Facebook app analyzes posts to find out which friend gave you the flu

Imagine if the CDC had access to all of your email, Facebook posts, credit card transactions, and location data from your phone and photos. It could do a reasonable job of finding the infection vectors for large populations (an unsanitary restaurant or school cafeteria, for example, or a friend who never washes their hands, or an infected spinach batch from country X, or a MRSA outbreak from hospital A, wing B). This information could be used to warn people to be extra careful in specific situations. Sadly, this is unlikely to happen in the near future.

To save people the clicks it takes to get there, this is what the app has access to:

* Your basic info

* Your location

* Your status updates

* Friends' profile info: hometowns, locations and relationship details

* Status updates shared with you

Seeing how this is a 300-word blog post from AdvertisingAge that reads like a 300-word summary of a Friday press release, I'm guessing is that there's no real science or ingenuity behind this, other than perusing your timeline history and looking for:

a) the last few friends you were tagged with at an event

b) the last few friends you were tagged with in a photo

c) in the absence of a) and b), text-mining your friends' status updates to see if any of them said "I'm sick/have the flu"

If they can do that, it should also be pretty easy to identify your political affiliation. And speaking of which:

http://persecuting.us

I'm sure the "Help, I have an STD," version of the app is not far behind.

God, this is so stupid.