Tag: DATA

Google has admitted that its Street View cars have collected entire passwords and emails while mapping the world and collecting information about open Wi-Fi hotspots on their way. Google's Senior VP of Engineering and Research, Alan Eustace, mentioned this today in a blog post dedicated to how Google plans to deal with privacy controls inside the company. Google has been accused by many ...

Power users (like our own Erez Zukerman) will tell you that Google Docs Spreadsheets don't have nearly the same chutzpah that Excel does -- not for really complex work, anyway. Still, Google keeps plugging away and adding features... Like better import options! Docs now supports custom delimiters and an inline preview pane for imported data. While you may not find the addition useful, it's the ...

When I was a kid and used to fantasize about what the future was going to be like, I didn't envision a Google-like search engine. If anything, I thought the future would hold something more along the lines of Wolfram Alpha – an omniscient search box that would slice and dice numbers and facts in all sorts of crazy ways and spit out a bunch of cool graphs. And now, Wolfram Alpha has added ...

A UK regulatory body has cleared Google of stealing users' personal data via Wi-Fi snooping from its Street View vehicles. Google admitted that it mistakenly snooped packets of data from open Wi-Fi hotspots while taking photos for Street View, and it turned over the data to several governments who wanted to investigate exactly what had been collected. The UK Information Commissioner's Office ...

Using a well-documented and easily-replicated flaw in the USB specification, a bunch of plucky Canadians have managed to turn innocuous peripherals like keyboards into a hardware trojan horse. The team produced a modified keyboard that was capable of transmitting data in Morse code, using an LED -- but that was just a proof of concept! There's nothing to prevent a keyboard from sending data ...

Posterous, as I'm sure you're all aware, is the supremo light-weight blogging platform. Not only is it fantastically easy to use, but it's also the king of flexibility and interoperability -- you can post to your blog via email, bookmarklet, mobile phone and even Twitter! It also has the ability to import from other platforms: WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and switch from many others -- but yesterday ...

Google's Street View vehicles drive around collecting the images that power the very useful map service, but it turns out they've been collecting a bit more than that. The trucks grab location data from open Wi-Fi networks as they travel, automatically jumping networks five times a second. It turns out that in that 1/5th of a second they spent on each network, Street View vehicles may have ...

One of Google's biggest strengths is its ability to make predictions based on data. If you're a developer with a bunch of data, and you want to harness the freakishly-accurate predictive powers of Google, there's now an API for that. Google's Prediction API analyzes patterns in your data to do things like generating product recommendations, sorting email, routing messages, or identifying ...

My friends think I'm crazy ... overreacting. I've gone and done it, though. I've deactivated my Facebook account. My privacy settings were set to be as restrictive as Facebook allows, and I still didn't feel comfortable with it. Not because I have anything to hide, but because I don't trust Facebook to not use my information (and that of my friends) for evil, or even to adequately protect ...

WebOfTrust is an awesome extension for Google Chrome in its own right -- it provides trust and safety ratings for websites and helps keep you out of trouble. They also allow other developers to tap into their data, which leads to cool little spin-offs like the Ultimate Chrome Flag extension. After you install the extension, you'll see a flag icon in your Chrome Omnibar which tells you where a ...

If you care who uses your Facebook data, you should get ready to change your privacy settings, yet again. Facebook Connect, which delivers your personal data to other sites that you choose, is about to start delivering it to sites that Facebook has pre-approved, too. That basically makes Facebook Connect an opt-out instead of an opt-in feature, and compromising your privacy will be the default ...

Until now, geolocation has been one of those quaint, semi-useful buzzwords: '... now with geolocation!!!' Twitter, Buzz and Foursquare -- the main exponents of exposing your location -- might not be small, but they pale in comparison to Facebook. With the announcement that Facebook will be enabling geolocation next month, Pandora's Box has been torn open; whether you like it or not, geolocation ...

Nick Felton likes numbers. I mean, he really, really likes numbers. He's the guy that publishes an annual report on his life. So yeah, numbers. He also created a tool that we briefly mentioned awhile back called Daytum. Daytum is a web application that lets you set up any number of various displays tracking virtually anything you want, and presents it in a beautiful way. Daytum is a great tool for ...

We'll throw this in the "Whoops" category. ComputerWorld took some time to outline some of the best (or worst?) data security breaches of 2009. While the actual events might not have been too funny to the people involved, the blunders the technology world has dealt with are pretty comical now that they're safely resolved. Some of the highlights include the TSA getting a little too "open", ...

Galloping into the scene on its shining, white horse, Google has finally struck back at the privacy advocates that got just a little riled up by Google CEO Eric Schmidt's outburst last week. And it takes the form... of a presentation! Yes, in classic, classy, we're-as-transparent-as-a-pane-of-glass-covered-in-morning-dew understatement, Google has prepared a lovely set of slides that outline ...