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"Admiral Insurance will analyse the Facebook accounts of first-time car owners to look for personality traits that are linked to safe driving. For example, individuals who are identified as conscientious and well-organised will score well. Facebook forces Admiral to pull plan to price car insurance based on posts Read more The insurer will examine posts and likes by the Facebook user, although not photos, looking for habits that research shows are linked to these traits. These include writing in short concrete sentences, using lists, and arranging to meet friends at a set time and place, rather than just "tonight"."

"The blackouts coincided with exams for secondary and high-school students and were implemented as the ultimate step in the country's battle to stop students cheating using smuggled mobile phones and internet-connected devices in exam halls. While attempting to ban mobile phones from exams or setting up local jamming equipment might be a less draconian measure, shutting off the internet is undoubtedly efficient. However, the outage impacted every person and business in the parts of the country controlled by the Iraqi government, causing human rights campaigners, including Access Now, to condemn the move."

"A report from the Oxford Martin School's Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology said that 47 percent of all jobs in the U.S. are likely to be replaced by automated systems. Among the jobs soon to be replaced by machines are real estate brokers, animal breeders, tax advisers, data entry workers, receptionists and various personal assistants."

"This person or group, who go by the names BestBuy and Popopret, recently spammed an ad to folks on Jabber, an instant messaging service. They offered to perform a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on whomever their client(s) wanted, and they backed up their offer by claiming to wield the ability to perform some of the strongest DDoS attacks ever seen. Recent events in the history of the internet show us that these kind of attacks - if these hackers indeed have the power they claim - can wreak internet havoc by blocking user access to a range of some of the web's most popular destinations."

"There's an increasingly popular solution to this problem: why not let an intelligent algorithm make hiring decisions for you? Surely, the thinking goes, a computer is more able to be impartial than a person, and can simply look at the relevant data vectors to select the most qualified people from a heap of applications, removing human bias and making the process more efficient to boot."

"An automated process is better-suited for a variety of other machine-readable forms of identification, said Vahid Motevalli, a professor at Tennessee Tech University and a flight security expert. For example, a person can't read bar codes, but even if they could, they wouldn't be as efficient as an automated process. A machine can almost always check in more people per hour than a security official, meaning security lines would move much faster."

"This wasn't the first time a person of authority told the video game creator to quit doing what he cared about. Luckily, "I had grit and I didn't let them discourage me," said Hawkins."

"Since Keepod's technology enables the computer to boot from the USB device and use the Keepod OS, old computers can be reused, since hardware requirements are not an issue. This way, each person can be given their "own" computer by using an old computer as a "shell." The cost of each system is a mere $7 - a fraction of the cost of an actual PC"

"Now spool forward to the present. One of the things that baffles me is why more people are not alarmed by what Edward Snowden has been telling us about the scale and intrusiveness of internet surveillance. My hunch is that this is partly because - strangely - people can't relate the revelations to things they personally understand."

"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."

"The global volume of electronic waste is expected to grow by 33% in the next four years, when it will weigh the equivalent of eight of the great Egyptian pyramids, according to the UN's Step initiative, which was set up to tackle the world's growing e-waste crisis. Last year nearly 50m tonnes of e-waste was generated worldwide - or about 7kg for every person on the planet. "

"That is, when you are continuously surveilled, when your every word - even your private conversations, even your personal journals - are subject to continuous monitoring, you never have the space in which to think things through. If you doubt a piece of popular wisdom and want to hash it out, your ability to carry on that discussion is limited the knowledge that your testing of the day's received ideas is on the record forever and may be held against you."

"Fear of data-mining of healthcare could be costing as many as 100,000 lives a year, according to Google's Larry Page. Speaking out in response to fears over his company's vast haul of personal information, Page made the case that not only is Google not going too far with collecting and analysing such information - it's not going far enough."

"Machine learning is what's taking place with our personal data while we're passive players in the process. "

"Privacy campaigners say the plan for the regional centres revives talk of "pseudonymised information" being extracted from medical records. That refers to a process whereby some personal identifiers are removed but not enough to make information completely anonymous."

"built an algorithm that can determine with 90 percent accuracy whether a person is drunk or not based on an infrared image of his or her face."

"One of the most widely used tools for monitoring and restricting pupils' internet use in UK schools has a serious security flaw which could leave hundreds of thousands of children's personal information exposed to hackers, a researcher has warned."

"In case you're wondering what could be wrong with entrusting secret keys to the government for use "in exceptional circumstances", just ponder this: a few months ago, hackers (suspected to be Chinese) stole the personnel records of 21.5 million US federal employees, including the records of every person given a government background check for the last 15 years."

"They are a modest correction against failures in algorithmic prioritisation on the indelible web. Before the requests go to the BBC, individuals must prove to Google - which has every interest in rejecting their claim - that the links contain personal information that is inaccurate, irrelevant or out of date, and holds no public interest."

"Google's self-driving cars have driven over a million miles in autonomous mode. But when Google brought its testing program to Austin, Texas, one of the vehicles met its match: a cyclist doing a track stand - when a rider shifts very slightly forward and back to maintain balance while keeping feet on the pedals." This is very surprising that this self-driven car would detect a person not even moving and still keep stopped, it will be interesting to see if and how they fix this problem.