Legal Commentary

Google Flu Trends privacy concerns

By David Canton

Google recenty announced that they would use search requests to plot flu trends.  They claim they can show flu trends 2 weeks faster than traditional methods.  The trend data is anonymized so no one looking at the trends knows, for example, that I might have been one of the individuals who searched for “flu remedies”.

So where is the privacy issue?  Privacy is often about the details.  Critics say that the anonymization methods used by Google don’t go far enough, and that it is possible to put the details back together and actually identify the individuals. 

Striking the proper balance between usable data and privacy is an ongoing struggle.  Opinions on where the balance should lie vary greatly.   Factors include how long individual data should be kept, the purpose of the data, how sensitive it is, and what should be done to strip away the identity of individuals.  

For more detail about the privacy issues around Google Flu Trends, take a look at the article in this EPIC Alert.

Full post as published by eLegal Canton on November 21, 2008 (boomark / email).