The Googlization of health research: from disruptive innovation to disruptive ethics

摘要: Consumer-oriented mobile technologies offer new ways of capturing multidimensional health data, and are increasingly seen as facilitators medical research. This has opened the way for large consumer tech companies, like Apple, Google, Amazon Facebook, to enter space research, offering methods collecting, storing analyzing data. While these developments often portrayed ‘disrupting’ research in beneficial ways, they also raise many ethical issues. These can be organized into three clusters: questions concerning quality research; privacy/informed consent; power asymmetries based on access data control over technological infrastructures. I argue that this last cluster, insofar it may affect future agendas, deserves more critical attention.