Your data or your life
Written by: Previous staff on 20 May, 2009Issues around data security/management/usage etc constantly provoke debate and strong opinions. Yesterday, at an event organised by Google, this was certainly the case as co-founder Larry Page highlighted the benefits of storing user data vis-à-vis the predicting of potential pandemics. However, he felt that their ability to do this – using Google Flu Trends – would be dramatically weakened if search data had to be erased after six months (a desire of the European Commission). In fact, Mr Page went so far as to say that the less data that companies like Google were able to hold the “more likely we all are to die”. Strong stuff, eh?
Anyway, for those of you not familiar with it, Google Flu Trends uses search data to estimate possible flu activity, and according to the graphs on this page, it is impressively accurate. The advantages to governments and health officials of being able to receive these early warnings of pandemics are obvious. However, do you want search engines holding onto to your searches and IP addresses? What if the data is anoymonised? Who do you trust more: the European Commission or Google?
The debate continues…
