| Hi, Gerrit De Vynck here. If you haven't noticed yet, Google is getting really into health care. The search giant has been bringing together various parts of its business under the Google Health umbrella, led by industry veteran and psychiatrist David Feinberg. Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf is on board, too. Verily, a health-care unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc., is working on everything from a diabetes joint venture with pharma giant Sanofi to a "smart" diaper. Google is also pushing hard to sell cloud services to health-care companies. All that activity raises a lot of questions. The biggest one is what Google plans to do with all the personal medical data from these initiatives. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google has been sucking up patient information, including names and diagnoses, as part of a deal with hospital network Ascension. That prompted a flurry of stories and tweets speculating that the tech giant was using the data for nefarious purposes. Google and Ascension maintained the data-sharing was all completely legal. In an interview with Bloomberg News on Tuesday, the head of Google Health, Feinberg, said the company was only building a tool to help Ascension search through its electronic medical records. No data was being used for AI research, he said. Still, Google's ambition in health care does include AI. It's arguably the world leader in the field, and it got there by training its software and machines on reams of data it already collects from offerings such as Search, Maps and Photos. Health tech is a mess, and Google may well be able to bring new benefits to patients, doctors and medical researchers. But using health data secured through private agreements is a lot different than scrapping and indexing information that's already shared on the public web. With rising scrutiny on the tech industry's digital privacy practices, Dr. Google will have to proceed cautiously if it wants to avoid a regulatory backlash.--Gerrit De Vynck | 
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