Posted in War on Privacy

Google shuts down Google Health

But don’t think that means Google isn’t interested in people’s medical records:

Now, with a few years of experience, we’ve observed that Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would. There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people. That’s why we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue the Google Health service. We’ll continue to operate the Google Health site as usual through January 1, 2012, and we’ll provide an ongoing way for people to download their health data for an additional year beyond that, through January 1, 2013. Any data that remains in Google Health after that point will be permanently deleted.

Translation: We couldn’t convince the masses to trust us with their sensitive medical records, so we’re done with this approach. When we figure out a better way to mine medical information, we’ll be back with a new offering.