Google has made a very important announcement about its drive to preserve the privacy of its users. Searching for medical records of private citizens will henceforth yield no results. This will have far reaching positive results on the financial and social position of a person, whose medical records so far may have been available through special searches into hospital, clinical and government records.
In the western world, preservation of all medical data of a patient is mandatory for doctors and hospitals and that is what drives a major portion of the Indian BPO business.
Now Google has announced that it has updated its content guidelines to specifically exclude personal medical records from its search results pages.
Google has been open, so far, about controlling content indexing and this is in accordance to laws in several open countries around the world. However, now medical records of private citizens would be added to a small list of banned categories that are actively removed from search by Google.
Bloomberg revealed this updated Google support document. The company’s “Removal Policies” page now lists “confidential, personal medical records of private people” under the “information we may remove” section. Other data it generally removes include bank account and credit card numbers and sexually explicit personal images.
For a long time, Google only actively removed financial details and personal identification numbers. It only added the revenge porn guidelines in 2015 after coming under attack from the media and users. This makes the new ban on medical records significant, indicating the company is again relenting on the level of personal information it thinks can live online.
—India Legal Bureau