Driverless cars could soon be cruising Australian roads if South Australia gives the go-ahead to reforms to its road legislation. The technology promises to increase safety on our roads, but what happens…
The consent policies of popular websites would take a month to read. Perhaps including a sign like this would be a simpler solution.
Shutterstock
We live in a world increasingly dominated by our personal data. Some of those data we choose to reveal, for example, through social media, email and the billions – yes, billions – of messages, photos and…
The trend towards cloud storage has privacy implications for individuals.
What does privacy mean in an age of ongoing privacy breaches? With new privacy law coming online in Australia on March 12, our Privacy in Practice series explores the practical challenges facing Australian…
Can you ever be anonymous in your doctor’s surgery if your doctor isn’t?
MTSOfan
The debate about uploading nearly all data from UK medical practices to a national database continues to cause concern. Responding to fears that the information held in the care.data database will put…
Press two to cancel your mobile phone contract and revert to your landline.
_Wiedz
Concern over privacy has peaked in recent months, especially in telecommunications, where technological advances appear to bring total surveillance ever closer to reality. In one high-profile case of recent…
Online retail continues to grow, despite the shadow of cybercrime.
Dolinski/Flickr
The recent hack and subsequent data loss by US retailer Target involved the personal information of at least 70 million customers, including names, phone numbers, email and mailing addresses. It follows…
Personal data stored on social media platforms, including photos and chat messages, are vulnerable to a range of threats.
Flickr: papalamour
How many of your cherished memories, and even important work documents, only exist online? Taken together, photo and video sharing sites, blogging and microblogging sites, as well as social media, have…
Protestors against Lynas mine processing in Malaysia
Peter Boyle
This week a dozen protesters travelled from Malaysia to Australia to protest outside the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of Lynas Corporation, an Australian rare earth mining company, for the third year running…
A little known UK government initiative is underway to release vast amounts of personal data from companies to citizens with the laudable aim of handing power to the consumer. The midata initiative aims…
Using nanotechnology, researchers have developed a technique to increase the data storage capacity of a DVD from a measly 4.7GB to 1,000TB.
Nature Communications
Min Gu, Swinburne University of Technology; Yaoyu Cao, Swinburne University of Technology, and Zongsong Gan, Swinburne University of Technology
We live in a world where digital information is exploding. Some 90% of the world’s data was generated in the past two years. The obvious question is: how can we store it all? In Nature Communications today…
Shhh – there’s so much buzz around your digital footprint.
Yael P
Privacy and technology go together like music and dance: it’s only when both work well together that the magic happens. But what about privacy in the age of big data, an era in which your every move has…
You could fill this with coffee … or the equivalent of millions of DVDs.
raindog/Flickr
Biological systems have been using DNA as an information storage molecule for billions of years. Vast amounts of data can thus be encoded within microscopic volumes, and we carry the proof of this concept…
The imperative to remember information has been replaced with the imperative to remember where information is located.
parkieblues
When Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” hit newsstands in the July/August 2008 edition of The Atlantic, the reaction was predictably vociferous. The essay itself – a 4,175 word editorial…
The debate about data is growing as politicians and law reformers consider privacy implications.
AAP
Prime Minister Julia Gillard today launched a data centre in Sydney, as part of a broader push to see sensitive data stored in Australia. The government is proposing new legislation that would force telecommunications…