- Five senators have sent letters to Google and the White House raising privacy concerns over the new screening website run by Google that Donald Trump announced Friday.
- Trump initially announced that Google was building a website to coordinate nationwide screenings for coronavirus.
- Google later clarified that Verily, a subsidiary, was making a screening site for counties surrounding San Francisco, which it hopes to eventually scale nationwide.
- The lawmakers are seeking more information about how people's health information will be shared between Google and the government, citing violations of potential health laws.
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Five Democratic senators are seeking answers about the privacy of people who use Google's new site for coordinating coronavirus screenings that President Donald Trump announced Friday.
In letters send on Wednesday to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Vice President Mike Pence, the lawmakers highlight privacy concerns that could stem from the site, arguing that people who use the site could put their health data at risk of being exposed in a breach or shared in violation of privacy laws.
Trump initially announced on Friday that Google would build a website to coordinate coronavirus screenings across the US, set to launch this week. Google later tempered those claims, clarifying that the site - run by its subsidiary Verily - is currently only active for residents of counties surrounding San Francisco, but that it hopes to eventually scale up to become available to all Americans.
Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat and author of the letter, wrote that the White House and Google should clarify whether people using the website will have to waive privacy rights that prevent third-party companies from viewing their health information, and whether the site would ever sell user data to other companies.
Menendez and the letter's other authors also raised concerns about whether health data stored by Verily could be subject to a breach.
"We are concerned that neither the Administration nor Google has fully contemplated the range of threats to Americans' personally identifiable information," they wrote.
Representatives for Google and Verily did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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