The US department of Homeland Security has commissioned a
one-year contract to investigate the efficacy of using social
networks to identify instances of bioterrorism, pandemics and other
health and security risks.
It is paying
Accenture Federal Services $3 million (£1.8 million) to scan
the networks' for key words in real time to see if growing threats
or health trends can be distinguished. So if an individual flags up
a nasty cough in a Facebook update, for instance, the software will
be looking to see if key medical terminology is repeated in
connected groups or from other individuals posting from the same
location.
"This is big data analytics," said John Matchette, managing
director for Accenture's public safety department, who admits the
technique is yet to be proven. "In theory, social media analytics
would have shown timely indicators for multiple past biological and
health-related events." Mobile data mapping has been used in the
past to
track and predict population movements following natural
disasters and algorithms can use data to
track disease hotspots after the event. However, this latest
experiment could provide real time information to help stem disease
spread, develop early warning systems and help emergency services
coordinate react in a timely fashion
According to a company statement from Accenture, the software
will constantly scan blogs, as well as the usual outlets, but not
all networks and channels have been decided upon. It's no surprise
that national security departments monitor social networks to look
out for threats (Paul Chambers' arrest after a tongue-in-cheek
faux bomb tweet threat being a perfect example of when that
monitoring goes very wrong), however Homeland Security is already
being sued by civil liberties group Electronic Privacy Information
Centre and is under pressure to answer questions about setting up
fake social networking accounts to search for key words such as
"virus" and "trojan". The department has been
accused of violating the public's free speech and
constitutional protections against unreasonable searches. No one
would disagree there needs to be better systems in place to monitor
and protect against the spread of infectious disease, however how
data is monitored to do this has come under fire.
"The information won't be tracked back to individuals who posted
it," stated Matchette.
Not everyone is convinced. "Even when data is in aggregate,
we don't have any clear policies around how data will be used and
how it can be traced back, including if and when there are signs of
an illness outbreak," Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy
project at the Centre for Democracy and Technology,
told WebProNews. "I think it's a legitimate question to ask
[Homeland Security] what the guidelines are for using this data.
I'd prefer they have a plan in advance for dealing with this,
rather than waiting."
A statement on guidelines from Homeland Security -- which has
begun aggregating data from the Centres for Disease Control and
Prevention and collecting urban air samples as points of reference
-- is somewhat vague, but does admit there is room to home in on
specific persons of interest. Information that is already
"accessible on certain heavily trafficked social media sites" is
analysed without gathering personal specifics on an individual,
"with very narrow exceptions".