Following Google Inc.’s announcement of a pilot project, which will store medical records of a few thousand people who are patients of a Cleveland clinic, some privacy advocates wonder whether hackers will be able to access the Google medical records or whether the company will use them commercially.

A number of 1,500 to 10,000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic volunteered to give their personal health records up to be electronically transferred so they can be retrieved through Google’s new experimental service.

“We believe patients should be able to easily access and manage their own health information,” said Marissa Mayer, the Google executive overseeing the health project, quoted by the Associated Press at the time.

Google’s service has drawn the fire of privacy watchdog groups even before the announcement became public. These groups believe that Google already knows too much about the interests and habits of its users as its computer log their requests and store their e-mail discussions.

Though Google announced that the program would not be available to the public and would be protected by a password, privacy advocates question whether Google can ensure that only patients will access their own records.

"The concern is we have the movement of data out of the health-care sector [the Cleveland Clinic] to a noncovered entity [Google]," Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a San Diego non-for-profit public interest research group said, according to the Seattle Times.

She expressed her concerns over the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which governs medical privacy, but which might not cover information stored on Google.

As for the other concern regarding Google’s possibility to use the information commercially, Google Representative Gabriel Stricker wanted to underline that Google would not share nor would sell users’ information.