Google Health: Now in possession of 100% of your personal data

Last thursday, Google launched it’s new service. Google Health.

It has been pretty quiet around Google and it’s health related service for years. I think it was announced some 1-2 years ago and after that announcement, everyone kept quiet about this service. Until thursday when Google launched the service for US public use.

Personally, I had forgot about this service. I seriosly never thought Google would launch such a big personal data gathering service. And seriously, even as advertiser: This is just too much for me to ignore.

Google claims that with the help of its Health service you can communicate better with your doc and just keep a better eye on your state of health. While this may be true for some people that just rely on many, many pills and drugs, for most of us a service like that is just not suitable.

Lets just list up some of the things you can tell Google Health about your personal data yourself

• Notices
• Drug interactions
• Age, sex, height…
• Conditions
• Allergies
• Procedures (!!!)
• Test results (!!!)
• etc.

Well. I seriously don’t want to know how much some spammers would be willing to pay for a single pack of such accurate and targetted data.

I’m not saying Google would sell your data to spammers. No, lol, I really doubt they are selling anything to spammers.

My guess is, that pretty soon, Google will be using this data for much, much better ad-targeting.

Adding the data Google gathers by Google Health users to it’s ad-delivery algorithm, big uncle G wouldn’t even have to ask the advertiser what his preferable demographic would be.

Just some reasons to boycott this service:

Reason 1:

Lets just say you are an advertiser and you want to sell ringtones. So obviously you will think about some ringtone-related keywords to promote on and put them up on Google AdWords

Google could show your ads to the appropriate public by just knowing that the person searching for “Jay Z Ringtones” or browsing a celeb-related blog is between 16-20 years old.

Try getting some 40yr old guy signing up to your ringtone scam subscription service and you will know why this is such a precious information.

Reason 2:

By using Google Health, Google will know most things everything about your medication. In fact, most online pill stores would pay huge sums for such “nice” data. Or lets just say: They would advertise even more on AdWords and they would pay even more for those sweet, highly targeted clicks. Uncle G wins, yay!

Reason 3:

Oh, did I mention that you can just check if you are obese or not by just calculating your BMI? If you already have told Google Health your height and your weight, Google will be able to calculate that.

Well, so your BMI is too high, huh?

Why not try some non-prescription weight-loss pills, for Free *** !?

Bonus reason 4:

Get your Google-Account stolen. Get all your medical record stolen

This is just too funny. If you forget to log off on a public terminal, you usually will stay logged on with your Google Account for some time.

The problem is: You won’t only expose all your email, apointments, ad earnings and advertising costs to the public. You will also expose every single detail of your medical record to the public.

Wow, what a great feature!

As an advertiser, I guess I’m looking forward for some nice data to spend on. As an european who cares about data-securty. I’m scared. And remember: Those are just 4 simple reasons not to use Google Health.

Now, I know that most americans do care less about their private data than europeans do. But seriously, not one single guy I know would want Google to know everything about their life.