Ethical Use of Twitter for #DigDisDet

These slides were presented at the 2013 International Conference on Digital Disease Detection in San Francisco, CA.

Abstract:

The use of Twitter for digital epidemiology has yielded a number of advances important to public health surveillance. However, the ethics around using the service for research or surveillance purposes have not yet been thoroughly discussed. Twitter users may not know or understand that their data is being made available. Furthermore, data provided through Twitter may be used or combined with other data in ways that violate the privacy of the tweet authors. This discussion describes a need for an ethical framework to protect the privacy and autonomy of Twitter users while furthering digital public health efforts.