Neal Ungerleider

With every change in power, especially in the social media era, questions are raised about the new US president’s commitment to privacy rights. Here are some of the biggest things to look out for:
1) The Federal Communications Commission Makes it Easier for ISPs to Share Your Data
2) Citizens and Non-Citizens: Since Donald Trump entered office, the news media has regularly reported on phones and social media being searched at the airport. Although this also took place during the Obama era, anecdotal reports suggest that immigration officers are now requesting these searches of more travelers, and of both citizens and non-citizens.

Inside a San Francisco office building, Google is trying its latest experiment: original sports journalism. When the 2014 World Cup began, Google unveiled a World Cup Trends Newsroom to turn search data surrounding soccer games into infographics.

For the duration of the World Cup, a team of data scientists, designers, editors, and translators will publish shareable original content in multiple languages to the microsite. The project is a bold attempt to turn Google's search results into shareable material -- and inject Google-branded content into the Facebook and Twitter ecosystems.

Inside a large open-plan floor office in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood, the 20-person staff works with an internal Google Trends dashboard to create World Cup-themed content on tight deadlines.

“Prior to each match, we look at sentiment in each country and sentiment about their competitor,” Danielle Bowers, the lead World Cup data analyst at Google Trends, said. “We then look at searches for players, and searches in general in each country. Then during a match, we use real-time tools after things like refs making a controversial call. After the matches end, we then pull summaries of the most interesting statistics.”

When you walk around the offices of Twitter’s engineering department, located on the sixth floor of the company’s downtown San Francisco headquarters, you will see signs counting down the days until the World Cup.

More than 3.2 billion people watched at least a minute of the World Cup live in 2010. For Twitter, Facebook, ESPN, YouTube, and a host of regional social media sites from Brazil to Russia, the World Cup means engineers frantically working overtime to prevent outages and site overloads.

If you’re a college student in Buenos Aires or Chennai, you may have come across an unorthodox way of making extra money. Using your Android phone, an American corporation will pay you to stop by the supermarket on the way home; snap a picture of how much bread or tomatoes costs that day; and submit the price of those commodities into an elaborate data system.

California-based Premise, as they're called, uses this information as fodder for an unusual business model: getting inflation and commodity price data before governments do, sourced from regular people on the street. Using thousands of college students and other part-time workers, Premise gathers raw item prices from retailers and street markets worldwide.

The information Premise’s workers collect is used to help develop live inflation indexes and food security data for clients including hedge funds and government agencies.

According to Premise, the company is currently collecting economic data in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, India, China, Japan, and Australia. Premise is currently offering their indexes to corporations and financial service providers, to government agencies, and to marketing organizations. Of these, David Soloff, Premise’s CEO, feels government agencies have the biggest potential for licensing Premise’s indexes.

Matt Cutts, a senior member of Google's webspam team, announced in early 2014 that Google is working on a new version of their algorithm designed to help small businesses by pushing spammers and content mills into far less prominent search results.

But because algorithms aren't perfect and lack human editors, Google may have accidentally made search results from many small websites less prominent over time.

Brazil is a place where the Internet landscape is diverging from the United States in a way that benefits ordinary digital citizens: On April 21, Brazil's congress passed a legally binding “Internet Bill of Rights.”

The Brazilian Internet Bill of Rights, called the Marco Civil, guarantees network neutrality, regulates government surveillance on the Internet, and places limits on data companies can collect from Brazilian customers. In addition, Internet service providers won't be held liable for content published by their customers and will be legally required to remove offensive material via court order.

President Dilma Rousseff said “The Marco Civil guarantees net neutrality, a fundamental principle for maintaining the free and open nature of the Internet. The new Marco Civil establishes that telecommunications companies must treat any and all data packages equally, and also forbids the blocking, monitoring, filtering, or analysis of the content of such packages. Our model for the Marco Civil can now influence the global debate on the path to ensuring real rights in the virtual world.”