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Senators ask Alphabet how it will protect COVID-19 screening site data
Alphabet's COVID-19 screening site might serve as a relief to those eager to determine if they need to get tested, but it's also raising some privacy concerns in Congress. Five Democratic senators have sent letters to Vice President Mike Pence and Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai asking if they've studied the potential for privacy and security holes in Verily's Baseline triage system. The politicians wanted to know if users will be asked to "forfeit" their data to participate, and if Google will be barred from either using the data for its own purposes or selling it to third parties.
Alphabet starts collecting health info to better predict disease
It didn't take long for Alphabet's Verily to get its watch-based health study off the ground. The life sciences company has launched its 4-year research initiative, Baseline, to potentially spot early signs of diseases before obvious symptoms appear. Verily's health-tracking Study Watch plays a central role, of course, as it will track everything from heart rate to ECGs to the skin's electrical conductivity. However, that's just one piece of the puzzle -- the team will look at numerous other factors to see where disease begins.
Google wants to define a healthy human with its new baseline genetic study
Google's got a big new project and it's you. Well, not just you, but a genetic and molecular study of humanity that aims to grasp at what a healthy human should be. It's in its early days, collecting anonymous data from 175 people, but it plans to expand to thousands later. The project is headed up by molecular biologist Andrew Conrad, who pioneered cheap HIV tests for blood-plasma donations. According to the WSJ, the team at Google X current numbers between 70 and 100, encompassing experts in physiology, biochemistry, optics, imaging and molecular biology. The Baseline project will apparently take in hundreds of different samples, with Google using its information processing talents to expose biomarkers and other patterns - the optimistic result hopefully being faster ways of diagnosing diseases. Biomarkers has typically been used with late-stage diseases, as these studies have typically used already-sick patients. "He gets that this is not a software project that will be done in one or two years," said Dr. Sam Gambhir, who is working with Dr. Conrad on the project. "We used to talk about curing cancer and doing this in a few years. We've learned to not say those things anymore."
