As many a Facebook friend will tell you, revealing more about your private life than you would like is an everyday hazard of the web.
But a new concept for an app could see social network users sharing information far more sensitive than a drunken party snap.
Researchers are exploring whether websites such as Facebook could be used to sift through users' friend lists and flag up which of them may be carrying a sexually transmitted infection.
A team at the University of North Carolina's Center for Infectious Diseases hopes this approach can harness the power of increasingly ubiquitous social networks to prevent the spread of diseases such as HIV and chlamydia.
At an international health conference held last month, Dr Peter Leone - the professor leading the research - pointed out how a patient's circle of friends can be a vital clue in identifying who could be at risk of infection.
The theory is that, since social networks mirror our real-life friendship circles, services such as Facebook could be used to contact an entire at-risk group and tell them they may be in danger.
In a previous study Dr Leone tested the sexual partners of newly diagnosed HIV patients and found 20 per cent of them showed up HIV-positive.
His latest research looks at this finding in light of the idea that people who move in similar social circles often have sexual partners in common.
Dr Leone aims to develop a more precise approach to tracking the spread of STDs than simply focusing on at-risk demographics or limiting the search to those with whom the patient has had direct sexual contact.
Speaking to Salon, Dr Leone told of how a syphilis outbreak in North Carolina demonstrated how STDs can thrive within a social circle.
He said: 'When we looked at the networks we could connect many of the cases to sexual encounters, and when we asked who they hung out with, who they knew, we could connect 80 percent of the cases.'
The researchers offer a service whereby newly diagnosed HIV patients can provide a list of past sexual partners and anyone else who could have picked up the virus indirectly. The team then contacts these people, sometimes through Facebook, to let them know the patient is HIV-positive and that they should get themselves tested.
Describing the spread of sexual infections as a 'population-level effect', Dr Leone told Salon: 'It would be no different from someone who goes to a picnic and gets food poisoning. We’re concerned about everyone that was at that picnic.'
Another method being considered is based on an exisiting app for tracking the spread of flu. Developed by genetics professor James Fowler, of the University of California in San Diego, it trawls status updates for certain patterns and keywords, notifying users if their friends' activity indicates that they may be at a higher risk of falling ill.
The problem, of course, is that Facebook users are far less likely to broadcast news of their newly contracted STD than of a sore throat.
Nevertheless, Dr Fowler said social networks remain useful in the fight against STDs.
Not only do the likes of Facebook enable users to spread the message of safe sex, he said, they allow people to set examples to friends and destigmatise sexual health issues.
The above extract was taken from the Daily Mail.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2123914/Why-Facebook-soon-tell-friends-STD.html
One would hope that herpes or HPV would not be one of their targets but it is something to think about.
