Posts Tagged ‘Data’

One of the realities of using web apps is that you are storing some of your data on another company’s servers and that poses a risk of the company shutting down those apps or going out of business, preventing you from getting at your data. Consequently, it is a good idea to find out whether your favorite web apps provide a way to export your data so that you aren’t at risk of losing it. Google recently released Takeout, which is a data export app they are providing to enable users to download a local copy of their data, and today they announced that Takeout supports Google Voice.
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The first initiative spawned by LinkedIn’s announcement earlier this month of changes to its privacy policy reared its head Thursday, when the professional networking site announced changes to its advertising platform.

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Dr. Luosheng Peng of GageIn views the pain of information overload is not just personal, it’s business — a real problem that has a measurably negative impact on the bottom line.

In this guest post, he explores the information management needs of businesses and how social data can power business intelligence.

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The iPhone is heralded by its maker, Apple, as the greatest and grandest product on the market but this is one first place award Steve Jobs probably won’t put in the trophy case. A new report puts the iPhone ahead of the Android in insecurity, finding that 68 percent of the most popular free iPhone apps send data that can be used to identify users and transmit private information to third parties. That’s compared to the 50 percent of Android apps we reported last week that send users’ data to advertisers without their consent. The study revealed that the iPhone data breach goes even further, enabling some apps to send information as detailed as the user’s name.

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Back in May, privacy online was the number one issue on everyone’s minds. Facebook was in the middle of a huge fiasco over their privacy settings, Google was in hot water over the non-secure launch of Buzz, and AT&T and other companies had been called out for not doing enough to protect consumers’ data. Facebook’s privacy issues were the most notorious and severe, prompting the Electronic Frontier Foundation to propose a Bill of Rights of sorts for its users. They called for three basic principles that all social network users should demand: the right to informed decision making, the right to use and disclose their own data, and the right to completely delete their information should they decide to deactivate their account.
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Here is the visualization from a study by University of California at San Diego about Amrica’s daily data consumption. 1 zettabyte = 1 099 511 627 776 gigabyte – wow, that’s massive!

Could the federal government be getting in the way of transparent communication between officials and the public? According to The National Journal, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy is caught between a rock and a hard place, battling with its desire to interact more with the public via online social networks and the federal regulations that require everything posted online to also be archived internally.

That’s a lot of records that need to be stored. And it’s quite difficult to store such records when you’re talking about activity across networks like MySpace and Facebook. Private messages sent between users, wall postings, status and mood updates…these are all things that change frequently on social networks, and they are things that quickly and easily convey attitudes amongst users. But they can’t be readily archived. Just think of your Facebook newsfeed, which can be completely renewed in less than a day’s time.
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