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San Francisco and Oakland Drop Covid-19 Testing Program Run by Google Sister Company Verily - Gizmodo

San Francisco and Oakland Drop Covid-19 Testing Program Run by Google Sister Company Verily - Gizmodo

San Francisco and Oakland Drop Covid-19 Testing Program Run by Google Sister Company Verily - Gizmodo
Oct 26, 2020 1 min, 19 secs

San Francisco and Alameda counties have stopped using Verily, Google’s health-focused sister company, to test for the novel coronavirus, Kaiser Health News reported on Monday.

Verily launched a pilot covid-19 testing program earlier this year and scored $55 million in contracts with California state to set up both mobile and stationary test sites (it’s also part of Rite Aid’s $120 million-plus contract with the Department of Health and Human Services).

Per the privacy policies, personal data can be shared with “Verily’s contractors… the entity that is operating the site and its contractors, the state Department of Public Health and potentially other federal, state, and local health authorities, and other entities that assist with the testing program.” This exposes vulnerable community members to widespread sharing of personal data that could be used for commercial or other purposes.

As previously noted by Gizmodo, Verily’s Project Baseline was originally designed to “contribute to the map of human health and participate in clinical research.” There’s no concrete guarantee that the pharmaceutical companies running clinical trials through Project Baseline will keep any of that data quiet, and Verily reserves the right to use collected data for “commercial product research and development” and compile it in a “de-identified data set.” Verily told Gizmodo there were a number of privacy controls on data related to its covid-19 testing program, but stopped short of stating outright that none of it would be used for commercial purposes.

Jonathan Fuchs, testing strategy lead for the county health department, told the site the department’s Verily program was “currently on hold.”

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