The Royal Free has been recommended by ‘independent’ lawyers to terminate its ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ with DeepMind (page 68, second bullet from bottom)
If the “research” agreement with DeepMind – the MoU covering “the use of AI to develop better algorithms” – isn’t terminated, the deliberate exclusions from the legal opinion can only be interpreted as an attempt to mislead the public, once again.
What is the legal basis for continuing to copy 8 years of data on every patient in the hospital? While DeepMind claims the “vital interest” of patients, it still keeps the data of over a million past patients whose interests it will never serve, because RFH’s systems cannot provide “live data” (para 26.1) – despite the report saying that is only temporary (para 15.1).
When RFH completes its move to “fully digital”, will the excessive data be deleted?
The biggest question raised by the Information Commissioner and the National Data Guardian appears to be missing – instead, the report excludes a “historical review of issues arising prior to the date of our appointment” (page 9, para 8.4, 5th bullet, and page 17, para 5,bullet 7).
The report claims the ‘vital interests’ (i.e. remaining alive) of patients is justification to protect against an “event [that] might only occur in the future or not occur at all” (page 43, para 23.2). The only ‘vital interest’ protected here is Google’s, and its desire to hoard medical records it was told were unlawfully collected. The vital interests of a hypothetical patient are not vital interests of an actual data subject (and the GDPR tests are demonstrably unmet).
The ICO and NDG asked the Royal Free to justify the collection of 1.6 million patient records, and this legal opinion explicitly provides no answer to that question (page 75, para 5, final bullet).
The lawyers do say (page 23, para 12.1) “…we do not think the concepts underpinning Streams are particularly ground-breaking.” In Streams, DeepMind has built little more than a user-friendly iPhone app – under scrutiny, its repeated claims of innovation are at best misleading.
But Google DeepMind clearly still thinks it is above the law; it tries to defend all of the data it has by pointing at different justifications each time. Is this the ‘ethical’ ‘accountable’ approach we must accept from the company that wants to build dangerous AIs?
-ends-
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