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When you talk to people about online privacy – most of the time, they fall into three different camps: 1) the “I don’t really care – I have nothing to hide” – 2) the “Oh really, I didn’t know” – 3) and the “I know, I use a vpn, proxy servers and privacy mode on Firefox.”  My main concern is the people that fall into the 2nd group because, like most anything, if you don’t know….you usually don’t care.

Online Privacy: The term is very broad and includes issues concerning your private personal information, browser history, surfing habits, purchases, digital footprint and much much more. Now, if someone was to ask you for your personal information (full name, age,sex,address,etc) in real life (in person), you might not be so inclined to just hand it over – but what if it’s being taken online, without your direct knowledge? Would this bother you?

Information technology has become a ubiquitous presence. By visualizing the processes that underlie our interactions with this technology we can trace what happens to the information we feed into the network.

Last night, Zappos and 6PM.com started notifying customers that their websites had been hacked and that sensitive customer data had been taken. While news is still coming in, it seems like names, Emails, Addresses, last four digits of credit card numbers and “cryptographically scrambled” versions of passwords were taken. In response to this Zappos & 6PM.com have reset all user passwords, you if you are a customer of wither website, you should have some Emails waiting for you in your inbox. Zappos sent this to customers:

We are writing to let you know that there may have been illegal and unauthorized access to some of your customer account information on Zappos.com, including one or more of the following: your name, e-mail address, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, the last four digits of your credit card number (the standard information you find on receipts), and/or your cryptographically scrambled password (but not your actual password).

For more information of to contact customer support, please visit Zappos.com or 6PM.com for more information and by no means, responde to any email asking you for information regarding wither account.

Source: TechCrunch

Seems like lobbyists haven’t got the message yet, so they released this gem of propaganda. The ad is solely based on made up information, drumming up fear from un-informed citizens about the “evils” of the internet. When will special interest groups realize that a free internet is now a civil right – one that grants people information, free speech and the ability to converse and protest. Good luck taking that away!

Search: We’ve all seen the commercials (Below). We’ve all seen people talking to their iPhones – asking info and directions. Siri, Apple’s built in personal assistant is all the craze but has Apple, purposefully or not, put into motion the demise of Google’s search empire – or for that matter, search as we know it today? See, it all starts with how we think and use search right now – how Google, Bing and the lot have us searching now. You go to Google, you enter your query and then you’re presented with pages upon pages of results. These results are based on Google’s algorithm and advertising model, so what Google wants you to do is spend as much time as possible looking through their results. Essentially, this is the framework to Google’s search empire and their cash cow, which is printing them billions of dollars every year.

Enter Siri! When you ask your iPhone a question, it isn’t using Google search to find and provide you with the answer. It’s taking advantage of Apple’s partners, like Yelp and WolframAlpha to gather the correct information, before sending it to Siri. In essence, it’s bipassing Google all together and as Apple adds and acquires the necessary partners, its dependence on Google for search will lessen. Thanks to Siri’s success, other OEM’s are rushing to buy speech to text and voice recognition companies, Amazon being the most recent.  Now, this doesn’t mean people won’t search in the classical way (as we do now) but as search evolves into voice and touch, companies will be able to move beyond Google, to provide their customers with the information they desire.

Google: This isn’t news to Google and you can bet that they’re evolving along with the trend of search - after all, they are acquiring (on average) a company a week! That’s right, Google is adding to their portfolio, a company a week. This means technologies and services that will help them advance their search offerings far beyond the current traditional sense – for Google, the future is a combination or Local+Social+Search.

Future: The process of searching for information, is going through a renaissance at the moment and while we don’t know how far along it will advance (voice, touch, vision), we do know that its current form will go through some hard growing pains. Traditional search companies like Google and Microsoft will have to up their game, in order to stay in the game. For me, the most exciting aspect of this ever evolving tech, is the way we will interact with our countless digital devices.

I am not trying to startle but rather inform. It seems that the technology applied in medical devices such as pace makers and automatic drug releasing implants for human use, are threatened by computer viruses.

The vulnerability of human medical implant devices are caused by a few factors. Typically, these devices don’t have inter-accessibility to the wider realm of the web and the platforms that we are all networked on. But things seem to be changing thanks to devices, R&D, and what may be direct or indirect marketing by some large companies. The fantastic abilities of devices such as the iPhone and software for it are merging these two arenas of main stream technology and medicine. This hazard has been flagged by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJOM, 2010; 362:1164 – 1166) Dr. William Maisel and Tadayoshi Kohno write; “that the complex and sophisticated features of medical devices have created a susceptibility to security breaches that could compromise the performance of such devices and the safety and privacy of patients.” The use of the iPad and its application in the medical management software realm has spread as if it were destined to be in the hands of doctors all along. Simply sated – threats are a concern.