NEW YORK: Google’s top health and cloud executives said the company isn’t misusing health data from one of the biggest US healthcare providers, pushing back against news reports that have triggered criticism from politicians of the search giant.
On Tuesday, the paper reported that the US Department of Health and Human Services’ civil rights office was starting an inquiry into the situation. Thomas Kurian, chief executive officer of Google Cloud, declined to comment on the alleged inquiry and representatives of the HHS did not respond to a request for comment.
News articles and social media posts have questioned why Google needs to collect patient information and speculated that the search giant could eventually use the data for advertising. That isn’t true, Kurian and Feinberg said in a joint interview.