David Cameron's close links to Google

[Magda Hassan]

Entrust my medical records to Google? I'd rather give them to Bin Laden


Last updated at 12:16 AM on 07th July 2009

Osama Bin Laden: Stephen Glover distrusts Google as much as this terrorist

Like many people reading this article, I use Google all the time. I wouldn't say it was an indispensable part of my life, but it certainly makes it a lot easier in a number of respects.

If I want to know the telephone number of a shop or restaurant, I can Google it at no charge, instead of wasting money telephoning one of the various successors to Directory Inquiries. Google can direct me instantly to any one of hundreds of useful databases when I am writing an article.
As a search engine it has been a revolutionary, and apparently almost entirely beneficent, force. And yet the mere mention of its name makes a growing number of people uneasy or suspicious. Some are even beginning to find this Behemoth positively sinister.

That is why many will react with incredulity to the news that the Tories are considering transferring our health records to Google or Microsoft should they win power. Patients will be given the option of moving their medical notes to these companies as the Conservatives wind down the multi-billion-pound central computer which this Government hopes will hold all our medical records by 2014.


No one disputes that New Labour has squandered billions on a succession of ill-conceived, expensive IT databases. I am also queasy about tens of thousands of medical staff having access to my personal medical records, and I imagine many others will share my anxieties. But if there is a choice between trusting the Government on the one hand, and Google on the other, I know where my greater confidence will lie.

The Government is an enormous, blundering elephant, hopeless at running any large IT programme, and incapable of controlling costs. All the same, I believe that, on the whole, it has the welfare of its citizens at heart. Hackers may get into the central medical database - one or two doctors have already done so to prove a point - but the Government is not going to flog our medical records, or try to make a profit out of them in any way.

The same cannot be said of Google or Microsoft, whatever they may claim. These are hugely successful and well-run companies which, unlike governments, make money out of information in their possession. People who deposited their medical records with Google would no doubt be given assurances that they would not be passed on to third parties. But Google would not go to the trouble and expense of storing such information unless it hoped to benefit from it in some way.
Am I being over suspicious? I don't think so. Look at what Google already does. Each time you make a Google search, a log is made of the date and time, and what your computer has looked for. This information is stored in one of thousands of servers piled up inside one of dozens of temperature- controlled warehouses owned by Google on at least two continents.




This enables Google to make a personal profile of you - your likes and dislikes, obsessions, interests and fears. All this information used to be held indefinitely, but, following considerable pressure from the European Union, Google agreed to 'anonymise' it after nine months. This means that it can still retain the information, but no longer link it to your computer's identity.
Meanwhile, those using Google Mail, the company's internet messaging service, will have their messages held by Google and scanned for keywords to discover what kind of person you are. Also, if you own a Google G1 phone, and are signed up for its 'latitude' mobile service, your exact whereabouts will be known, and can be recorded.
And, of course, every house and street in the country will soon be photographed and logged by Google Street View. Imagine how outraged we would be - and how fearful - if the State had embarked on such an act of intrusion. Yet Google has done it.
Here is a company which, through a variety of means, is building up a profile of each of us - or at any rate those of us who use computers. I understand, of course, that it has no over-arching intention of ordering or controlling our lives, and that the information it holds about us is used for its own commercial gain. But it would be absolutely the last company in the world to which I would entrust my medical records. I would far rather stick them in an envelope and send them to Osama Bin Laden or Vladimir Putin.
Why, then, is David Cameron considering giving people the option of storing their medical records with Google? A charitable view would be that he genuinely abhors the inefficiency and gross overexpenditure of government IT schemes, and regards Google as a cheap, painless, efficient alternative. He has been banging on about the virtues of 'Google Health' and 'Microsoft Health Vault' for months.
As the Tories present it, the consumer would be given greater freedom by escaping from the maw of the State. In fact, the consumer would be exchanging an inefficient but fundamentally benevolent system for one run by a superefficient private company, which has arguably already assembled more detailed personal information about our private habits than all the many organs of government.


Suspicious: David Cameron is a supporter of Google but why is this so?
However, the plot thickens - and worrying questions begin to mount up - when we examine Mr Cameron's close links to Google. Steve Hilton, one of the Tory leader's two or three most important advisers, is married to Rachel Whetstone, Google's vice-president of global communications and public affairs, and a long-time close friend of Mr Cameron's. The Tory leader flew to San Francisco to address the Google Zeitgeist conference in 2007. Five months ago, Eric Schmidt, the company's chief executive, joined a Conservative business forum to advise on economic policy.
I am obviously not suggesting that Mr Cameron has any inappropriate relationship with Google, but I do wonder whether he has not been got at by close colleagues who do owe an allegiance to the company. If he had thought carefully about the matter for a moment, he would have realised that while most voters have probably lost faith in botched governmental IT projects, they do not wish to throw their lot in with a slightly scary company such as Google.
Very possibly the Tory leader thinks Google is 'cool' and viewed by people not as an oldfashioned capitalist enterprise, but as a post-modern company whose executives wear opennecked shirts, eat polenta and drink fruit smoothies. If so, he could not be more wrong. Google is capitalist in tooth and claw, and there need be nothing wrong with that. What is disturbing is that the company's brilliant lead in technology should have given it a virtual monopoly to establish a kind of sovereignty over our lives.
A true Tory would be happy with a commercial market of five or ten Googles, but naturally suspicious of one. Better the single government computer we have - or else, if is too expensive and blundering, none at all.
What's more, a true Tory should beware of getting too close to large companies and their top executives. That, surely, is one of the biggest lessons of the past 12 years. If the Tory leader has not learned from all the scandals of leading New Labour politicians having suspect relations with often dodgy billionaires, I wonder where he has been. Let Google sell its own wares - but without David Cameron acting as its go-between.

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