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""Not just here in this country, or in the United States, but virtually every adult human in the world has a cellphone, and they're all putting out data about where they are, what their preferences are, who they talk to and that data will run the world. That's why I call it the decade of data. "This is the beginning of it, not the end of it, we're just at the start," Pentland added. "

"We're tempted to file this one under "the more things change, the more they stay the same." A wristband, called Nymi, that taps the user's heartbeat as a biometric marker, will also double as a bitcoin wallet."

"Shadbolt also forecasts that future changes to the web will mean people will be "connected all the time" to medical diagnostic systems - but also that search companies including Google and China's Baidu may face challenges as web use shifts from the desktop to handheld and mobile devices."

Huge chunks of the Internet will be effectively unreachable, and which sites go into the censorship bucket will be decided upon in secret, by unelected employees of big corporations, like China's Huawei. Sure, you can untick the box if you want, but as David Cameron's advisors will tell you, defaults are powerful and most users never change them.

"Not everything is so straightforward in Google land, as Google's chat protocols Hangouts and Talk, suffered a privacy issue on the 26 September that saw instant messages routed to unintended recipients."

"The reason is that routine big-data analytical techniques can now effectively manufacture personal data that is not protected by any of the measures we've used up to now. A well-known illustration of this is the way Target, an American retail chain, creatively collated scattered pieces of data about individuals' changes in shopping habits to predict the delivery date of pregnant shoppers - so that they could then be targeted with relevant advertisements."

"So instead of switching off the internet, the conversation should be about how to change it. How to clarify what we're giving for what we take. And the responsibility should not be with young people, in their WiFi-reliant worlds - it should be with the massive corporations that profit from them. As with cigarette packets (their photos of messy lungs a stark reminder of the choice you're making), so should the internet be required to advertise its risks, to alert you to where your data is being held. Because this is not just somewhere we play. The internet is where we live."

"From a computer science perspective, learning the behaviour of a single user is tough. This is the small data problem; unlike big data, where patterns and trends easily emerge, individual human beings can be unpredictable and can change behaviour, which is not helpful for pattern-hunting algorithms."

"Naturally, you should do this - but be aware that this situation presents an ideal opportunity to phishers to start sending fake emails, complete with embedded links to the "change password" page - in reality, a website designed to harvest your details."

"The new tools appear to allow Twitter users to share images with text overlays, stickers, and other modifications. Twitter's existing tools merely allow people to crop images or run them through filters that greatly change their appearance, whether it's by upping the contrast or making them look like old Polaroid shots."

"While Keenan emphasised the capability was not a centralised biometric database, and was simply an improved way to share information already collected by different Australian jurisdictions, Gregory questioned how these images of Australians will be employed by law enforcement. "It's subtle changes in the way that things are used that need to be debated the most," he said. "In this case, we're talking about using our passport photos for a purpose for which we never gave permission.""

Technology impacts on education From the abacus to the Apple Mac, technology has constantly changed the way we learn.In equal measure, the needs of education have provided the driving force behind some of our most significant technological innovations.BBC World Service programme Digital Planet, explored three of the many unique initiatives in education technology.

Millions of Internet Explorer users in Europe will get the chance to change their web browser from 1 March.

The new changes to Facebook have not been well-received by everyone.

"Creepy grabs all this geo-location data and puts pins on a map for you. Most of the time, you probably remember to get the privacy settings right. But if you get it wrong just once - maybe the first time you used a new app, maybe before your friend showed you how to change the settings - Creepy will find it, and your home is marked on a map"

"Like China's Great Firewall, the UK firewall is a patchwork of rules and filters that are opaque to users and regulators. Every ISP uses its own censorship supplier to spy on its customers and decide what they're allowed to see, and they change what is and is not allowed from moment to moment, with no transparency into how, when or why those decisions are being made. "

"Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well. Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades. Call Center Employees call-center Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient. Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you. But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls. Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves. At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced