Google Flu Trends: Invading Privacy to Help Our Country! I saw this post at DrudgeReport.

From Drudge:

GOOGLE will launch a new tool that will help federal officials "track sickness".

"Flu Trends" uses search terms that people put into the web giant to figure out where influenza is heating up, and will notify the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time!

From Google.org:

Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. But can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and discovered that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.

During the 2007-2008 flu season, an early version of Google Flu Trends was used to share results each week with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC. Across each of the nine surveillance regions of the United States, we were able to accurately estimate current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports.

I actually don't know where I stand on this issue--I'm a big fan of online privacy. I'm also a big fan of Google (which would seem hypocritical of me being a fan of online privacy.) But, and this is a big but--if they put their powers to good use, maybe we as a whole will benefit...or it will lead to our demise. Either which way I'm excited about the technology.

Labels: culture, google

  ¶ posted by Rocco Mandaglio, Staff Writer @ 11/11/2008 05:45:00 PM