[foxylad]

Now we have the capacity to capture enormous amounts of data about our everyday lives, I'm amazed that as a society we haven't started doing wide-ranging pattern recognition to attempt to find environmental triggers for common ailments.

Google and Facebook could redeem themselves by putting some resources into looking for statistical patterns in their massive datasets. Finding the smoking gun for Parkinsons or prostate cancer would go a long way to making their data-collection more socially acceptable.