Scrubbed geo-location data not so anonymous after all

Your commute = your fingerprint

Anonymized data collected from GPS-enabled devices may not be as anonymous as you think, according to researchers who show that knowing someone's general home and work locations can be enough to identify an individual uniquely.

The findings, by Philippe Golle and Kurt Partridge of PARC, or the Palo Alto Research Center, are significant, given the proliferation of devices that monitor a user's geographic location using global positioning system and other technologies. At the same time, a growing number of websites monitor user location to offer restaurant recommendations and other services.

Social Networks Keep Privacy in the Closet

Social-networking sites lead a double life. On one hand, they encourage users to share as much personal information as possible, making it easy to post photos, videos, notes, and links. But at the same time, these sites have to safeguard that information and limit how it is shared between users and beyond their own walls. Users are often dismayed when their information reaches unintended recipients, such as bosses, relatives, or other companies.

This situation encourages social networks to bury the privacy settings that they build, according to research that will be presented later this month at the Eighth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, in London, U.K.

A New List of How Much AT&T Knows About You

...But the company is saying more clearly than most other big companies that it knows a lot about you, that it will use that information to help it make more money in any number of ways, that it will keep the data for as long as you remain a customer, and that it can be forced to give all that information to the government without giving you the chance to object.

Survey: Family time eroding as Internet use soars

Whether it's around the dinner table or sitting front of the TV, U.S. families say they are spending less time together.

The decline in family time coincides with a rise in Internet use, and the boom of social networks—though a new report stops just short of assigning blame.

The report is from the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California.

The center is reporting that 28 percent of Americans it interviewed last year said they have been spending less time with members of their households. Only 11 percent said that in 2006.

The Digi-crib Kids

It seems that everyone born with a computer in his or her crib (“digital natives” or DNs) differs from those of us who were not (“digital immigrants” or DIs). Their brains develop in a different way. The way they learn is different. The jury is still out as to whether this is good or bad.

Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, cites numerous studies that show young DNs’ disaffection with reading. In one case, over 40 percent of college freshmen said they did not enjoy reading serious books and articles, doing so “only when I have to.” In another survey of high school graduates who went on to college, one quarter of them said they never read a word of literature, sports, travel, politics, or anything else for either enjoyment or illumination. A 2004 report indicated that 20 percent of entering college freshmen end up in remedial writing courses and even more in remedial reading courses.

But not everyone agrees that reading or writing is still pertinent. Bauerlein offers this from a digital native writing on a USA Today blog: “Today’s young people don’t suffer from illiteracy; they just suffer from e-literacy. We can’t spell and we don’t know synonyms because we don’t need to know. What smart young person would spend hours learning words that can be accessed at the click of a button? Spell-check can spell. Shift + F7 produces synonyms.” Jonathan Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation, asserts that digital youth create a new kind of literacy that goes beyond the traditions of reading and writing. Science writer Steven Johnson, appearing on the Colbert Report, touted the digital game Civilization IV because 12-year-olds who play it can “recreate the entire course of human economic and technological history.”