Posted by Orin Kerr:
Google To Track Flu Searches and Report Them to Feds?:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_11_09-2008_11_15.shtml#1226438263
[1]This report at Drudge strikes me as pretty creepy:
GOOGLE will launch a new tool that will help U.S. federal
officials "track sickness".
"Flu Trends" uses search terms that people put into the web giant
to figure out where influenza is heating up, and notify the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention in real time.
GOOGLE claims it would keep individual user data confidential:
"GOOGLE FLU TRENDS can never be used to identify individual users
because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often
certain search queries occur each week."
It's legal for Google to do this: From a legal standpoint, when you
send a query to google, that query belongs to them and they can
voluntarily disclose it. But do we want Google establishing such a
cozy relationship with the federal government? I don't. I've thought
about writing an article calling for a Search Engine Privacy Act, to
prevent unauthorized use and disclosure of search queries, and stories
like this make me think I may but that on the front burner rather than
the backburner.
References
1. http://www.drudgereport.com/flashgof.htm
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