Google Scares Us
November 11, 2008
This is scary stuff. honestly truly scary. Beware of what you search. Evidently Google can now play God.
SICK SURVEILLANCE: GOOGLE REPORTS FLU SEARCHES, LOCATIONS TO FEDS
Tue Nov 11 2008 15:34:50 ETGOOGLE 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!
GOOGLE, continuing to work closely with government, claims it would keep individual user data confidential: “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.”
Engineers will capture keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and others.
Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at CDC: “One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data. The data are really, really timely. They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used… as early warning signal for flu activity.”
Thomas Malone, professor at M.I.T.: “I think we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with collective intelligence.”
Eric Schmidt, GOOGLE’s chief executive vows: “From a technological perspective, it is the beginning.”
Comments
View Comments to “Google Scares Us”
Got something to say?
Recognized by Advertising Age Magazine as top Power 150 news outlet for Advertising and Marketing.
Recognized and listed in Google News. Don't stress, we're Satire
Ad Agency Advertising
Hardly scary. This kind of “collective intelligence” can only help, keeping the CDC one step ahead of flu outbreaks.
What’s really scary is the new administration’s call to Eric Schmidt to join them in an advisory role. That should scare the pants off of Microsoft and Yahoo.
I have to disagree with you Paul… the level of information Google has access to can be used for great good, or great evil.
Evil becomes successful only when someone says “it’s just business”.
As long as anonymity is built into the equation with watchful oversight and scutiny, I think we can live with the good that is rendered.
I am not a fan of Google-esque domination but do believe that their forecasting based on anonymous search queries can make the collective “us” smarter.