Google Surveillance™
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- ukit
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!
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."
- jevad0
Why did one of the scenes from 12 Monkeys pop into my head after reading that...
- BattleAxe0
is this similar to GOOGLE TGIRL TRENDS
- KwesiJ0
awesome
- BattleAxe0
google is getting annoying now
- dearhead0
i dig this. seems smart.
obviously a slippery slope, blah blah blah, but its a pretty dope use of the information & technology if used appropriately and handled morally.
- sublocked0
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
- jamble0
I don't have any problem with it if it's using anonymous data to create trends but I find it hard to believe that's really the case.
- rafalski0
Did you know the very same Eric Schmidt was among this (and last) year's Bilderberg Group meeting attendees?
*looks out for helicopters
- BaskerviIle0
I just searched flu symptoms even though I'm feeling fine today, just to mess with their data
- automate that bouncing it through various worldwide proxies and then you're onto somethingsublocked