Cyber spy network

Breaking news of an "electronic spy network, based mainly in China, [that] has infiltrated computers from government offices around the world" in more than 100 countries, according to Canadian researchers http://tinyurl.com/dms5dt

Is nothing we do online safe?!

Social network sites dent privacy efforts

The BBC reports that "Greater use of social network sites is making it harder to maintain true anonymity, suggests research. By analysing links between users of social sites, researchers were able to identify many people in supposedly anonymous data sets."

Do we care? Why, or why not?!

Monitoring social networks

"Social networking sites like Facebook could be monitored by the UK government under proposals to make them keep details of users' contacts ... It is part of a plan to store details of all phone calls, e-mails and websites visited on a central database ... Phone companies are already required to store details of all calls, such as the time and date, location and who made them, for 12 months for possible use in criminal investigations or court cases ... An EU directive ordering data on internet traffic to be stored in a similar way is due to come into effect in the UK on Monday, 6 April." http://tinyurl.com/cw856n

Australia to filter internet traffic

In October 2008 there were reports of concerns by online civil liberties groups that the Australian government is about to erect a Great Firewall of Australia - introducing a form of internet censorship that will infringe upon the freedom of computer users to browse the worldwide web. http://tinyurl.com/58vf3f

Long tail again

Re-reading Chris Anderson's amazing book "The (Longer) Long Tail" about the new Web 2.0 internet economy; how to monetize content and engage with customers and others in our marketplace.

It's packed full of fantastic ideas and helping to shape our approach to product development and marketing. And because it's such an easy read some of the guys on the team are also dipping into the ideas it puts forward.

Google listening to our phone calls now?

I'm one of millions who happily use Google's Gmail service to send and receive my email, even though the context-sensitive ads down the side of the screen are proof enough that Google's computers are monitoring every word I send and receive in emails (or write in this Blogger-hosted forum!)

Recent news is that Google plans to extend their powers of observation to the phone calls we make also: the new Google Voice service will provide a speech-to-text service for voicemail. Instead of having to listen to voice mail messages, they will be converted automatically to text as the Google computers listen in; the messages will then be sent to the subscriber by email, where they can be stored and searched.

Presumably, if they can do this for voicemail then the computers could listen to all my conversations, transcribe them and archive store for later search?