Sermo mines your personal conversations

I recently received a mail inviting me to buy a report from Sermo, a healthcare physician social networking platform. Mmm I thought, I hope all those doctors knew that their discussions will be mined.

Sermo allows only US doctors on their sites , so I could only read their terms of use and privacy policy. But its pretty clear that they own anything you put on the site and can do with it what they will:

"OWNERSHIP OF MATERIALS

All Materials on this Site are provided by Sermo unless indicated otherwise. All intellectual property rights in the Materials (including copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets and patents) are the property of Sermo unless indicated otherwise. Sermo retains all copyrights in the individual pages, and their components, and collective works available at the Site"

"16. USER SUBMISSIONS

Unless otherwise agreed in writing prior to Your submission, any material, information or other communication You transmit or post to the Site or third party site will be considered non-confidential and non-proprietary ("Communications"). Sermo will have no obligations with respect to the Communications. You agree that from time to time Sermo may invite or otherwise make You aware of certain educational, promotional or financial opportunities relating to Your Communications and profile."

That is unless you as the doctor say anything that sermo gets into trouble for, in that case:

"REPRESENTATION

As a user of this Site, You are liable for the accuracy of the information that You provide to us, including, but not limited to, Your personal and professional representation as provided in Section 4. You hereby certify that You are not a paid consultant or have any other financial interests in the information you provide to this Site including, but not limited to the promotion of "off-label" drug uses, the disclosure of confidential clinical trial or other proprietary information."

So this means that they are constantly monitoring and mining what you ask or say. It would be interesting to know of any lawsuits regarding comments or questions that they made on the site that was later used in a malpractice case.

I hope all the docs who are on their site knows what they have signed up for.

This makes me wonder about all those sub-sites in Facebook. I am sure the same level of mining goes on there, maybe with less protection because those sub areas are sponsored subsites.

So the moral of the story is , no matter where you are big brother and big business and big lawyers are watching , so be carefull.

Cheers

The Unk