"State regulators may consider requiring utilities and other firms to provide customers clear information regarding how their data may be used, if consumers authorize such use, and guaranteeing that customers have the ability to select the purposes for which their data may be used."

Do you know where your electronic health information is tonight? Here's a reader challenge: I'll pay $10 to the first adult who has had at least five encounters with the private-sector healthcare system in the past 10 years to come up with a complete map of where all his or her electronic health records have traveled, who has seen them and where they are now.

Would Near-Field Communication be considered a superior technology to high-frequency radio frequency identification?

The Facebook project began to unravel in 2008, when a privacy scholar at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Michael Zimmer, showed that the "anonymous" data of Mr. Kaufman and his colleagues could be cracked to identify the source as Harvard undergraduates.

Nearly half of people who weren't interested in mobile wallets said they wouldn't trust any of the companies connected to the technology including major credit card providers, carriers and other prominent companies.

Many also may not be comfortable letting AT&T and Verizon, recently under fire for completely ignoring privacy laws, anywhere near their financial data.

As companies like Google (GOOG), Square, Intuit (INTU) and, reportedly, Apple (AAPL) place their bets on some form of mobile payments, the technology's long-term potential becomes clear. What's harder to envision is exactly how this nascent industry will evolve.

But a smart grid is based on 21st century high-tech digital hardware and software. Its goal is to modernize electricity transmission and distribution and make them more secure, more reliable, more efficient, more interactive and more renewable.

"It's the easiest way for a bad guy to pretend to be you." So why are banks still using SSNs as a major form of customer identification?

On June 25, 2011, the Social Security Administration (SSA) will began assigning random Social Security Numbers (SSN). The current numbering process had been in place since it was created in 1936.

Consumers trust friends' opinions and access them on the go while shopping. 40% accessed social media via mobile phones. 37% of US social media users trust what friends and family say about brands or products on social media, compared to only 10% trust in strangers.

The statement did not indicate whether the information was paper-based or downloaded electronic information, and hospital officials were not immediately available for comment. The information likely was paper-based because "it appears the patients impacted by the incident were limited to individuals born between 1988 and 1992," according to the statement.

No U.S. appeals court appears to have ruled on whether such an order would be legal or not under the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment, which broadly protects Americans' right to remain silent.

Attorneys can customize discovery requests for online postings, status updates, blog entries, photos, or videos to fit the facts of each case. Deposition questions about online activity, changing privacy settings, and deleting online material likewise are fair game if reasonably related to the case at hand.

"If you use a Groupon mobile app and you allow sharing through your device, Groupon may collect geo-location information from the device and use it for marketing deals to you (and for other purposes listed in the 'How Groupon Uses Personal Information' section of the Updated Privacy Statement)," the email states. Groupon adds that the changes also address some new types of business relationships the company is forging and new technologies it is implementing or may use.

Online consumers thought to be motivated primarily by savings are, in fact, often willing to pay a premium for purchases from online vendors with clear, protective privacy policies, according to a new study in the current issue of a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®).

Juggling parental concern with an adolescent patient's legal and ethical right to privacy opens up some tricky questions. The law varies state by state,

While 51% of the comments were posted to blogs and 30% to message boards, just 7% appeared on Facebook and 7% on Twitter.

Despite the recent revelations - and subsequent Congressional hearings - about the use (and misuse) of personal data by companies doing business on the Internet, companies aren't about to stop collecting and trying to use it to improve their results. And why should they, when the more data companies use, the better their chances of selling you more products and services, at better returns? According to Sandy Pentland, a professor at MIT's Media Lab, the best chance people may have of controlling their data online is a modern version of "if you can't beat them, join them."

Much of the privacy debate has focused on cookies and icons and not what really matters: the misuse or abuse of consumer data by third parties in the real world. I don't care whether I see behaviorally targeted ads so much as I don't want my health care or auto insurance to be impacted by sites I've visited and stuff I post online.