Issues of privacy emerge within this sphere of participatory surveillance, predominantly focused on how much information is available on the web that an individual does not consent to.
[3][4] Within the realm of ecological fieldwork, participatory surveillance is used as an overarching term for the method in which indigenous and rural communities are used to gain greater accessibility to causes of disease outbreak.
[1] With added awareness of the locations of users, an aspect of greater socialization and interconnectivity emerges within both the digital and tangible world.
[3][4][10][11] Information people search for related to health as well as what the public says on digital-based platforms makes up the fabric of this field of study.
Coming about in 2002, infodemiology measures common social media platforms, disease and illness related websites, search engine information, and any other online user-related health data.
[4][12] For example, the H1N1 virus (swine flu) outbreak in 2009 was analyzed through Twitter reactions and responses in order to investigate these areas of thought.
[4] The speed at which social media reveals public thought and trends is about two weeks faster than that of standardized disease surveillance through the proper health-related institutions.
[4] However, due to the nature of social media as user-generated and unregulated, deciphering between what is relevant versus irrelevant material can blur generalizations and facts.
With that, social media is an unstable variable which, in order to become standardized, would require great expense to create measures in which it would become feasible to make valid generalizations about.
[12] Chikungunya virus, associated with moderate to severe skin rashes and joint pain, spread to Italy at the beginning of 2007.
Interestingly, most of the Twitter posts related to Chikungunya were highly guided by search engine queries rather than empirical investigations, leading to non-usable data.
[14] In hard to access regions such as the Arctic and rural Canada, researching ecological processes and disease spread can be difficult without constant monitoring.
[2] For example, the Inuit populations' observations during the outbreak of avian cholera helped identify specific zones of infection in Arctic Canada.
With support from the Cape Dorset, Iqaluit, Aupaluk, Kangirsuk, Kangiqsujuaq, and Ivujivik Inuit communities, the researchers were able to detect the outbreak of avian cholera in thirteen locations from 2004 to 2016.
The Inuit peoples were able to keep a closer eye on death rates of the Common Eider due to their daily routines and subsistence on the duck.
Background check websites and search engine sources reveal just how many people attempt to find information on another person, whatever the reason.
[15] Doxing is a form of cyberbullying, using the Internet to post private information about an individual or organization as a means of attack against the entity.