November 2019, the Office for Civil Rights of the United States Department of Health and Human Services began investigation into Project Nightingale, to assess whether the "mass collection of individuals’ medical records" complied with HIPAA. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google secretively began the project in 2018, with St. Louis-based healthcare company Ascension. 2022 In a 2022 National Labor Relations Board ruling, court documents suggested that Google sponsored a secretive project -- Project Vivian to counsel its employees and to discourage them from forming unions. Racially-targeted surveillance Google has aided controversial governments in mass surveillance projects, sharing with police and military the identities of those protesting racial injustice. In 2020, they shared with the FBI information collected from all Android users at a Black Lives Matter protest in Seattle, including those who had opted out of location data collection. Google is also part of Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion deal in which the technology companies Google and Amazon will provide Israel and its military with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other cloud computing services, including building local cloud sites that will "keep information within Israel's borders under strict security guidelines." The contract has been criticized by shareholders as well as their employees over concerns that the project will lead to further abuses of Palestinians' human rights in the context of the ongoing illegal occupation and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Ariel Koren, a former marketing manager for Google's educational products and an outspoken critic of the project, wrote that Google "systematically silences Palestinian, Jewish, Arab and Muslim voices concerned about Google's complicity in violations of Palestinian human rights—to the point of formally retaliating against workers and creating an environment of fear," reflecting her view that the ultimatum came in retaliation for her opposition to and organization against the project. Anti-trust, privacy, and other litigation Fines and lawsuits European Union On June 27, 2017, the company received a record fine of from the European Union for "promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of search results." On July 18, 2018, the European Commission fined Google €4.34 billion for breaching EU antitrust rules. The abuse of dominant position has been referred to Google's constraint applied to Android device manufacturers and network operators to ensure that traffic on Android devices goes to the Google search engine. On October 9, 2018, Google confirmed that it had appealed the fine to the General Court