you know:
- google knows where you are
- google knows what you search

you probably don't know: when you search for food poisoning symptoms, google looks back in your location history the time that food poisoning takes to incubate and guesses which restaurant poisoned you

then, in a few cities (vegas and chicago in 2016 and 2017, possibly other locations at other times), google would send a list of "suspect restaurants" to local health departments to perform "less-random" food safety inspections

it worked, of course. that's not too surprising. but nobody consented to it. and i wonder how many people would have, if they'd known.

Sadilek, A. (Google), Caty, S. (Harvard), DiPrete, L. (Vegas Health District) et al. Machine-learned epidemiology: real-time detection of foodborne illness at scale. npj Digital Med 1, 36 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-018-0045-1

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-018-0045-1

cop behavior

for clarity: the first tweet is in present tense, but i have no clue if/where google is still doing this analysis

amazing split on the quote tweets here between "this is a horrifying and egregious violation of user trust" and "this is great and we should do more of it" and embarrassingly there's mozilla engineers doing the latter