Google faces fresh class action-style suit in UK over DeepMind NHS patient data scandal – By Natasha Lomas (Techcrunch) / May 16, 2022
Google is facing a new class-action style lawsuit in the UK in relation to a health data scandal that broke back in 2016, when it emerged that its AI division, DeepMind, had been passed data on more than a million patients as part of an app development project by the Royal Free NHS Trust in London — without the patients’ knowledge or consent.
The Trust was later sanctioned by the UK’s data protection watchdog which found, in mid 2017, that it had breached uk data protection law when it signed the 2015 data-sharing deal with DeepMind. However the tech firm — which had been engaged by the Trust to help develop an app wrapper for an NHS algorithm to alert clinicians to the early signs of acute kidney injury (aka the Streams app) — avoided sanction since the Trust had been directly responsible for sending it the patients’ data.
So it’s interesting that this private litigation is targeting Google and DeepMind Technologies, several years later. (Albeit, if a claim seeking damages against one of the world’s most valuable companies prevails there is likely to be considerably more upside vs litigation aimed at a publicly funded healthcare Trust.)
CONTINUE > https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/16/google-deepmind-nhs-misuse-of-private-data-lawsuit/
