I wrote about Google Flu Trends the other day. Yesterday, I came across this article discussing if there is a privacy risk with Google Flu Trends, and made a note that I was going to comment on the article. Lauren Weinstein has written a pretty good commentary on the article and I pretty much agree with what he has written.
Google Flu Trends is a result of taking individual personal data and aggregating it. This has the advantage of anonmizing the data as well as providing another tool in the toolbox of mechanisms to track flu outbreaks. This trending could be applied to many other concepts with similar results. I and others like me have done this type of analysis for our clients years now. While I applaude people that monitor privacy violations, attaching privacy violations to this data is incorrect. Privacy should be attached to the methods that Google and others use to track and store data. Associating IP addresses to search terms and unique cookies and keeping that data for extended periods of time as one example. Google and other search sites along with social sites such as Facebook all track detailed data. Facebook for example tracks every profile you look at including date and time, by IP and unique ID. This data can be obtained by interested parties. This is where privacy advocates should be focused.
