Originally published May 20 2008
Review of Google Health - Technology Achievement or Privacy Disaster?
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
(NaturalNews) Google Health was launched with much fanfare this week, positioned by Google, Inc. as a technological solution to the rather embarrassing problem of an advanced nation still running on medical records that seem to be stuck in 1970's-era technology. The Google Health service promises to give users a free, central storehouse for all their medical records, providing a convenient way to share medical histories with doctors, insurance companies and other primary health care players.
But is Google Health secure? And is the company behind it guaranteed to protect your privacy? In this review, NaturalNews takes a critical look at Google Health and examines several areas of increasing concern. Let's start by looking at the first area of concern: Consumer privacy.
In its terms of service, Google Health openly says it may share a user's personal health records with the following groups:
• Subsidiaries, affiliated companies or other trusted businesses who process personal information for Google.
• The U.S. government, following a request of such information from the government.
• Merger or acquisition partners, if Google sells off its Google Health assets someday. Under this scenario, Google promises to "provide notice" before personal information is transferred and "becomes subject to a different privacy policy."
In other words, under Google's own terms of service, which you can read at (http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacypolicy....), Google could first get a hundred million people to enter their health records under Google Health, then it could sell off those records to a third party which might have a new privacy policy that eliminates any real right to privacy and gives the new owner of the records the right to sell such records to anyone (such as drug companies, governments, employers and more).
How would you like to find yourself going to a job interview one day, then suddenly finding out you're denied the job because your potential future employer bought your health records from this third party company that purchased them from Google? Although this is certainly not the intention of present-day Google, it remains a disconcerting possibility that's actually written right into Google's own privacy policy. Regardless of whether Google ever intends to sell your health records to someone else, the language of their privacy policy enables them to sell off the Google Health unit -- and all its records -- to any other business, government or individual at any time, with no recourse on your part. You have no right to delete your records under such a scenario. They become the "property" of the new buyer.
But would Google ever really do such a thing? That's where we take a closer look at the ethics of this company that claims to "do no evil."
Google's Partnership with Communist China and the Censorship of Search Results
It is a well known fact that over the last few years, Google openly conspired with the Communist Chinese government to build a custom search engine that would censor freedom-related subjects, eliminating such topics from the search results delivered by Google to the citizens of China. This campaign of Google-engineered mass censorship was created to keep the Chinese population enslaved by a tyrannical, Communist government regime that believes reading the Bible is a criminal offense, or that meditating in a public place justifies your arrest and prosecution by the Chinese government.
China, you see, doesn't want its population to see search engine results on topics like the Dalai Lama, the Tiananmen Square uprising, or even articles that are critical of the current government regime. And when given an opportunity to engineer a search engine that enforced this "thought crime" censorship across a nation of one billion people, Google jumped right into step with the Chinese Communist government and applied its considerable technical resources to the challenge of figuring out the most efficient way to keep an entire nation enslaved by limiting its ability to engage in the free exchange of ideas.
Thus, Google -- the company that once claimed to "do no evil" -- became the architect of one of the most colossal "Big Brother" projects in the history of the internet: The creation of a search engine for China that specifically sought to limit freedom, limit access to information, and protect the power base of a corrupt, aging Communist dynasty that feared it might lose its grip on the population if people had open access to the internet. A search engine is a dangerous thing, didn't you know? China thinks it is, anyway.
Google's "do no evil" slogan slid down that slippery slope of corporate ethics and inevitably became "Do no evil unless there's money to be made." And this company, which openly and willfully conspired with the Chinese government to deny its citizens access to "dangerous" ideas, now wants to hold on to your private health records! But don't worry, Google promises it won't do anything evil to you.
In its own defense, Google says it's better to do business with China in the hope that it might be able to influence that nation's internet censorship policies in the future. While this initially sounds like a potentially justifiable line of reasoning, it is the same line of reasoning that, throughout the history of human civilization, has been invoked by entrepreneurs and corporations doing business with tyrants. It's the same line of reasoning used by the pharmaceutical companies who manufactured Zyklon B gas for Nazi Germany, or who manufactured Depleted Uranium weapons for the U.S. military to use in Iraq. The very idea of "doing business with evil groups in order to achieve some future good" is actually just a form of self-deception. No lasting good has ever been produced by cooperating with evil regimes. (But it sure makes for a slick-sounding spin campaign, doesn't it?)
Is Google working against the People?
The disconnect between Google's "do no evil" slogan and its actual behavior presents us with an interesting form of corporate schizophrenia, or a Jekyl-and-Hyde behavior pattern that hardly lends itself to trust. Add on to that the fact that Google employs U.S. government spooks (see http://www.google-watch.org/jobad.html ) and you start to wonder: Just who is Google really working for anyway? It already admits that it will turn over your private health records to the U.S. government, if requested, but it fails to detail just what kind of requests it will honor vs. reject.
The turning over of private health records to the government is probably not even a real issue anyway, given that under Big Brother legislation passed since 9/11, the U.S. government is no doubt already secretly tapping into data feeds from Google. I have no doubt that user searches, for example, are routinely profiled and searched for keywords that might indicate a "terrorist" is searching for a way to build a bomb (or whatever). Web pages are probably mined on a regular basis to find hints of terror-related activity, and Google's famous PageRank technology offers a perfect framework by which web pages of known terrorists can lead investigators to related pages from other potential troublemakers.
There's simply no question at all in my mind that Google is either knowingly or unknowingly sharing information with the U.S. government right now. If you're not familiar with these facts, just read up on the government's Total Information Awareness program here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awa...
You'll soon come to realize that every e-mail, phone call, credit card charge and financial transaction you make is recorded, archived and mined by the federal government as part of their search for whatever group they're calling the bad guys this year. Does anyone really believe search engines aren't also part of this illegal domestic surveillance system operated by the government? Of course, we can't say for sure whether Google is cooperating with such efforts, but it's not too difficult to imagine a bunch of dark suits showing up at Google corporate headquarters one day and demanding that back doors be engineered into the search engine archives as a matter of "natural security." The simple invocation of "natural security," it seems, is justification enough for practically any degree of spying on Americans these days.
Who's on the advisory board of Google Health?
Google Health is operated with input from an advisory board. Ever wonder who's on that board? It reads like a who's who of Big Brother freedom haters who run pro-military think tanks, drug company front groups and billion-dollar drug retailers. Here's a partial list of who sits on Google Health's advisory board right now:
Douglas Bell, M.D., Ph.D.
Research Scientist, RAND Health, RAND Corporation (a militaristic think tank group involved in numerous covert events of the past several decades)
Linda M. Dillman
Executive Vice President, Risk Management, Benefits and Sustainability, Wal-Mart (one of the country's largest retailers of harmful prescription drugs)
Bernadine Healy, M.D.
Former head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Health Editor & Columnist, U.S. News & World Report (a pro-drug rag that rakes in tens of millions of dollars each year from Big Pharma while its ad pages are filled with promotions for toxic medications that kill people)
Bernie Hengesbaugh
Chief Operating Officer, The American Medical Association (AMA) (a highly corrupt pharmaceutical front group that has already been found guilty of conspiracy to destroy alternative medicine in U.S. federal courts). Read "How the AMA Got Rich" here: http://www.naturalnews.com/023195.html )
David Kessler, M.D.
Former FDA Commissioner, Vice Chancellor-Medical Affairs & Dean, School of Medicine, UCSF (as the former head of the FDA, David Kessler led one of the most evil, corrupt and law-breaking government organizations that has ever been created, aside from the CIA, perhaps)
Put all these people together, and what do you get? The advisory board for Google Health! Of course, a few other people sit on the advisory board, and they're not all bad people, but just the fact that the people listed here are sitting on the Google Health advisory board should make you wonder about the real motive behind such a system.
Google Health, as I see it, is a way to sucker people into a system of disease and ongoing pharmaceutical treatments by creating the illusion that organization of health records is a replacement for real health prevention. But let me be the first to say this: An organized list of all the pharmaceuticals a person is taking and all the false diagnoses they have been given by ignorant doctors is no replacement for the real health policies we need in this country if we hope to have a future. What kind of health policies do we really need? The teaching of cancer prevention, the banning of drug advertising, the banning of junk food marketing, the outlawing of toxic food additives, the banning of toxic chemicals in personal care products, the overthrow of the FDA and its ongoing campaign of tyranny and censorship against nutritional supplements, and so on.
Google Health may, indeed, look like a great way to organize health records, but in the end, all it's doing is lending the illusion of order to a system of medicine that's based primarily on fraudulent science, harmful chemicals and corporate greed.
Reinforcing the illusion of disease
Google Health even goes out of its way to reinforce the existence of fictitious diseases and disorders that have no basis in reality. ADHD, for example, is one of the diseases that can be selected by users of Google Health, which describes it like this: "ADHD is a problem with inattentiveness, over-activity, impulsivity, or a combination." It then goes on to provide a "reference page" of information supporting this false disorder, which reads must like a full-page advertisement for the drug companies: https://www.google.com/health/ref/Attention+Deficit+...)
Nowhere does Google Health indicate that the "disorder" is entirely fictitious, or that it was invented by drug companies and corrupt psychiatrists in order to sell amphetamines to children. (See my article on this topic here: http://www.naturalnews.com/021944.html )
Instead, Google Health just perpetuates a cult-like belief in toxic, synthetic chemicals that harm children and now kill at least 100,000 Americans a year. Thus, just like in China, where Google openly cooperated with the mass censorship of the Chinese population, Google Health is now a program of mass brainwashing for the U.S. population. It attempts to create the illusion of bringing organization to an industry that's ultimately based on the motivation to keep people in a state of ongoing degenerative disease so that drug companies can rake in billions of dollars in profits without actually curing anybody. The entire Google Health interface, in fact, is engineered precisely in a way that reinforces false beliefs about fictitious disease, since many users seeing ADHD appear in a "conditions" list might figure, well gee, if it's on this Google list, it must be real!
The Google Health page goes on to urge readers that children should be subjected to "treatment" that begins with medicating the child. Finally, this Google Health page goes on to insist that alternative or natural therapies are utterly useless by stating, "Alternative remedies have become quite popular, including herbs, supplements, and chiropractic manipulation. However, there is little or no solid evidence for many remedies marketed to parents."
Thus, Google Health has now joined the ranks of all the pro-Pharma drug pushers who are doping up our children on dangerous drugs while calling it "treatment." It has become a purveyor of poison; a promoter of fictitious disease labels and a force that now attempts to discredit nutrition, vitamin D, avoidance of food toxins and other strategies that completely eliminate symptoms of so-called ADHD within just a few weeks.
And remember; all this is from a company that claims to "do no evil." I suppose even George Bush thinks he's God's gift to human civilization, too, which just goes to show you that even the most insane, twisted individuals and organizations can easily find ways to justify their destructive behaviors and call them "good." (George Bush thinks God told him to invade the Middle East. Wow. Too bad nobody ever told him the voices in his head are actually coming from his medication...)
How Google further protects Big Pharma
This isn't the only thing Google has done over the last few years to prop up the pharmaceutical industry. Try to enter an Adwords ad on the name of any drug, and you'll be greeted with a screen that declares you can't use such keywords unless you first prove you are a licensed pharmacy. So my own articles about the dangers of Ritalin, for example, cannot be advertised on Google Adwords because I cannot use the word "Ritalin" in an ad. This is just one more way in which Google cooperates with powerful corporations to censor information that's critical about pharmaceuticals, thereby contributing to the ongoing brainwashing of the U.S. population (it was never limited to China, get it?)
I don't mean to say that all Google's employees are evil people, by the way. In fact, most Google people are pretty darned cool. They're smart, capable and well-meaning. But as we've seen in many other cases, a powerful corporation can easily begin to take on a negative role that in no way reflects the individual intentions of the people working there. Corporations want to get bigger, more powerful and more profitable. And sadly, most corporations end up compromising their principles in their eagerness to achieve greater size, power and profitability.
Do we really need Google Health anyway?
But let's suppose for a moment that Google Health is 100% private, secure and honest. Let's take a trip to imagination land and pretend there's a zero chance of Google ever selling off that business unit and sharing your private health records. There's still a very important question that comes to mind:
Does anybody really need to store their private health records online anyway?
Why not just type them into a Word document? Is there really any underlying need to go online and enter these records somewhere else?
And if so, what's next: Will Google launch "Google Car Repair" that stores your car repair records online? Will they launch "Google Resume" where you enter your educational records online? There's really no compelling reason, you see, to enter your personal records online, especially when you want to keep them private. Just type them into a document at home, and bring a copy with you to the doctor.
Finally, here's another important point we seem to forget these days in our over-medicated American society: If your health records are so long that you need an online database to store them, you're probably taking way too many meds! I've seen people come into local health clinics taking eight, ten or even a dozen different medications all at once! Neither they, nor their doctors, have any idea whether such cocktail combinations of chemicals are dangerous (hint: they are!). They've never even been tested in such a way. But you can bet these people are suffering from all kinds of side effects, symptoms and health problems due to the taking of all those medications.
Have you ever met a person taking ten prescription drugs who got better? Of course not. They don't exist. Pharmaceuticals make people sick, diseased and dysfunctional. That's why they're such profitable business products: Once you start taking one, you soon need another one, and then another one, until one day you can't sleep, can't poop, can't breathe and can't get an erection. They have pills for all those things, too, which I suppose you can just add to your 5000-word Google Health medical record that proves you're a walking bag of Big Pharma chemicals.
Nowhere, by the way, does Google Health warn people that taking so many medications is extremely harmful to the environment (because those drugs pass right through you and damage aquatic ecosystems), and nowhere does Google Health even mention the simple fact that vitamin D can prevent 77% of all cancers, thereby eliminating the need for hundreds of different drugs and medical labels that are included in their system. It's almost as if Google Health was constructed by Big Pharma itself, then licensed to Google.
The most shameful Google project yet
In all, Google Health is a monumental failure by a company that should frankly know better. Rather than creating something that helps make the world a better place, Google chose to follow the Big Pharma / conventional medicine lies and disinformation, promoting drugs and fictitious diseases labels as "health." In doing so, Google has wasted this monumental opportunity to make a positive difference in the world and has once again reinforced the fact that when it comes to promoting powerful organizations vs. helping real people, Google will side with the rich, powerful corporations and disease organizations.
If Google really wanted to create a useful health technology that could change the world and make a huge difference in the prevention of disease and the quality of life for everyday Americans, they should have invited the top natural health experts to sit on the board and design a system that promoted real health, not fictitious disease. But alas, they did not. I searched my mailbox twice and didn't see an invitation [chuckle], and after this article goes live, I sort of doubt I'll ever see one from Google.
I can tell you this much: If I had the financial resources and influence of the Google founders, I wouldn't waste it sitting around on my duff creating useless health databases that promote a mindset of disease and medication. Instead, I'd be teaching health, nutrition and disease prevention (all the things that the Google ADHD page says don't work, quite hilariously). I'd be using my money and influence to make the world a better place by challenging the status quo instead of perpetuating a system of diseasification and medication.
I'm going to build a better health database than Google
In fact, I've got something to announce right here, right now. I'm going to build a better health search engine than Google, starting right now. This year, in 2008, I'm going to single-handedly build a massive database of natural health knowledge that Google could not accomplish with tens of millions of dollars, and I'm going to do it for the sole purpose of bringing health freedom and information solutions to the People of our world. I'm going to do it from my home office, with no more than a couple of PCs and a single internet connection.
So take this as my official announcement: I'm going to build what Google couldn't -- a massive natural health information database that will be offered free to the public as a way to counter the disinformation being perpetuated by Google Health. And in doing so, I'm going to demonstrate that one man with the right motivation and the right ethics can do more than an entire campus full of "geniuses" backed by billions of dollars in funding.
I know exactly what to do to make this a reality, and thanks to nutrition and Mother Nature's medicine, I have the presence of mind and cognitive function to make this happen. My project will be powered by superfoods! (I also happen to have a software engineering background, which might come in quite handy on such a project...)
Google, watch out. A one-man operation with deep-rooted compassion for fellow human beings and a genuine healing purpose is about to put your entire Google Health project to shame. And when it's done, no, Google you cannot buy it from me. It's not for sale. It belongs to the People of our world and will be donated to my non-profit Consumer Wellness Center so that it can remain freely available to the People through the years.
Watch NaturalNews.com for announcements throughout this year about my natural health global electronic library project.
I am also welcoming friendly bets from wealthy Google executives on whether or not I can succeed in building such a project before the end of Calendar year 2008. The minimum bet is $1 million. Void where prohibited by law.
All content posted on this site is commentary or opinion and is protected under Free Speech. Truth Publishing LLC takes sole responsibility for all content. Truth Publishing sells no hard products and earns no money from the recommendation of products. NaturalNews.com is presented for educational and commentary purposes only and should not be construed as professional advice from any licensed practitioner. Truth Publishing assumes no responsibility for the use or misuse of this material. For the full terms of usage of this material, visit www.NaturalNews.com/terms.shtml