Yesterday, Google launched their newest prod­uct, Google Health, a web-based tool that lets you track your med­ical con­di­tions, his­tory and med­ica­tions all in one place. Some med­ical providers can even con­nect to Google Health, so you can import your com­plete health his­tory as eas­ily as you can invite all of your MSN con­tacts to sign up for Gmail.

Scary, right? Of course Google promises that they will keep your infor­ma­tion “safe and secure,” but safe and secure from whom? The pri­vacy pol­icy men­tions that they will use your per­sonal health data in ways not clearly defined:

Google will use aggre­gate data to pub­lish trend sta­tis­tics and asso­ci­a­tions. For exam­ple, Google might pub­lish trend data sim­i­lar to what is pub­lished in Google Trends.

They might. Or they might not. This vague “pol­icy” doesn’t inspire con­fi­dence. But it gets worse:

None of this data can be used to per­son­ally iden­tify an individual.

We know this isn’t true, as we’ve already seen how osten­si­bly anonymized data can be used, with some detec­tive work, to reveal iden­ti­ties. And if no one has ever cap­tured and pub­lished this par­tic­u­lar data before, how can we be cer­tain that indi­vid­u­als can’t be iden­ti­fied with it? More impor­tantly, does lump­ing my infor­ma­tion in with oth­ers’ and then pub­lish­ing it on the web qual­ify as keep­ing my health records “safe and secure”? Obviously, Google and I dis­agree on this point. But we have already tran­si­tioned into a world where Gmail mines our emails, and Mint mon­i­tors our per­sonal finances, so why not do the same with med­ical records?

An effi­cient, secure tool for man­ag­ing one’s own health infor­ma­tion would be an enor­mous asset. I just don’t think that a web-based, hosted solu­tion is in the individual’s best inter­est. Convenience doesn’t always have to come at the expense of relin­quish­ing con­trol of our pri­vate data.

Also see: NY Times story