Archive for the ‘privacy’ Category
What do you think of Google Flu Trends?
I’ll admit it, I’m sucker for Google products – Reader, Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Chrome and I know on some level the dangers of that. I have lots of bookmarks in delicious about it. This morning while I was watching the news I heard mention of something new – Google Flu Trends. According the the site:
We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and discovered that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.
I’m not certain why this disturbs me, I think I want to know how Google knows where I am when I search. If I go into a computer in my library and do a Goolge search for Flu how do they know I’m in Jefferson City? How? I looked in the FAQ and How Does This Work section and don’t see it. I’m sure someone will leave a comment and let me know. But I’m not sure that will make my unease go away. Think of everything else they *could* track.
Read more:
I’m not narcisitic, you’re eavesdropping
In many of the articles I read about the Social Web, especially Twitter, the author laments that they don’t care that I had a peanut butter and banana sandwich for lunch, or what I thought of the latest American Idol. I’ve long felt that these writers are missing the point and this week I came across two sources that articulate this better than I could have.
The first is Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody, he makes the point that with new advances in technology people mistake broadcasting media (1 to many) for communications media (1to 1). New tools allow people to use broadcasting media for communication. He gives this example – if you read a blog of someone you don’t know and see that they got wasted last night and today when shopping for clothes you think what’s the point? Who cares? Yet if you went to a food court in a mall and eavesdropped on the same conversation it would be clear that you are the weird one. We’re so used to the old web that we think if we can read it, it’s targeted towards us and with the new Social Web this just don’t hold true anymore.
The second is this article from The New York Time Magazine.
“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.” Yet it is also why it can be extremely hard to understand the phenomenon until you’ve experienced it. Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel.
Both of these illustrated the point that just because you can read it, doesn’t mean it’s intended for you. If you precieve something as blather, you’re probably not the target audience. This is a new occurrence that has developed with social web tools. The line between what’s public and private becomes blurred. If you come across the blog of someone you don’t know and start reading it are you violating their privacy? It’s out there for anyone to read. What if they only started writing it to keep their family updated, and you’re not the intended audience?
