A couple of Swedish parents have stirred up debate in the country by refusing to reveal whether their two-and-a-half-year-old child is a boy or a girl. Pop’s parents, both 24, made a decision when their baby was born to keep Pop’s sex a secret. Aside from a select few – those who have changed the…
Category: Misc
Who’s watching the watchers?
A silicon chip in your Viagra pack reports back to Pfizer on how much you took, and when. You fetch the last Coke from your chip-tagged fridge and your TV airs a Pepsi ad. Your phone company combs your trash for the chips you’ve cast off, selling the data it finds to marketers. And when…
IBM crypto snoops data without looking
An IBM researcher has solved a tricky mathematical problem that makes it possible to analyse encrypted data without compromising privacy. Craig Gentry used a mathematical object called an ideal lattice to develop a system called fully homomorphic encryption (apparently you might also know it as ‘privacy homomorphism’). […] With the breakthrough, companies storing confidential, electronic…
How much information can the government demand from us?
When I was in law school, I went to a luncheon at which famed legal scholar Arthur Miller spoke. His topic, still a fresh one back in the mid-1980s, was the amount of private information floating around in computers. His target was American corporations. He felt that American corporations were collecting too much consumer data,…