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Federated learning is not a cure-all for data ethics

Although federated learning is often seen as a promising solution to allow AI innovation while addressing privacy concerns, we argue that this technology does not fix all underlying data ethics concerns. Benefiting from federated learning in digital health requires acknowledgement of its limitations.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Ibberson for his insightful thoughts and valuable feedback to the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Marieke Bak.

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Nature Machine Intelligence thanks Umit Topaloglu, Kristin Kostick-Quenet and Sascha Rank for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Bak, M., Madai, V.I., Celi, L.A. et al. Federated learning is not a cure-all for data ethics. Nat Mach Intell 6, 370–372 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-024-00813-x

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