The data deluge

Eighteen months ago, Li & Fung, a firm that manages supply chains for retailers, saw 100 gigabytes of information flow through its network each day. Now the amount has increased tenfold. During 2009, American drone aircraft flying over Iraq and Afghanistan sent back around 24 years’ worth of video footage. New models being deployed this year will produce ten times as many data streams as their predecessors, and those in 2011 will produce 30 times as many.

But the data deluge also poses risks. Examples abound of databases being stolen: disks full of social-security data go missing, laptops loaded with tax records are left in taxis, credit-card numbers are stolen from online retailers. The result is privacy breaches, identity theft and fraud. Privacy infringements are also possible even without such foul play: witness the periodic fusses when Facebook or Google unexpectedly change the privacy settings on their online social networks, causing members to reveal personal information unwittingly. A more sinister threat comes from Big Brotherishness of various kinds, particularly when governments compel companies to hand over personal information about their customers. Rather than owning and controlling their own personal data, people very often find that they have lost control of it.

The best way to deal with these drawbacks of the data deluge is, paradoxically, to make more data available in the right way, by requiring greater transparency in several areas. First, users should be given greater access to and control over the information held about them, including whom it is shared with. Google allows users to see what information it holds about them, and lets them delete their search histories or modify the targeting of advertising, for example. Second, organisations should be required to disclose details of security breaches, as is already the case in some parts of the world, to encourage bosses to take information security more seriously. Third, organisations should be subject to an annual security audit, with the resulting grade made public (though details of any problems exposed would not be). This would encourage companies to keep their security measures up to date.

Openness is becoming the default social norm

If you're curious, and you have $20, you can now pre-order a copy of the 2009 Felton Annual Report. When published next month, this limited-edition, 16-page dossier will reveal, among other things, that last year New York graphic designer Nicholas Felton consumed 12 different types of nuts (including pistachio), 65 different vegetables (including dandelion) and 50 flavours of beer (including Red Stripe).

Felton has been crunching and graphing his personal data into whimsical reports for the past five years, promoting his design skills and making oversharing aesthetically pleasing. But these reports also mean that Felton, at least according to writer and transsexual activist Andrea James, is a "non-private person."

Save your life ... digitise

Recording every detail of your life on gadgets could one day replace the need for memories — or mean an end to privacy

What if you could recall everything you did? Every person you met, every sight you saw, every moment of your life? What if you recorded everything digitally? You could take photos every few seconds, store all your e-mails, your phone calls, every web page you looked at, every document you read.

This scenario is not some vision of a far-off future but real and happening now. Two senior Microsoft researchers are recording their lives, putting them at the forefront of a digital memory revolution. They say our biological memory will be augmented, and, to a certain extent, replaced by e-memory. They call it Total Recall.

“The coming world of Total Recall will be as dramatic a change in the coming generation as the digital age has been for the present generation,” says Gordon Bell. “It will change the way we work and learn. It will unleash our creativity and improve our health. It will change our intimate relationships with loved ones both living and dead. It will, I believe, change what it means to be human.”

Tech-savvy 'iGeneration' kids multi-task, connect

Move over, Millennials. You're not the younger generation anymore.

For the past decade, you were the ones to watch. But now, as the eldest among you are fast approaching 30, there's a new group just begging for some attention. They're still kids, and although there's a lot the experts don't yet know about them, one thing they do agree on is that what kids use and expect from their world has changed rapidly.

And it's all because of technology.

"It's simply a part of their DNA," says Dave Verhaagen, a child and adolescent psychologist in Charlotte. "It shapes everything about them."

To the psychologists, sociologists, and generational and media experts who study them, their digital gear sets this new group (yet unnamed by any powers that be) apart, even from their tech-savvy Millennial elders. They want to be constantly connected and available in a way even their older siblings don't quite get. These differences may appear slight, but they signal an all-encompassing sensibility that some say marks the dawning of a new generation.

AT&T Family Map in App Store

AT&T now offers  the AT&T FamilyMap App on the App Store for iPhone. The app provides families with a more seamless experience when locating and connecting with one another on the go using iPhone.

This app could come in handy if kids are out in the snow, because now parents can view maps of where their family members are on their phones.

The AT&T FamilyMap app brings a streamlined approach to helping families stay up to speed on each other's whereabouts by locating wireless devices within a shared family account. The app provides iPhone users with access to FamilyMap's features which until now, were only accessible through a computer.