ArticleEMBO molecular medicine2020
Google's Project Nightingale highlights the necessity of data science ethics review.
Article in EMBO molecular medicine, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Big Data and Digitalization in Dentistry: A Systematic Review of the Ethical Issues.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2020Pooled it
- A Markov Chain Replacement Strategy for Surrogate Identifiers: Minimizing Re-Identification Risk While Preserving Text Reuse.Electronics · 2025Article
- Role of artificial intelligence in advancing immunology.Immunologic research · 2025Review
- Remote robotic surgery: implementing a technology 20 years in the making.Surgical endoscopy · 2025Review
- Comments on Contemporary Uses of Machine Learning for Electronic Health Records.North Carolina medical journal · 2024Review
- Article
- Megatrends in Healthcare: Review for the Swiss National Science Foundation's National Research Programme 74 (NRP74) "Smarter Health Care".Public health reviews · 2022Review
- Social Media Terms and Conditions and Informed Consent From Children: Ethical Analysis.JMIR pediatrics and parenting · 2021Article
- The case for information fiduciaries: The implementation of a data ethics checklist at Seattle Children's Hospital.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2021Article
- Considerations for an integrated population health databank in Africa: lessons from global best practices.Wellcome open research · 2021Article
- Privacy Challenges to the Democratization of Brain Data.iScience · 2020Review
- All Our Data Will Be Health Data One Day: The Need for Universal Data Protection and Comprehensive Consent.Journal of medical Internet research · 2020Article
- Google's Project Nightingale highlights the necessity of data science ethics review.EMBO molecular medicine · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
On November 14 last year, the British Guardian published an account from an anonymous whistleblower at Google, accusing the company of misconduct in regard to handling sensitive health data. The whistleblower works for Project Nightingale, an attempt by Google to get into the lucrative US healthcare market, by storing and processing the personal medical data of up to 50 million customers of Ascension, one of America's largest healthcare providers. As the Wall Street Journal had already reported 3 days earlier, and as the whistleblower confirmed, neither was the data anonymized when transmitted from Ascension nor were patients or their doctors notified, let alone asked for consent to sharing their data with Google (Copeland, 2019; Pilkington, 2019). As a result, Google employees had full access to non-anonymous patient health data. Google Health chief David Feinberg commented that all Google employees involved had gone through medical ethics training and were approved by Ascension (Feinberg, 2019).
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.