“Alarmed by the scope and audacity of the breach, the company went public with the news in January 2010, becoming the first U.S. firm to voluntarily disclose an intrusion that originated in China. In a blog post, Google chief legal officer David Drummond said hackers stole the source code that powers Google’s vaunted search engine and also targeted the e-mail accounts of activists critical of China’s human rights abuses. As Google was responding to the breach, its technicians made another startling discovery: its database with years of information on surveillance orders had been hacked. The database included information on thousands of orders issued by judges around the country to law enforcement agents seeking to monitor suspects’ e-mails. The most sensitive orders, however, came from a federal court that approves surveillance of foreign targets such as spies, diplomats, suspected terrorists and agents of other governments. Those orders, issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, are classified.”

“Every time we make a mobile call or send a text message–which pings a cell tower–that info is recorded. So, with enough computer power, a company can draw pretty accurate conclusions about how and when people move through a city or a region. Or they can tell where people have come from to attend an event. As part of a recent case study, for example, Verizon was able to say that people with Baltimore area codes outnumbered those with San Francisco area codes by three to one inside the New Orleans Superdome for the Super Bowl in February. In a world enamored of geolocation, this is digital gold. It’s one thing to know the demographic blend of a community, but to be able to find out how many people pass by a business and where they’re coming from, that adds a whole nother level of precision to target marketing.”

“Photographing a single license plate one time on a public city street may not seem problematic, but when that data is put into a database, combined with other scans of that same plate on other city streets, and stored forever, it can become very revealing. Information about your location over time can show not only where you live and work, but your political and religious beliefs, your social and sexual habits, your visits to the doctor, and your associations with others. And, according to recent research reported in Nature, it’s possible to identify 95% of individuals with as few as four randomly selected geospatial datapoints (location time), making location data the ultimate biometric identifier.”

“Is more data always better? Hardly. In fact, if you’re looking for correlations—is thing X connected to thing Y, in a way that will give me information I can act on?—gathering more data could actually hurt you.”

“Over the years, the Postal Service has become the world leader in optical character recognition — software capable of reading computer-generated lettering and handwriting — sinking millions of dollars into equipment that can read nearly 98 percent of all hand-addressed mail and 99.5 percent of machine-addressed pieces. That was not always the case. In the beginning, people sorted mail. As the volume and variety increased, the post office turned to automation. But the machines could read only about 35 percent of the mail at first and had trouble with handwritten addresses. So the Postal Service set up the centers, using people to supplement the scanners. At the height of the program, in 1997, the centers processed 19 billion images annually, about 10 percent of all mail at the time, the post office said. In the last year, this center, and the one in Wichita, Kan., that will close in September, deciphered just 2.4 billion images, or a mere 1.5 percent of the mail, the post office said.”

“An estimated 5 million Americans are already using wearable devices to sync their lives to the cloud, and their ranks are growing rapidly. Like Paulus, they are sending vast amounts of information—collectively referred to as Big Data—to the servers of salivating Silicon Valley executives. In just the first half of last year, venture-capital firms invested $700 million in businesses developing new wearable and embedded devices. According to a study by the consulting giant McKinsey, Big Data could be worth $300 billion annually to the health-care industry alone. But its value to sports-apparel companies, health-food purveyors, and even mattress-makers is also apparent. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, 283 vendors showed up to promote digital health products—over 100 more than the number of companies hawking games. One British mobile-research firm estimates that by 2017, 70 million people will be buying wearable devices annually and slapping them on their wrists (and chests, ankles, and necks). And while there is no valuation yet for, say, what Paulus’ heart rate is worth per beat, there’s reason to think that users of tracking apps and sensor-laden devices are giving the milk away free.”

“As recently as the year 2000, only one-quarter of all the world’s stored information was digital. The rest was preserved on paper, film, and other analog media. But because the amount of digital data expands so quickly — doubling around every three years — that situation was swiftly inverted. Today, less than two percent of all stored information is nondigital.”

“The survey found a large percentage of Millennials – and an even larger percentage of users age 35 and older – are uncomfortable with others having access to their personal data online or information about their web behavior. When asked about the statement, “No one should ever be allowed to have access to my personal data or web behavior,” 70 percent of Millennials agreed, compared with 77 percent of users 35 and older. However, in spite of those views, significant percentages of Millennials compared to those age 35 and older are willing to give up some of that privacy – if they benefit from it.”