Comment by theblackbox

I've not really kept up with this story, nor can I rouse myself to feel the outrage shared by a lot of the community on this one... but if I were to throw in my two cents, I'd have to point to Google Flu Trends [1] and the fact that their modeling of influenza outbreak and spread are some of the most accurate and up-to-date on earth, often besting the World Health Organisation. This is sometimes used as justification for extending the length of time that Google retains data.

If this anti-google sentiment is to be believed and they are marching the corporate road to evil, I shudder to think of the information that could be inferred from collective search pattern trends.

I just noticed that the example had not been given yet and I think it's an important one in this debate. It is a seemingly benign, if not entirely altruistic, case study. What is the consensus, smoke and mirrors, or is there a real social value to be gleaned [2] from the harvest of the vast data swarm?

[1: http://www.google.org/flutrends/] [2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleaning]