AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: No more plastic bags in Mass and Google grabs your medical records

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning and he'd been talking a lot about recycling and recycled bags and stuff because the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is right now considering legislation that would black ban all plastic bags throughout the state. And of course, they're not really considering implications. But we got into Google and they are now using a vacuum truck to grab all of our medical records and our personal information along with it. So, here we go with Mr. Polito.

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Related articles:

Big Tech Has Your Private Medical Records -- Through Hospital Partnerships   

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson 0:00
Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I don't know if you've seen them yet. But I've got a couple of Facebook Lives up on my page. You can go there just from my website, Craig Peterson dot com slash Facebook. But you can find me if you poke around a little bit. And I have been kind of explaining some of the technology that business people small business people need to know and be aware of and understand. So check those out if you haven't already. And shout out to everybody. I had a few people comment. Basically, they listened to all of my podcasts from last week, which amounted to more than two hours uninterrupted. And that was a lot of Craig. Hey, I appreciate you guys listening and subscribing. It does get the word out which is really good. We are building momentum again on the podcast over 100,000 here recently sold that's all downloads. That's all really really good and I appreciate you guys, buddy. up with me and asking questions too. That's how I get a lot of the source materials as I kind of explain the latest in technology, and more particularly some of the latest in the security realm as well. This morning I was on with Mr. Polito. He'd been talking a lot about recycling and recycled bags and stuff because the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is right now considering legislation that would black ban all plastic bags throughout the state. And of course, they're not really considering implications. But we got into Google and they are now using a vacuum truck to grab all of our medical records and our personal information along with it. So that's what we chatted about this morning.

Jim Polito 1:52
Here we go. This man is incredible. Incredible. Hey, who was A guy who said the next frontier of cyber hacking and everything else you have to worry about is your record your healthcare record, Craig Peterson said in our tech talk crew, and he joins us now. Good morning, Craig.

Craig Peterson 2:16
Hey, good morning, Jim. You know, if people are worried about recycling plastic bags, when you walk into any Target, WalMart, almost any of these big-box retailers right inside, there is a recycle box that you can put your plastic bags into. Yeah, problem solved. 

Jim Polito 2:37
Yeah. It's everybody being responsible. And it's not our fault that the oceans are filled with that stuff. But anyway, let's get on to the Google monster and something that you are the first really to sound the alarm on quite a while ago. It was Hey, the new frontier is not going to be your financial record. It's going to be your healthcare record. We find out that the folks, the good folks at Google are swallowing up our, our information. Should I be worried, Craig Peterson?

Craig Peterson 3:16
Yeah, here's the thing that you know, we talked about it in January 2018. I remember it well, years ago for the Wayback Machine. It is it is. And it was because our medical records are so valuable. And I was saying back then actually kind of late 2017 that really our medical records are going to be the next frontier of the bad guy stealing them you remember, of course, these HIPAA regulations went in place 30 years ago now. And the main idea behind them was that hey, your records gonna be portable gym when you do your Snowbird emulation and end up in Florida for two weeks. middle of winter and you have to see a doctor, the doctor down there would be able to look at your electronic medical records from up here in Worcester, right. That's the whole idea. Listen,

Jim Polito 4:12
I think that's great portability of a medical record, controls, costs, improves quality of healthcare, all of that. I'm on board for that.

Craig Peterson 4:23
But, the other side of this was before HIPAA regulations went into place if someone was to share your medical records with someone else, did not have a direct interest, like another doctor. It was illegal, they could get into trouble you could sue them for privacy violations. But HIPAA made it possible for medical companies, doctors, everybody else, to share your records in an unfettered way. While it's all For instance, if I wanted to look at every record that UMass has every medical record or you know, you name a hospital, and I'm in collusion with that hospital, I could just easily say, Hey, listen, I'm thinking about buying you guys. I want to see the medical records of every patient you've had. And they could give them to me. Yeah. Now, here's what's happening. With our friends at Google. We've got something called Project Nightingale. You might remember that woman from a little while back, I think was her first name was Florence.

Jim Polito5:34
A wonderful lady.

Unknown Speaker 5:37
Exactly. She helped so many men and women and just saved lives. So, Google has Project Nightingale underway now. And Google has partnered with and this is the part I'm having a little bit of a hard time swallowing. They're partnering with a group called Ascension which is a big health care conglomerate really but company here in the United States. And this is the part that I just don't understand here, Ascension is a Catholic nonprofit health system includes  34,000 providers 2600 hospitals, doctors' offices, other facilities. 21 states plus the District of Columbia. Google and Ascension have partnered and Ascension has apparently without even notification to the patient, has apparently shared these medical records that they have with our friends at Google. The Wall Street Journal has a report out there saying that this information contains patient names birth dates, a complete medical records, as well and according to the Wall Street Journal, what's been happening here is that Ascension has not only fed them data that they already had about all of these patients. But when you go in and you're checking in all of that information, when you are sitting there upfront is being fed directly into Google. When the doctors are evaluating their case, it's being sent directly to Google, as well. It's all under the HIPAA regulations, which many people think somehow provides them with more privacy. But certainly, in this case, and in many others, has taken away not only your privacy, but you're rights, and the need to even notify you. So, this is very concerning. And Google is saying, Hey, listen, it's only 150 of our employees that get to see this. Show me your diagnosis, laboratory test results and hospitalization records. You know, don't worry about it. What could go wrong here?

Jim Polito 8:02
I'd love that. That's always the line. I think they said that on the Hindenburg. What could go wrong here? It's just hydrogen.

Craig Peterson 8:09
What could go wrong? It's just a small, small coal fire in the hold of our Titanic ship.

Jim Polito 8:18
Big deal, knock it off. Don't be such a worrier.

Craig Peterson 8:22
Right? Exactly. So this is 10s of millions of Americans that are affected by this. And what they're trying to do. What this project is trying to do is to make it so that they get better diagnoses, better outcomes, ultimately, because all those information is being sucked up by Google's been analyzed and apparently. The doctors are unaware of this happening in these Catholic and other hospitals. But Google is providing them these doctors with some recommendations about treatments and diagnoses as well.

Jim Polito 9:00
Okay, well wait a minute. We're talking with our good friend Craig Peterson. And you probably heard in the news about Google and this foray into medical records. All right. Look, I know someone whose son is working on a research project, and it's in relation to breast cancer. And it involves a giant cloud calculation of putting in data of all of these different people who had breast cancer diagnosed with breast cancer. And, and the mission is to find out something that was common at the time of diagnosis and what was different prior to diagnosis. Basically, what they're looking for is what was the switch that was thrown that started this cancer, okay, so then massive amounts of data, and I get that. But that data is all protected from matching it up with an individual. I mean, many of these individuals could be dead. This is a massive amount of data. I get that, Craig, but I'm worried about. And I don't have a problem with Google and other big, big firms working on this. What I do have a problem with is, how do I know this is protected? How do I know this isn't going to be used against me?

Craig Peterson 10:35
Well, one only needs to look at the NIH to get an answer to that question. Of course, you know what that is?

Jim Polito 10:43
Yeah, is that in Canada.

Craig Peterson 10:44 
No. That's The National Health Service over in the United Kingdom, okay. Yeah, and this is socialized medicine. And in all of these countries, they have death panels, and they're trying to Figure out, is it worth spending any money on this patient? Basically, if you're under 10 years old or over 50 years old, the answer to that question is no. But here's what they've done over in the UK. They have taken this type of data now. And they're using computers to determine whether or not they should just let you die. Literally, let you die. Yeah, if they should treat you at all. That's where this ultimately leads. I love the idea of, you know, having this robust data set, improving outcomes, reducing costs, saving lives, that's what they really want to do. That's why the Catholic Church and ascension got into this. Ultimately, this is for the good. But Jim, this is another example of the government telling us that HIPAA is going to make our information more private, safer, and is done the exact opposite. None of these things People had to opt-in. None of these people were even notified that it was happening, let alone a chance to opt-out of it. Okay. And that's where some of the problems come in. And when you're talking about this massive amount of data, you talked about the anonymizing that happened, yeah. So you can identify an individual in this case, obviously they could, because thinking the names and addresses, but even with anonymized data, where all they have is a number associated with the record and no other information like your name or address, it's been proven again and again, that it can be D anonymize very, very easily in most cases. So we'll see what happens. But the President of Google Cloud came out with a statement and, and you know, bless these guys, they're trying to do the right thing. But Google just you know, this whole deal to buy bit fit. We're now giving our instant cardiac readings on Exercise readings are sleep readings, everything else to Google Now. And it is starting to show up in our employment records and in and in the socialized medicine component countries. It's helping to decide whether or not they're going to treat you. Not just how to treat you.

Jim Polito 13:19
All right, Craig, this is great information. I know you have a lot of other stuff, but I wanted to focus on this. I know that if folks text My name to this number, they can get that information.

Craig Peterson 13:34
855-385-5553 I'll send a link out to this article today. But txt to 855-385-5553

Jim Polito 13:19
Standard data and text rates apply. And Craig Peterson will not annoy you. He'll get you this information. And other great stuff. Craig, thank you so much. It was very helpful and we will talk to you next week.

Craig Peterson 13:58
Thanks again, Jim.

Jim Polito 13:19
Right. When we return something incredible.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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