Facebook is constantly under scrutiny for privacy issues and data collecting. Do a quick internet search of "Facebook and personal info" and the first few articles include phrases like "protect your privacy" and "Facebook wants to pay for your personal data."
Although there's a lot of negativity around the social network, scientists have discovered a beneficial way to use Facebook for your health.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania Medicine and Stony Brook University found that Facebook can be used to help predict medical conditions. Out of 21 different conditions, all of them were predictable from Facebook alone.
Does this mean that Facebook is going to start accessing your medical records? No, of course not. It does, however, mean that through status updates, scientists can find keywords that help predict medical conditions that traditional medical data cannot.
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For example, "drink" and "bottle" were shown to be more predictive of alcohol abuse, while words expressing hostility — like "dumb" and any expletive — served as indicators of drug abuse and psychoses.
"One challenge with this is that there is so much data, and we, as providers, aren't trained to interpret it ourselves — or make clinical decisions based on it," explained lead author Raina Merchant, MD, MS, the director of Penn Medicine's Center for Digital Health and an associate professor of Emergency Medicine. "To address this, we will explore how to condense and summarize social media data."
Other research shows that Facebook posts could predict a diagnosis of depression three months sooner than a diagnosis in the clinic.
If you think about it, this makes sense. People are more willing to open up behind a computer screen than in a doctor's office. The things we post on social media are gateways into what we like, dislike, care about, want or need. Why not use it for science?
The full study, which was published on the non-profit Public Library of Science, is promising, but still in its early stages.
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