what really excites me about this sort of initiative is the scientific possibilities that this data in anonymized form can provide. With aggregates of this data containing all recorded dimensions (age, location, race, family history, weight, nationality, diet, etc. etc.) instead of having to perform decade long studies scientists could potentially test out hypothesis in seconds by running queries against an existing database. IMO this could quite possibly be the most important thing we could do to accelerate scientific understanding of the causes of illness.

is don't post valleywag garbage without fact checking.

This is a non-story.

Is: "Google gives employees 400$ google phone for christmas instead of 1000$ cash bonus",interesting at all?

I think the reason that Google wants to purchase DoubleClick is because DoubleClick is more pervasive than Google in the display advertising market. Theoretically though, if they were to start targeting doubleclick ads using page content the same way they do with adwords then ads would likely become more relevant. Are they really so irrelevant now? They aren't for me, overall relevancy is way higher than through other mediums. I do have the same negative opinion of marketing. Advertising is probably not the correct way to go about funding information distribution.