Talk:Google Flu Trends

Why was it Retired?

Here's a Wired article which says,

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. But GFT’s failure doesn’t erase the value of big data...

It would be interesting to add the story of why and how the GFT was shutdown. With regards to how, Google's blog post announcing the discontinuation of the program in August 2015 says that they have opted for giving the search data to the CDC and some other health organizations so they can use it directly for predicting outbreaks.

Another question in my mind is how much did the data which Google gave (gives?) the CDC end up being used? Currently on the CDC's Weekly U.S. Influenza Surveillance Report I can only find mentions of laboratory confirmed flu cases and visits to doctor. Themumblingprophet (talk) 16:50, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Privacy Concern section

States: "Google runs programs on computers to access and calculate the data, so no human is involved in the process."

So are readers meant to see this as if the entire program is automated without any human oversite? Maybe i need to research how privacy is defined. The year is 2024 and Privacy has become or perhaps always has been a euphemism used by advocates to describe something that never existed..

Polypsychosis (talk) 15:18, 1 April 2024 (UTC)