A legal case has been launched on behalf of more than a million people whose confidential medical records were obtained by Google.
In 2015, Google’s AI firm DeepMind was given the personal records of 1.6 million patients at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust.
The law firm handling the case said it was launched to address public concerns about the use of private health data by tech firms.
DeepMind has not commented.
But it is understood that no claim has formally been served at this time.
The Royal Free Hospital Trust has also been asked for comment.
In 2015, when it became public that vast amounts of data had been tapped into by DeepMind, causing an outrage – although the firm insisted that the patient records were being used to help create a life-saving app.
The Stream app was an alert, diagnosis and detection system that could spot when patients were at risk of developing acute kidney injury. It is in the process of being decommissioned, following DeepMind being subsumed into Google Health.
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