[llarsson]

"Google could know which medications I take, and what any medical diagnosis's I have," Carpenter said. "It makes me feel sick to my stomach."

Google already knows what diagnoses people have, simply because people have been searching their symptoms. Remember when Google several years ago boasted about predicting epidemics faster than the health care system, based on searches?

[daliusd]

They are not doing this anymore [0] and I assume there is a reason for that.

UDPATE: Here is the reason: "And then, GFT failed—and failed spectacularly—missing at the peak of the 2013 flu season by 140 percent. When Google quietly euthanized the program, called Google Flu Trends (GFT), it turned the poster child of big data into the poster child of the foibles of big data. " [1]

[0] https://www.google.org/flutrends/about/

[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/10/can-learn-epic-failure-google-...

[Zenst]

Maybe that people look up all kinds of things not related to themselves. For example, read an article and it mentions some illness you have not heard of, you double tap the illness in question and right-click and search for that. Things like that will skew results. Heck, if google based my health upon what I've googled over the years then they would of had me flagged as dead many times over.

[ryanmercer]

That just says they are no longer publishing it. That is very intentional phrasing.

>Google Flu Trends and Google Dengue Trends are no longer publishing current estimates

[daliusd]

As well they say they are working with universities on that. Basically, they are doing something most probably, but not necessary have something valuable.

[Izkata]

> missing at the peak of the 2013 flu season by 140 percent.

Can someone decode what this actually means? Was their estimate of flu cases 140 percent higher or lower than the actual amount (or maybe lazily meant "at 140 percent", so, estimate was 40 percent low), was the peak offset by 1.4 months (or 14 months??), something else?

[LegitShady]

That's different that wearing a tracking device ok your arm.

People are really upset because google started acting politically. If they weren't concerned about Google's judgment they wouldn't be worried.

But they're right to worry.

[shantly]

It's not the politics, it's that I don't like voyeuristic stalkers. I don't care how much money they're making voyeuristically stalking people.

[ryanmercer]

>That's different that wearing a tracking device ok your arm.

An activity tracking device on your arm can't determine what medication you are taking or what diagnosis you have unless it has a secret microphone that is recording every conversation and uploading it for analysis, which is what the concern the person you replied to quoted.

[phkahler]

Who doesnt have a phone? Who doesnt talk to people with a phone? If Google is secretly recording conversations almost everyone is covered regardless of what device they have - even no device.

[mc32]

But it can know how active / inactive you are and may also know your location(s) (if you enable that).

[9dl]

Acting politically is ok

Acting corporately is totally not ok

[frockington1]

As an employed person happy with my life I enjoy my corporation, does this make me not ok?

[9dl]

If you CEO/CTO/top of that corp it seems ok for me

If you decent person of course

[_jal]

"People" may have, but that does not mean Carpenter or other specific Fitbit owners did.

There's the general and the specific.

[tgv]

Even the "general" interpretation is bloody wrong. People google more symptoms than their own, and not everybody uses google either. FitBit's data is valuable to any party trying to muscle themselves into siphoning some of that health care money.

Google is on a war path, but many prefer to stick their heads in the sand.

[JohnFen]

I am not representative of the average person, of course, but when I think of the times that I've searched the web for medical symptoms, I'm pretty sure the it has never been because I myself was experiencing those symptoms. It's always been for educational or curiosity purposes.

[jbarberu]

They might know in general what people search for, but as a person using !google for both email and search I too would be pretty pissed if my health data was going straight to the biggest advertiser.