...extract maximum profit at all cost.'

amf122• 4 years ago

google has nothing but nefarious interest in this project

So Google wants to profit from it. Is that really surprising? It's a private company and will seek profit. It would be foolish of them to start a project if it only results in losses.

The research could potentially benefit humanity and the medical field, which means the interest isn't "nothing but nefarious".

DueDilligence2• 4 years ago

.. surmise what you will. My intel states otherwise.

astrange2• 4 years ago

Google clearly doesn't care about extracting maximum profit at all costs. All their products are free and their employees spend all day sliding down slides in microkitchens.

What they do have is an ad monopoly they don't seem to be able to develop into anything else, and then a lot of passion projects the founders happen to like.

amf122• 4 years ago

This is a clickbait title with a plagiarized article from Propublica. Propublica makes mention of the fact that this never got off the ground:

“Despite efforts from Google and many at the Department of Defense, our work with JPC unfortunately never got off the ground”

Second, I don't see any harm in sharing public data (anonymized of course) with any private or public research organizations. Isn't advancement in medicine good? Are these negative reactions only because its Google?

I'd have a problem if Google said that only they can have this data or something nefarious, but there is nothing in the original article to suggest that.

StanislavPetrov• 4 years ago

Second, I don't see any harm in sharing public data (anonymized of course) with any private or public research organizations.

Your DNA isn't "public data". Further, those in the military didn't have a choice in the DNA collection. Anyone who chooses to give their DNA to Google, or anyone else, should be free to do so. Nobody's DNA should be harvested and given to a private corporation, no matter what the purported purpose.

dekhn13• 4 years ago

The military members consented to this when they joined (along with mandatory vaccinations and many other things) voluntarily.

DNA is public data (you're shedding it everywhere) although in many research situations, many pseudonymous genomes are available.

Heck, there are even ones tied to individuals; for example, https://my.pgp-hms.org/profile/hu80855C That's my genome. Google paid for it to be sequenced. I'm David Konerding. Have fun with it.

inetknght• 4 years ago

Full disclosure: I worked 6 years for a private DNA analysis company. I left the company over two years ago in pursuit of challenges closer to my passions -- robotics.

Your DNA isn't "public data".

You shed DNA every day in dead skin cells; if you're in public then it's effectively public trash and most public trash is... well... public. If you eat or drink at a restaurant then you've left your DNA on the utensils and cups.

Even beyond that: Are you sure your relatives haven't given their DNA? It is possible to reconstruct your DNA using the DNA of your relatives.

Nobody's DNA should be harvested and given to a private corporation, no matter what the purported purpose.

This much I fully agree on. Private businesses should have no business in DNA analysis. Private businesses aren't beholden to nearly as much public scrutiny. Unfortunately, DNA analysis is (or, was when I left) a growing private business.

hilbert424• 4 years ago

"Your DNA isn't "public data". Further, those in the military didn't have a choice in the DNA collection."

Fucking right! Google has an unmitigated hide to even contemplate such collection.

The 'no' in Google's 'do no evil' disappeared long ago.

Google's behavior in recent years is really beyond the pale, it's acting like a metastasizing cancer in everything it touches. It's high time governments brought it to heel.

You're absolutely right, DNA shouldn't be harvested by any private irrespective of purpose.

ProAm• 4 years ago

Second, I don't see any harm in sharing public data .... Are these negative reactions only because its Google?

100% I do not trust Google to do remotely the right thing that is in the interest of anyone but themselves.

These people served their country for the government to give that data to a private company for profit? Google can talk all they want about doing it for good, zero trust in them to actually to anything remotely close to that.

And as we've seen with Google in the past, what they say they will do today does not mean that standard will still apply tomorrow.

LinuxBender3• 4 years ago

The military are already having a very difficult time recruiting people. Not for a lack of interest but for a lack of physical qualification. [1] This behavior will not help them get more people.

I foresaw something like this when I served and had to fight them on DNA collection. I neither won nor lost but I stalled them long enough to get out. That was my commander's idea. It went all the way to Al Gore via FoIA and came back down as several boxes of paperwork that were worded more vague than a car commercial as to what the data/dna could be used for, how long they could keep it and who would have access to it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWN13pKVp9s (2012)[video][16 mins]

themodelplumber4• 4 years ago

Do they still use the old PT model for fitness upkeep?

Culturally that was like telling people you can walk to work...even if you work 20 miles away. Our society needs more interesting and subjectively calibrated brain food for fitness maintenance.

Ideally they could switch to a relatively flexible multi-model fitness system. Give a bit more freedom and education to people who showed they are willing to fight for it. And if somebody still wants PT? Go for it.

LinuxBender3• 4 years ago

Do they still use the old PT model for fitness upkeep?

According to the General in the linked video from 2012 they have tried to make some improvements, though there is only so much they can do with someone that has been eating poorly and sitting still for most of their life leading up to enlistment. I have not kept up to date with what they are currently doing but there are others here that I believe are still in the military.

rubyfan5• 4 years ago

Give a bit more freedom and education to people who showed they are willing to fight for it.

People need to eat properly and exercise on a daily basis in to stay fit for service. Most 18-20 year olds have a hard time with discipline. Routine mandatory exercise is a must have for military service. Thus the people with the discipline and "who show willingness to fight for it" and basic competence are the ones that end up leading in the military.

dontreact2• 4 years ago

The title is not correct and not supported by the article. The article clearly states that Google has not obtained any medical records.

“Ultimately, even through negotiations, we were unable to find a pathway that we legally could do and ethically should do,” Simon said. “And the partnership dissolved.”

dang3• 4 years ago

Ok, we've switched the URL from https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-opens-medical-vault-for-google/ to the original source, and corrected the title as part of that.

burner73• 4 years ago

Man, I’m a vet, work in tech, and the reactions here are why I hate the tradeoffs I make by being in the industry.

The amount of “what’s the big deal!” or just total blindness to the issue at hand is not surprising but severely disappointing in what it confirms.

These aren’t just random medical records, they belong to service members and extends the theme of the DoD owns you in service and the VA “helps” you after service to… and Google too! It’s just another example of how Soldiers are treated like disposable units and now apparently that extends into my civilian life.

The civilian/military divide lives and breathes in the so-what attitudes in this thread.

dekhn13• 4 years ago

It's like you're assuming bad faith while many people are trying to save lives.

hilbert424• 4 years ago

"It's just another example of how Soldiers are treated like disposable units..."

Tragically, this problem is not new. It's centuries old and few countries manage veterans well.

Unfortunately, young testosterone-driven men with lots of bravado have little concept of war until they're in the trenches when they quickly learn to regret past notions. Commitments made by governments to their fighting men quickly atrophy and the 'detritus' of war is all too often left to fend for itself.

dang3• 4 years ago

Url changed from https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-opens-medical-vault-for-google/, which points to this.

Google’s quest to digitize troops’ tissue samples

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