I think that those of us in the medical community have far better ways to conduct medical research.
If, as it seems Facebook was proposing, you have patients in an anonymized pool, and you start matching them to Facebook users using algorithms, haven’t you just identified those patients?
I don’t see an IRB going for this. I wouldn’t if I were on the IRB.
It WOULD allow you to determine, based on facebook posts, which patients would ‘qualify’ for medical treatment and what sort of medical treatment they’d get.
Please, what is IRB?