Facebook's Friend Suggestion Feature Recommends Patients of Psychiatrist to Each Other

July 15, 2015

The 'People You May Know' feature on Facebook was reported by a psychiatrist for recommending her patients as friends, potentially breaching privacy and confidentiality in healthcare. This incident underscores the need for safe and secure AI practices. For those interested in shaping harm prevention measures through responsible AI governance, JOIN US.

This incident highlights the importance of HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM's Map function, as it showcases how such instances can compromise sensitive information and threaten trustworthy AI principles.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.676, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.671, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.643, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: facebook
Alleged developer: facebook
Alleged harmed parties: pseudonymized-psychiatrist's-patients, pseudonymized-psychiatrist, patients, healthcare-providers

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/406

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.