Google and Coast to Coast AM: What the Internet Cannot Do

OK, I admit to listening to parts of Coast to Coast AM with George Noory... mostly the interesting news stories George reads at the beginning of the show but also to interviews with certain guests. That's why I was listening a couple nights ago when the story of Google.org's new flu tracker project came up.

It seems that Google plans to track certain terms searchers use in order to predict the spread of flu epidemics to feed to the Centers for Disease Control. The theory is that people who are coming down with the flu will look up terms related to it, demonstrating through their IP addresses that the flu is in their region.

Now that seems like a specious conclusion to me. If it were sound, then perhaps Google thinks I am forming an Anglo Saxon army in the Seattle area with all my searches for shield walls, seaxas, and timber forts. Just the words they have selected cast doubt on their reasoning. For example, "thermometer". Do people who are getting sick head to the Internet to look for thermometers? Might those who use that search term be as likely to be students looking for how to convert Ceelsius to Farhenheit or digital weather station nuts like my husband? Methinks Google has unmerited confidence in its insight into the "community mind". I mean, if one million people search for "Alanis Morrissette" it's probably valid to say the lady has a lot of fans, but to conclude a pandemic is on the way because people in Granite Falls, WA, start searching for "aspirin" or indeed "thermometer" is quite a leap.

To make matters worse, here is George Noory talking to one of his regular guests, Katherine Albrecht, a self-styled consumer privacy advocate, panicking about Google zeroing in on people's individual IP addresses to spy on our symptoms. Citing how Google sold out and let the Chinese government dictate access to sites they preferred to censor, Noory and Albrecht ratchet up the hysteria in spite of the fact that they are comparing virtual apples and digital oranges. Blanket censorship and farming data from IP addresses are not at all connected.

There comes a time in everyone's paranoid life when one needs to stop and ask, "But what would they get out of this?" I supppose the Noory's and Albrechts of the world believe the CDC is preparing the concentration camps for people with the flu. I think Albrecht has more incentive to whip up conspiracy theories to sell her merchandise. The bottom line is that, even if Google and the CDC plan to track IP addresses, they won't learn anything useful. "Community Mind" is a delusion of those who overestimate the power of the Internet.

Has anyone else heard that postings on medieval historical fiction groups and blogs indicate a coming outbreak of Black Death? Better stock up on foxbane and weaselwort!

Back to the really important things in life... sex and historical fiction.