AT&T thinks it’s figured out a new way to make money off the rise of smartphones: Instead of just having consumers pay for …
data
The Internet Weighs About as Much as a Strawberry
Last week, the world was shocked—shocked!—to discover that downloading an electronic book to a device such as a Kindle actually increases the weight of the Kindle. Not by any truly measurable amount, said the New York Times, but still: adding data to a device apparently results in trapped electrons which “have a higher energy than …
Apple: We’re Not Tracking Anyone, and We Never Will
Listen up, world. Steve has something he wants to say:
“Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.”
It doesn’t happen very often but Apple does, every once in a while, make a public statement about something that isn’t directly related to new product …
Class Action Suit Filed Against Apple over Location Tracking
Two men in Florida have filed a class action lawsuit against Apple over the recently-reported hidden database file found on iPhones and 3G-enabled iPads that periodically records users’ location coordinates.
The suit claims that “users of Apple products have … no way to prevent Apple from collecting this information because even if …
How to Encrypt Your iPhone’s Location Data (Consolidated.db)
In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a little file on your iPhone called “consolidated.db” that records your whereabouts every so often.
Some people are upset about it and some people are saying it’s not a big deal. However you perceive it, you can take a simple step to ensure that the location information recorded by your iPhone doesn’t …
Why Apple Collects Location Data from Your iPhone
At this point, unless you’ve been living under a digital rock, everyone knows that Apple is collecting data from your iPhone. But why are they doing it?
(More: How to Encrypt Your iPhone’s Location Data)
Turns out the answer is simpler than you think, and it doesn’t involve a conspiracy theory, the government or David Duchovny. …
iPhone Geo Data Row Rumbles On
The row about iPhone data logging rumbles on today. One security expert says your iPhone sends your location to Apple “twice a day” – and that you agreed to it (even if you didn’t realize it at the time).
Another says the data file at the center of the row is nothing new, and that Apple never gets its hands on it.
Data Visualization Technology: Where Do Your Tax Dollars Go?
If you’re grumbling your way through a mountain of tax forms at the last minute today (or if you forgot today was tax day—hurry!), you may be wondering where all your hard-earned money is going.
Google wondered the same thing, and sought to answer that question with what it calls the Data Viz Challenge. Per a company blog post:
…
Global Data Consumption? 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes
The world’s computers crunch through 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data every year.
That’s 9.57 zettabytes. One zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power, or a million million gigabytes.
And if you still can’t get your head around that kind of number (I know I can’t), let’s convert it into average-sized books.
In book form, our …
Epsilon Breach: Here’s Which Companies’ Email Lists Have Been Exposed
Email marketing provider Epsilon recently revealed that “a subset of Epsilon clients’ customer data” has been exposed.
As “the world’s largest permission-based email marketing provider” with a roster of more than 2,500 big-name clients, the subset of data includes “email addresses and/or customer names,” as the original press release …
Epsilon System Hacked: Has Your E-Mail Been Stolen?
In what’s being touted as possibly one of the biggest data breaches in U.S. history, online marketing firm Epsilon warned some of its customers over the weekend that the personal information of many, many people could be at risk.
Follow-up: See a list of which companies’ e-mail lists have been exposed.
Last Friday, an outside …
If You Use Twitter, You’re Probably One of These Dots
If you have a Twitter account, there’s a very good chance that you are one of the millions of tiny dots on this chart.
That’s because Rob Weir has been watching Twitter’s publicly available data since 2009, patiently aggregating it so he had a huge dataset to work with.
Then he began making graphs, plotting individual Twitter …
