More than 90 percent of Americans would refuse to share their health data with digital platforms for free, according to a survey administered in the wake of the reveal of Google and St. Louis-based Ascension's "Project Nightingale."
The annual Financial Trust Index Survey, conducted in December by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Evanston, Ill.-based Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, asked more than 1,000 Americans about the circumstances under which they would agree to share health data for a hypothetical Facebook health project, according to a Booth blog post.
When asked whether they would share their data with the project for free, over 93 percent of respondents said no. Even when the possibility of financial compensation was added to the equation, 88 percent of those surveyed still said they would not share their data; less than 10 percent said they would willingly share the information in exchange for money.
Their asking prices are high: Half of those surveyed said they would only provide their data to the hypothetical project for $100,000 or more. Another 22 percent set their prices between $1,000 and $100,000.
As the blog post notes, if a health data-collecting initiative such as Project Nightingale had heeded the majority of patients' wishes and paid out $100,000 for each data use, Google would have had to pay $5 trillion for the 50 million patient records to which it reportedly has access — all but eliminating big tech companies' ability to profit off the healthcare industry.
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