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it's in these companies' hands to do this ethically--to build algorithms that show us what we need to know and what we don't know, not just what we like.

why would the Googles and Facebooks of the world change what they're doing (absent government regulation)? My hope is that, like newspapers, they'll move from a pure profit-making posture to one that recognizes that they're keepers of the public trust.

most people don't know how Google and Facebook are controlling their information flows. And once they do, most people I've met want to have more control and transparency than these companies currently offer. So it's a way in to that conversation. First people have to know how the Internet is being edited for them.

what's good and bad about the personalization. Tell me some ways that this is not a good thing? Here's a few. 1) It's a distorted view of the world. Hearing your own views and ideas reflected back is comfortable, but it can lead to really bad decisions--you need to see the whole picture to make good decisions; 2) It can limit creativity and innovation, which often come about when two relatively unrelated concepts or ideas are juxtaposed; and 3) It's not great for democracy, because democracy requires a common sense of the big problems that face us and an ability to put ourselves in other peoples' shoes.

Stanford researchers Dean Eckles and Maurits Kapstein, who figured out that not only do people have personal tastes, they have personal "persuasion profiles". So I might respond more to appeals to authority (Barack Obama says buy this book), and you might respond more to scarcity ("only 2 left!"). In theory, if a site like Amazon could identify your persuasion profile, it could sell it to other sites--so that everywhere you go, people are using your psychological weak spots to get you to do stuff. I also really enjoyed talking to the guys behind OKCupid, who take the logic of Google and apply it to dating.

Nobody noticed when Google went all-in on personalization, because the filtering is very hard to see.

In addition, the file is not easily accessible to users: it requires some computer skills to extract the data. By contrast, the Apple file is easily extracted directly from the computer or phone.

Senator Franken has asked Jobs to explain the purpose and extent of the iPhone's tracking. "The existence of this information - stored in an unencrypted format - raises serious privacy concerns," Franken writes in his letter to Jobs. "Anyone who gains access to this single file could likely determine the location of a user's home, the businesses he frequents, the doctors he visits, the schools his children attend, and the trips he has taken - over the past months or even a year."

Franken points out that a stolen or lost iPhone or iPad could be used to map out its owner's precise movements "for months at a time" and that it is not limited by age, meaning that it could track the movements of users who are under 13

security researcher, Alex Levinson, says that he discovered the file inside the iPhone last year, and that it has been used in the US by the police in a number of cases. He says that its purpose is simply to help the phone determine its location, and that he has seen no evidence that it is sent back to Apple. However documents lodged by Apple with the US Congress suggest that it does use the data if the user agrees to give the company "diagnostic information" from their iPhone or iPad.

This explanation is completely bogus. Wireless providers, like wireline broadband providers, are quite capable of retaining logs of the IP addresses they temporarily issue to their customers. Many wireless providers, such as Sprint and Verizon, already retain IP logs for at least a year. The true explanation for the loophole is, I believe, that the wireless carriers have powerful and remarkably effective lobbyists.

At the heart of this debate is the need to ensure that in a world where many, if not all, of the important details of our lives – including our relationships – exist in cyber-perpetuity, people retain, or reclaim, some level of control over their online selves. While the world of forgetting may have vanished, we can reshape the new one in a way that benefits rather than overwhelms us. Our overriding task is to construct a digital way of life that reinforces our existing sense of ethics and values, with security, trust, and fairness at its heart.