As per Rowenna Fielding, head of individual rights & ethics at Protecture, the requirement to create a Google account to get a confirmed checkup on Coronavirus, can be risky and can bring your privacy under threat.
Google has recently come up with a testing website for coronavirus wherein they are asking for the customer's personal details in order to allow them a check-up.
The website is set up by Google parent group called Verify under the umbrella of Project Baseline It went live from March 15, finding screening areas of those who want to confirm if they have COVID-19 or not.
The privacy policy of the website confirms that it collects user's personal information. It also confirms that in order to access certain restricted areas of the website it asks users to have a Google account of their own.
“We may receive certain information from Google related to your Google user account, such as email address, and will treat such information in accordance with relevant Google policies,” the privacy policy states.
Fielding says that asking for a customer's contact information is feasible but asking them to make a personal google account is a major privacy issue.
“It makes sense to have users provide their contact information, but insisting on account creation (and subsequent tracking) for the entire Google ecosystem, is excessive and intrusive,” she says.
Meanwhile, a medical expert named Eugene GU, went further to claim that the Google website is “one huge data mining operation.”
Google’s Project Baseline coronavirus screening website appears to be one huge data mining operation to collect your health information for commercial purposes. It does not appear to follow HIPAA privacy laws. No wonder Trump was pushing this so hard. This is dystopian. pic.twitter.com/qPafFsd5BZ
— Eugene Gu, MD (@eugenegu) March 16, 2020
“Google literally says it will use your most private health data to ‘build new tools, technologies, products, and partnerships’ and share it with ‘biopharma companies and medical device companies for research and commercial product development purposes’,” says Eugene Gu.
He further said that the information is being used by Google for commercial benefits and research and development reasons. Google's approach to collecting personal information is also keeping the privacy experts thinking after its idea to make it big in the healthcare sector started making news in the market.
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