His Google searches may have given him away. Photo: CC/Daniel Horacio Agostini
Prepare to be reading a hell of a lot about “infoveillance” and “infodemiology,” and for the major news outlets to continue making nice to Google.
That’s because the biggest “infodemiology” experiment to-date is about to take place, now that we are at the end of flu shot season.
Thanks to a new Google product, Google Flu Trends federal watchers will track Americans’ illnesses this winter, based upon the search engine terms they use.
Any flu-stricken sap searching Google for a cure will find himself under the microscope.
Where people bang out searches for “sniffles” or “flu,” an outbreak might be seen by the feds as taking hold in that community.
Several searches from a single street for “hacking” and “high fever” might trigger a quarantine.
Google is making the usual assurances that the data will be aggregated, anonymized, etc…
But I know of no regulatory body authorized to march into Google’s offices, to insure the company scrubbing anyone’s personally identifiable information.
I can see why the CDC would covet such data: it will give epidemiologists specifics (in addition to hospital admissions data) on the course of an outbreak.
Such a project will also show the feds which communities haven’t gotten the “everyone must get a fllu shot” memo.
See the New York Times report.
I am currently in a mild state of shock. A couple of years ago – when Google.org was just created and Larry Brilliant was appointed CEO of Google.org, I sent him a preprint of my research on the correlation of searches on Google and Flu symptoms (published in 2006 here: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1839505). My hope was that a visionary guy like Larry would be open to a collaboration to explore my idea, the correlation between Internet searches and disease outbreaks (most notably influenza).
I was also hoping that Google.org would perhaps be open to fund this project, or to share data.
What I did not expect is that they just go ahead and do what I proposed themselves, without ever getting back to me!
Today the NYT reported that Google.org has — mmh, let’s say “adopted” my idea, without giving any credits to its origin.
In the past 12 hours, at least half a dozen people who know about my infodemiology work have emailed me and asked “Hey, isn’t this what you were doing, why aren’t you on that paper?”.
The NYT even goes so far to (wrongly) report that “Google Flu Trends appears to be the first public project that uses the powerful database of a search engine to track the emergence of a disease.”. Wrong – apparently this reporter didn’t do his homework or checked the published literature. In fact, I started doing this line of research four years ago – in 2004, and talked about this on various conferences (e.g. at AMIA, in 2006 – where my paper “Infodemiology: Tracking Flu-Related Searches on the Web for Syndromic Surveillance” won the Distinguished Paper Award, and in 2007, on a joint panel organized by John Brownstein from Healthmap.
Healthmap by the way just got a few millions from Google.org, and apparently – according to the NYT article – managed to get a paper accepted in Nature.
Google.org obviously has every right to use and publish their data, and perhaps it is a case of “great minds think alike” (though I have not seen any presentation or publication from them which precedes mine), but I wonder how outside researchers who submit proposals and suggestions to Google.org they can be certain that they don’t just steal the ideas? Google.org has not the structure and level of accountability as traditional funding agencies or charities – in fact, it is set up as a company.
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The following is my slidedeck of my “infodemiology” and “infoveillancve” experiments, which I have been conducting since 2004. The slides were presented at various AMIA meetings, at the CDC, at a NCI/NSF workshop, and in other places. For the record: The terms infodemiology and infoveillance were created by me!
Eysenbach: Infodemiology and InfoveillanceView SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: medicine health)
Nice work on the “Surveillance State” Gunther.
Way to go. Looks like Google burned you too. Better check your contract.