SEOGoogle Tracking Health Searches For Disease Mapping!

Google Tracking Health Searches For Disease Mapping!

The BBC reported that Google tracks people’s searches for disease information and is mapping them to find trends. While this may work as a way to gather insights in to where diseases are occurring, there is a big question on the privacy issues involved.

“Type in a search for flu in Google and you will not only find out how sick you are but your data will also be recorded on its flu monitoring service,” the BBC reported.

“By gathering aggregate data from millions of people or by scouring the web for online news reports, blogs and chat room postings, these programs are considered to be excellent indicators of disease levels across the globe.

“We’ve found what people search for are actually very good indicators of influenza in a population,” Google Flu Trends spokeswoman Corrie Conrad told BBC World Service’s Digital Planet”

Apparently this is not just limited to Google, though other researchers use searches of online news sites to gather information.

“We’re essentially a web crawling tool very similar to Google in that we’re scouring the web through tens of thousands of websites, every hour looking for specific clues about infectious diseases,” explains HealthMap co-founder John Brownstein.

Guess if you want to get a city quarantined you could just roll in with a few people and start doing searches for Black Plague symptoms. What about adding some freelance articles for the local websites about disease outbreaks and panic or how to mass treat a disease. Do it from a computer in the local hospital and could the CDC trucks come rolling in?

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