(Reuters) reports from London. Google won a lawsuit filed on behalf of 1.6 million individuals against a British hospital trust over medical information transferred to the US internet giant.
In 2015, the Royal Free London NHS Trust handed patient data to Google’s artificial intelligence business DeepMind Technologies in order to build a smartphone app that would evaluate medical records and identify acute kidney damage.
The Information Commissioner’s Office, Britain’s data protection authority, said in 2017 that the Royal Free Hospital, which is part of the public National Health Service (NHS), mishandled patient data when it transferred it to DeepMind.
Last year, Royal Free patient Andrew Prismall sued Alphabet Inc subsidiary Google and DeepMind on behalf of 1.6 million patients for alleged abuse of private information.
In March, the firms claimed that the action was “bound to fail” since there was no way of proving that all 1.6 million claimants’ private information was exploited or that they had any expectation of privacy in regard to the material.
Judge Heather Williams concluded on Friday that the lawsuit should be dismissed because it is “doomed to fail.”
“I conclude that each member of the claimant class does not have a realistic prospect of establishing a reasonable expectation of privacy in respect of their relevant medical records,” she wrote.