A former medical patient at the University of Chicago is suing both the school and Google in a class action lawsuit, claiming that the school provided the Big Tech giant with private patient data, reported Campus Reform. The Google-UChicago partnership was supposed to involve machine learning to help forecast medical incidents, but the records the school gave Google allegedly contained time stamps for university patient visits, patient diagnoses, demographics, etc.
Even though the names weren’t included, the lawsuit claims that the University of Chicago provided Google with enough other data that Google could re-identify the patients in the records. It says “the reason no other hospital, including the other health care providers partnering with Google, provided this type of information is because it would be a prima facie violation of [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] to share or even receive medical records in this form.”
Now Google, for its own part, is insisting it hasn’t broken any laws, saying it thinks its healthcare research could prove instrumental in saving lives, but the company, of course, didn’t mention just how much money it would make off of whatever service it might create — I also wonder just how much UChicago got paid for its cooperation.
It looks like we’re fast approaching a world where using public services or things that have become as ubiquitous as public services kick people with the wrong opinions off their platforms entirely and subject those who remain to some pretty invasive measures. Would you rather be banned or have all your most intimate info sold to the highest bidder — that’s not much of a choice, is it?
Meir Elran was a brigadier general in the Israeli Defense Forces and currently works for the Institute for National Security Studies. He’s teaching a course at the University of Chicago this semester called “Security, Counter-Terrorism, and Resilience: The Israeli Case,” reported Campus Reform.
UChicago Socialists and Students for Justice in Palestine co-authored an op-ed in which they said “Elran’s course actually infringes upon open discourse by furthering the all-too-common and virulently Islamophobic rhetoric that positions Israel as standing bravely and resiliently in the face of their country’s barbaric natives.”
Yeahhh I don’t think these guys really understand the concept of open discourse. Speech cannot infringe upon open discourse unless you’re shutting other people down which Elran’s not doing; this is his class. As for Islamophobic rhetoric, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to frame defending against Palestinian rocket launchers, rock throwers, etc. as having an irrational fear of Muslims.
Anyways, the students say “in recent months, under the guise of counter-terrorism, Israel has violently suppressed demonstrations against invasive security measures at the al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site.” When they say “invasive security measures,” I think they’re referring to metal detectors Israel put in place after Arabs murdered two police officers there. How dare you stop us from killing you — that is bigotry.
