According to information provided by the companies, the contact began when Edouard Bonlieu, VP for marketing strategy at French hosting provider Scaleway, reached out to Packet CEO, Zac Smith about an information sharing arrangement.
One recent example of a private sector tech company becoming embroiled in a UK public sector data ethics scandal culminated, last summer, with the ICO sanctioning a London NHS Trust that had signed an information sharing arrangement with Google DeepMind — after the watchdog judged the pair's 2015 data-sharing arrangement to have breached domestic privacy law.
In its statement, the NSA said: "We are not going to comment on any specific information sharing arrangements, or the authority under which any such information is collected.
The agreement will see the two governments adopt new tax information sharing arrangements, under which they will automatically exchange information on tax residents on an annual basis.
The agreement will see the two governments adopt new enhanced reciprocal tax information sharing arrangements, under which they will automatically exchange information on tax residents on an annual basis.
"While we do not usually comment on information sharing arrangements with international law enforcement organisations we want to emphasise that, having received fresh assurances, we are now working closely with our key partners around the world including all those in the 'Five Eyes' intelligence alliance," National Counter Terrorism Policing Lead Mark Rowley said in a statement.
More broadly, it claims there's no difference in the structure of the information-sharing arrangement it has versus other third-party healthcare system providers to the NHS, such as Cerner.
John Bellinger, the US State Department's Legal Adviser, claimed that public disclosure of the documents was "likely to result in serious damage to US national security and could harm existing intelligence information-sharing arrangements between our two governments".
The information-sharing arrangement remains under investigation by U.K. data protection watchdogs.
The Google-owned U.K. AI company began its push into digital healthcare services in 2015, quietly signing an information-sharing arrangement with a London-based NHS Trust that gave it access to around 1.6 million people's medical records for developing an alerts app for a condition called Acute Kidney Injury.
However since the proposed study was to be conducted purely on a database of patient data, rather than at any NHS locations, and given that the Royal Free already had an information-sharing arrangement inked in place with DeepMind, it's not clear exactly what additional external approvals they were awaiting.
