Straddling the snuffling pig
It is no surprise, following the extensive media publicity about the outbreak of Swine Flu, that spammers have tried to get in on the act. Some junk mail promises face masks, pharmaceuticals and miracle cures. Other junk mail, with headlines such as "Madonna caught swine flu" are designed to get you to open executable attachments to infect your own machine with computer viruses and other malware.
According to figures from McAfee, the biggest sources of swine flu spam are Brazil, the USA, Germany and the Russian Federation, with the UK lying in ninth place, and a common tactic of this sort of malware is to try to get the reader to install a malicious "codec" using Windows Media Player, thinking it will let them view a news video. It seems that no matter what human tragedy befalls the world, whether it is pandemic flu, plane crash or earthquake, spammers rub their hands with glee and rush out spam to exploit the event.
But it is not just spammers who have jumped onto the swine flu bandwagon. According to Google, if it cannot keep more than six months worth of search data on us then we are all at more risk from swine flu.
Google is a great search engine, but one of the concerns of privacy advocates is the amount of data it collects to profile its users and build up a history of the surfing habits of each one of us so it can better target marketing and advertising at us. Increasingly, governments and regulatory bodies are deciding that this degree of profiling is intrusive and the European Commission has suggested that search engine companies such as Google retain no more than six months worth of surfing history. Google is lobbying against such restrictions but who would have thought Google would claim that deleting search histories could affect human health?
Speaking at the Zeitgeist Conference in London, Google co-founder Larry Page claimed that web search data is a better method of tracking the spread of infectious disease than traditional methods such as the US CDC's reporting network of doctors. Google claims that certain search terms are good indicators of the spread of flu and that it is possible (in the USA) to estimate flu activity at US-state level in near real time. But, according to Page, without more than six months worth of search history, this would be impossible, and presumably human health would suffer.
There are some obvious questions thrown up by that argument. Do people search for information on swine flu because they have the symptoms, or because it is a top item on the news? How does knowing what I personally searched for a year ago help Google decide if I have flu today? Why can't it use anonymous aggregated search histories? And is there any topic of global concern, be it disease, greenhouse gases or the threat of terror, where Google wouldn't make the same claim that it needs our search history for the good of mankind?
28th May 2009
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.