Social Networking Hits the Genome

Article published at Technology Review by Emily Singer

If you've ever wanted to know just exactly how much DNA you share with your ridiculously tall brother or doppelganger best friend, you'll soon be able to find out. 23andMe, a personal genomics startup in Mountain View, CA, is about to unveil a new social-networking service that allows customers to compare their DNA. The company hopes that the new offering will encourage consumers to get DNA testing, potentially creating a novel research resource in the process.

"I think the idea of social networking has untapped potential," says George Church, a pioneer in genomics at Harvard Medical School in Boston and a member of 23andMe's scientific advisory board. "The idea has precedence in patients like me, people who have been enabled to find one another by their disease. Here, people can find each other by their alleles [or genetic variations]."

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Privacy & Social Networks

Video generated by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Jennifer Stoddart. http://www.privcom.gc.ca/

cell phones + adds

As ads arrive on cell phones, privacy concerns grow with targeting opportunities

Article published at Technology Review



NEW YORK (AP) -- Your cell phone is a potential gold mine for marketers: It can reveal where you are, whom you call and even what music you like.

Considering the phone is usually no more than a few feet away, these are powerful clues for figuring out just the right moment to deliver the right coupon for the store just around the corner.

But first marketers will have to wrest the personal profiles from mobile carriers worried that annoyed subscribers might defect to rivals.

''It's proceed with caution,'' said Jarvis Coffin, chief executive of advertising distributor Burst Media Corp. ''Are consumers going to be spooked by the idea that suddenly their phone goes beep and it's a Starbucks offer, and they are standing next to a Starbucks?''

Carriers are now guarding the data zealously, but many people believe it's only a matter of time -- over the next year or two -- before marketers can routinely target ads to a potential customer's location and actions.

Imagine getting pitches for rental cars and hotels the moment you land in San Francisco because an analysis of past calls suggests you tend to take weeklong trips there. Or if day trips to Boston are your thing, you might get an offer for cab service instead.

''My phone has a lot of very specific and detailed information about myself ... information that isn't always going to be resident when I'm at a number of PC browsers,'' said Rob Adler, chief executive for mobile Web company go2 Media Inc.

The research firm eMarketer estimates that U.S. spending in mobile ads, at about $900 million in 2007, will grow more than fivefold to nearly $4.8 billion in 2011. By contrast, paid search and other online spending will only double, to about $42 billion in 2011.

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Consumer Data and Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing

Consumer Data and Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing is a Tesis by Teemu Mutanen published by VTT in 2007.

This is the Thesis Abstract

The emergence of ubiquitous computing means new devices, sensors, and protocols throughout society, and thus new sources of consumer data. The new data sources, along with new means of individual identification, constitute a personal privacy concern: what should and should not be done with personal data. The personal-privacy issue is accompanied by corporate privacy when data mining tasks are applied to consumer databases. The ubiquitous-computing environment will provide various data sources, and these databases will be distributed among various agents.


The privacy-preserving perspective on data mining is a relatively young area. The research in this area is mainly theoretical; to the best of our understanding, no real-world applications exist. In this work, we have tried to fill this gap. The current trend in the growing amount of personalization in online services has also created applications for personalized marketing. Personalized marketing services use detailed information about the context and personal history of a customer. This needs sophisticated individual identification methods, which themselves raise privacy concerns. The novelty in privacy-preserving methods is that sensitive and distributed data could be used for data mining tasks while the privacy of individuals is still preserved.


This thesis has two objectives: the first is to use consumer data from distributed sources and study how customer segmentation is possible while preserving privacy. The idea is to conduct the customer segmentation in a way that the data need not leave the agent holding the data. The other objective is the value of the knowledge acquired from collectively conducted segmentation. We believe that collectively conducted segmentation produces knowledge that cannot be acquired otherwise. The results of this work show that privacy-preserving customer segmentation is possible and that collectively conducted segmentation produces new knowledge.

EU data regulator says Internet addresses are personal information

Article published at Technology Review

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- IP addresses, string of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union's group of data privacy regulators said Monday.

Germany's data protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others comply with EU privacy law.

He told a European Parliament hearing on online data protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Internet protocol, address ''then it has to be regarded as personal data.''

His view differs from that of Google, which insists an IP address merely identifies the location of a computer, not who the individual user is -- something strictly true but which does not recognize that many people regularly use the same computer terminal and IP address.

Scharr acknowledged that IP addresses for a computer may not always be personal or linked to an individual. For example, some computers in Internet cafes or offices are used by several people.

But these exceptions have not stopped the emergence of a host of ''whois'' Internet sites that apply the general rule that typing in an IP address will generate a name for the person or company linked to it.

Treating IP addresses as personal information would have implications for how search engines record data.

Google led the pack by being the first last year to cut the time it stored search information to 18 months. It also reduced the time limit on the cookies that collect information on how people use the Internet from a default of 30 years to an automatic expiration in two years.

But a privacy advocate at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, said it was ''absurd'' for Google to claim that stripping out the last two figures from the stored IP address made the address impossible to identify by making it one of 256 possible configurations.


Full article at Technology Review