October 2013

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the court that oversees National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs, reauthorized the agency’s collection of bulk telephone data, saying that Congress had already approved the reauthorization of the program.

Judge Mary McLaughlin said she supports a ruling from earlier in the year, reauthorizing Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, which allows the NSA to collect bulk telephone data. To justify her ruling, Judge McLaughlin points to “Congress’ reenactment of Section 215 after receiving information about the government’s ... interpretation of the statute.” “Although the existence of the [bulk telephone data collection] program was classified until several months ago ... many Members of Congress were aware of, and each Member had the opportunity to learn about, the scope of the metadata collection,” Judge McLaughlin wrote.

Every smartphone these days comes equipped with a Wi-Fi card. When the card is on and looking for networks to join, it's detectable by local routers. In your home, the router connects to your device, and then voila — you have the Internet on your phone. But in a retail environment, other in-store equipment can pick up your Wi-Fi___33 card, learn your device's unique ID number and use it to keep tabs on that device over time as you move through the store.

This gives offline companies the power to get incredibly specific data about how their customers behave. You could say it's the physical version of what Web-based vendors have spent millions of dollars trying to perfect — the science of behavioral tracking. Thousands of customer interactions a day are logged and uploaded to the databases of third-party companies that specialize in retail analytics. Estimates vary as to how big this industry is, but according to Jules Polonetsky, the director of the Future of Privacy, nine major players account for the vast majority of tracking activity. Others estimate there could be as many as 40 major and minor firms.

As the number of touch-screen devices – smart phones and tablets – multiplies dramatically in American homes, so, too, do the arguments for and against these devices being placed in little toddler hands.

According to a Nielsen survey, some 80 percent of tablet-owning parents let their young children use their devices; Babyshower.com found that 75 percent of moms regularly hand their smart phones to their toddlers. Apps for preschoolers is one of the fastest growing categories in the Apple Store. Some child-development experts are sounding an alarm about the effect of this new, interactive technology on young children, seeing it as a dangerous increase in "screen time," with various negative effects on development, while others see huge potential in an "app generation," in some areas even advocating an iPad for every preschooler.

All of this has left parents struggling to find a balance for raising what some call the touch-screen generation – those children born around the same time as the iPad, who are young enough to still be the full-time responsibility of adults but who also have a seemingly natural ability to scroll and swipe their way independently through the world via mobile devices. Whether they ban screen time completely or allow only educational apps, many moms and dads are trying to chart their own course through touch-screen parenting. Often, they feel they are on their own, making rules up as they go.

Google and Facebook are the Web’s biggest advertising heavyweights, and fierce rivals. So it wasn’t surprising that when Facebook launched its Facebook Exchange ad-selling platform in 2012, it ended up working with just about everyone in ad tech except for Google. But now that is changing.

Google announced that its DoubleClick unit will soon be working with Facebook Exchange, which lets advertisers show ads to Facebook users based on their travels outside of Facebook’s pages. In English: Facebook is going to sell ads to Google’s ad buyers. In the ad tech world, this is a very big deal. DoubleClick is a dominant force, and Facebook Exchange has provided ad buyers with a huge new source of inventory, so putting them together has big advantages for both sides.