Hacker News Reader

Isn't the real story here that Bing is keeping track of user's search queries for months?

Google Flu is working different. They try to predict a flu epidemic by counting related search queries.

But Microsoft is predicting the health of a single person based on his search history.

Edit: Thinking about it: ofcourse Google, Facebook and others could do the same because they also gather user data.

Everything you do is logged by all these sites, and tied to your identity there, no matter what they say. They have so much storage space to spare that it's more compelling to save the data for potentially analyzing it later than to throw it away.

A few years back, Google decided to recalculate YouTube view and subscriber counts to counter bot usage. They store so much information about every request that they have been able to detect views made by bots in the past, from patterns in this data.

The thing is, this is illegal in the EU.

If you collect data for one purpose, you can't use it for any other purpose, unless you explicitly and in easily readable language told the user about it before.

You cant retroactively get permission to use data for other purposes either.

And currently medical or research purposes are not listed in Microsoft's or Google's ToS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com