Weird - Businesses being able to know information about people before family members

A couple of years back, there was a story about how a researcher had a challenge; how to identify a person based on their search patterns. After all, what a person searches for reveals to some extent clues to a person, and putting together all the details for a person in terms of their search helped the researcher get details of the person, to the extent that the actual person was identified by the researcher.
There is a lot of hoopla about privacy details, with the amount of details being recorded by search engines, social networks such as Facebook, and online stores that are integrated with these search engines; but the normal citizen is not so worried about such details. Read the details of this story, which worried the giant store Target so much that they tried to stop the details of this story from emerging (link to article):

Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers.
What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance.

One can be sure that it sounds creepy.

Online Privacy (Issues in the Digital Age)	Online Privacy: A Reference Handbook	Privacy Lost: How Technology Is Endangering Your Privacy

Weird news - An agency in Germany declares the 'Facebook like' button as illegal

For software companies, especially in the area of web, the different standards followed by Government agencies the world over can make their job very difficult. What works in one area does not work in another area, and these restrictions can cause problems to the companies.
Consider the case of Facebook. It is one of the most widely used platforms in the area of social networks, and one of the most important tools is the 'Like' button that is there in the Facebook page. These allow items to become popular, and get more people access to such news / updates. For Facebook, the Like button is a very important tool, and any restrictions on such a tool can be significant. Well, a data protection agency in Germany is threatening the 'Like' button (link to article):

A German data protection authority is "unliking" Facebook's "Like" button.
The state of Schleswig-Holstein's data protection commissioner, Thilo Weichert, on Friday ordered state institutions to shut down the fan pages on the social networking site and remove the "Like" button from their websites, saying it leads to profiling that violates German and European law.
Facebook insisted on Friday that is in full compliance with European data protection laws.
On Friday, Weichert issued a statement saying technical analysis by his office shows Facebook violated German and European data protection laws by passing content data to the social network's servers in the U.S.

Lack of security when discarding old machines or drives - contain confidential information

In today's time, we store a huge amount of data on our computers and on the disk drives that they contain. A small fraction of such information is pretty confidential, whether it be customer information, credit card information, social security information, police records, and even more importantly, national security related information (such as military and intelligence agencies). Accessing such information when it is in the computers during operation is pretty highly controlled, with all manners of security controls, penalties for unauthorized access, and so on. However, when these computers are discarded, precautions are not taken and such information can be extracted (link to article):

A third (34 per cent) of discarded hard disk drives still contain confidential data, according to a new study which unearthed copies of hospital records and sensitive military information on eBayed kit.
A disk bought on eBay contained details of test launch routines for the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) ground to air missile defence system. The same disk also held information belonging to the system’s manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, including blueprints of facilities and personal data on workers, including social security numbers.

Storing everything around you in electronic form

Have you ever thought about how much you see around you, all the experiences you undergo, the people you meet, and so on ? All of these are memories that we junk (after all, how many of us remember the persons who were in the elevator with us a week back) ? If you started remembering all that, you would be a person with a superb memory (many of us have problems with remembering the name of people we went to school with, or even those who were very close friends sometime back). Well, consider the case of a person (as part of an experiment) who saves all information, including the people he meets, the meals he has, the conversation he has, and so on (link to article):

But Bell, who is 75 years old, takes the idea of digital memory to a sci-fi-esque extreme. He carries around video equipment, cameras and audio recorders to capture his conversations, commutes, trips and experiences. Microsoft is working on a SenseCam that would hang around a person's neck and automatically capture every detail of life in photo form. Bell has given that a whirl. He also saves everything -- from restaurant receipts (he take pictures of them) to correspondence, bills and medical records. He makes PDF files out of every Web page he views.

Can you visualize recording your entire life, ready for you to play back whenever you need something. However, if there is something called 'information overload', then such a scene is a perfect example.