Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor. When Gabriel Weinberg launched a search engine in 2008, plenty of people thought he was insane. How could DuckDuckGo, a tiny, Philadelphia-based startup, go up against Google? One way, he wagered, was by respecting user privacy. Six years later, we're living in the post-Snowden era, and the idea doesn't seem so crazy. In fact, DuckDuckGo is exploding. Looking at a chart of DuckDuckGo's daily search queries, the milestones are obvious. "Every year, we've grown 200-500%," Weinberg says. Surprisingly, the sudden success didn't send the site crashing down. Three Ideas In One: Where DuckDuckGo Came From Weinberg didn't originally set out to build a search engine. "I started all of these projects independently and none of them really took off," Weinberg says.
The result was DuckDuckGo, a search engine offering direct answers to people's queries, rather than merely delivering a list of links. Related: Can We All Just Admit Google Is An Evil Empire? Weinberg and his small team seem undeterred. Attention, Shoppers - Store Is Tracking Your Cell. Can SF streetlights spy on you? Rebecca@sfbg.com In the Netherlands city of Eindhoven, the streetlights lining a central commercial strip will glow red if a storm is coming. It's a subtle cue that harkens back to an old phrase about a red sky warning mariners that bad weather is on the way. The automated color change is possible because satellite weather data flows over a network to tiny processors installed inside the lampposts, which are linked by an integrated wireless system.
Lighting hues reflecting atmospheric changes are only the beginning of myriad functions these so-called "smart streetlights" can perform. Each light has something akin to a smartphone embedded inside of it, and the interconnected network of lights can be controlled by a central command center. Since they have built-in flexibility for multiple adaptations, the systems can be programmed to serve a wide variety of purposes. LED streetlights are energy-efficient and could yield big savings — but the lights do far more than shine.
Data_mining. Big Data and a Renewed Debate Over Privacy. “It really freaked people out,” says Daniel J. Weitzner, a former senior Internet policy official in the Obama administration. “The people who cared about privacy were every bit as worried as we are now.” Along with fueling privacy concerns, of course, the mainframes helped prompt the growth and innovation that we have come to associate with the computer age.
Today, many experts predict that the next wave will be driven by technologies that fly under the banner of Big Data — data including Web pages, browsing habits, sensor signals, smartphone location trails and genomic information, combined with clever software to make sense of it all. Proponents of this new technology say it is allowing us to see and measure things as never before — much as the microscope allowed scientists to examine the mysteries of life at the cellular level. “This data is a new asset,” says Alex Pentland, a computational social scientist and director of the Human Dynamics Lab at the M.I.T.
Dr. Personal data, Dr. The Future Of Surveillance Will Turn Society Into A Massive Online Game. No matter what the future may contain, one thing is certain: just about everything in it, including us, will increasingly be under surveillance. Our habits, patterns, health, and preferences will be translated into data. Who will benefit from this valuable information, and how can we start developing the mindset to deal with this reality now? To get started, let’s filter a few core concepts and tough questions through our imaginations. Privacy The concept of privacy is relative, and it may be a luxury, but it’s good when people are able to relax, think, live and create without fearing that curiosity and exploration will come back to haunt them. Surveillance limits our freedom, but it could also allow us to save lives.
If we could see such events before they escalate, what would we do about it? Behavior The story line in many games is that you are the hero and you fight your way up to the final battle against some evil character. Counterculture.