Regulators and lawmakers are already unimpressed. New York State regulators said they would investigate the potentially discriminatory algorithm used by Apple Card. Libra has come under immense criticism from all sides because people don’t trust it. And Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, already said of Google’s banking effort to CNBC: “There ought to be very strict scrutiny.”

But there’s another question here: Do people even want to use Big Tech to bank? There’s a lot of inertia in the world of personal finance, and persuading people to switch from their bank to Apple or Google or Facebook will require features with genuine utility, or higher interest rates, or something else stellar. Fear about financial data privacy is probably a concern for consumers, too. In other words, it’s a high bar.

Hunger for Health Data

News surfaced that a partnership between Google and the hospital provider Ascension could allow the data of the health care company’s patients — 50 million in total — to be uploaded to Google’s cloud-computing platform. Without patients or doctors being notified, some of that data, including names, dates of birth, lab tests and diagnoses, were already being uploaded.

Ascension said it was exploring “machine-learning applications that will have the potential to support improvements in clinical quality” through the deal. Google said it would provide “tools that Ascension could use to support improvements in clinical quality and patient safety.”

This may all be totally O.K. It’s perfectly legal for health care providers to share patients’ medical information with business partners like electronic medical record companies. Still, the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services plans to seek more information about whether it complies with the law anyway.

Nonetheless, many people found it unnerving. That’s probably because of Google’s motivations: According to The Wall Street Journal, Google hasn’t charged Ascension for the work because it hopes to develop systems based on what it learns. It would eventually sell those systems to other health care providers.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with that. But it comes off as a little tone deaf to slurp up data as intimate as health care records without informing patients, at a time when data privacy concerns are more heightened than ever.