Google Trends Predict Flu Outbreaks!
Google has revealed that the company’s search frequency service, Google Trends, can detect flu outbreaks up to two weeks faster than traditional surveillance methods.
For those who have never heard of Google Trends, this is a free facility that allows people to view search trends by keywords or phrases.
Each week millions of people use the Google search Engine to look for specific information, and each of these searches are stored, including the location the search took place; Google is then able to build information on specific trends and their geographical location.
In the case of Flu Trends, Google does this by by processing the search results for specific keywords (in this case flu and flu related words), and then comparing those to the data provided by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Google explains this:
We’ve found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems.
This has raised serious privacy concerns with both the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Patient Privacy Rights groups contacting Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt by letter to raise these serious issues and challenge Google to publish the techniques that have been developed to protect the privacy of these search queries used for Flu Trends.
The letter raises the concern:
The question is how to ensure that Google Flu Trends and similar techniques will only produce aggregate data and will not open the door to user-specific investigations, which could be compelled, even over Google’s objection, by court order or Presidential authority.
However Google has already posted comments on the privacy of this information by saying:
At Google, we are keenly aware of the trust our users place in us, and of our responsibility to protect their privacy. Google Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week.
This is not the first time concerns have been raised about the privacy issues of the collection and storage of information by the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
All of these companies retain logs of the searches conducted for various periods of time and this information includes the IP address of the computer used for the search and a cookie associated with that computer. These logs could potentially be misused by the companies, over two years ago the New York times showed just how his could be used by the article A face is Exposed for AOL Searcher No 4417749.
So is the point Google is making that we can use this data for good?, or should Google not keep this amount of data at all?
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