Cancerous tweets: Socially sharing sensitive health information

Social networks provide opportunities to overshare information in a secondhand nature as information passes from primary to secondary to tertiary sources. This information can be supplemented with geographical information to obtain the approximate location of the primary information source without the primary source´s consent, presenting a potential breach of privacy. Messages regarding severe illness were obtained from the popular social media site Twitter to understand how sensitive information may propagate unregulated through secondhand information sharing. Results indicate that 59% of tweets concerning severe illness are Retweets distributed without explicit consent from the primary source. A majority of these Retweets were propagated by family and friends of the primary source.