EDITORIAL Confronting the Ethical Challenges of Big Data in Public Health

“Ethical Challenges of Big Data in Public Health ” by Vayena et al. is a timely paper for a num-ber of reasons, all of which are concisely embodied within the title. Ethical challenges are not something we consider often enough in this or most biomedical research journals. Yet, such challenges increasingly confront us as private citizens providing health data and as researchers using these data for public health and research purposes. Big data is an ill-defined term, yet there can be no denying that social media data (which are described in this article for use in digital disease detection [DDD]) cover a large and varied area, measured by both volume and velocity (rate of accumulation), and, as the authors de-scribe, have the potential for important public health uses, but also have risks. And that, as de-scribed, is only one potential use of these data; there are many other uses barely introduced by the authors. In short the appeal of such data is huge, but so are the risks. The authors do an ex-cellent job of characterizing the pluses and minuses of DDD. I encourage all of us to contem-plate this article and the implications it masterfully elucidates. The underlying message from Vayena et al. is clear: use of these data far outpaces the gover-nance and due diligence of the ethical considerations that need to be addressed. Quoting th