Alphabet seeks 10,000 volunteers — and their health data — for a massive medical study
Alphabet’s Google division is, fundamentally, in the business of selling data. That is a useful thing to keep in mind when Alphabet’s Verily comes calling for your medical data. But Google is also inarguably useful; this is why, despite knowing that my every move is being tracked by the company, I still make use of Google search, Gmail, and Google Docs, among its other myriad services. Verily’s Project Baseline is, in some sense, the health equivalent of those kinds of services — it has the potential to greatly expand our knowledge about what human health looks like. Not incidentally, the project will be of service to Verily as well.
In 2014,…
