Quartz

Americans are watching more television than ever. They’re just doing it on their own schedule.

Weekly TV viewing has increased 2% over the last three years, from 35 hours and 36 minutes to 37 hours and 50 minutes. In just three years, the percentage of viewers watching live TV has fallen from 89% to 80%, while streaming over the Internet has increased from 4% to 11%, and DVR viewing has jumped from 5% to 6% of total viewing.

Big data -- the kind that statisticians and computer scientists scour for insights on human beings and our societies -- is cooked up using a recipe that’s been used a thousand times.

Here’s how it goes: Acquire a trove of people’s highly personal data -- say, medical records or shopping history. Run that huge set through a “de-identification” process to anonymize the data. And voila -- individuals become anonymous, chartable, and unencumbered by personal privacy concerns. So what’s the problem? It turns out that all that de-identified data may not be so anonymous after all.

So argues Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton computer scientist who first made waves in the privacy community by co-authoring a 2006 paper showing that Netflix users and their entire rental histories could be identified by cross-referencing supposedly anonymous Netflix ratings with the Internet Movie Database.

Narayanan and fellow Princeton professor Edward Felten delivered the latest blow to the case of de-identification proponents (those who maintain that de-identification is viable) with a July 9 paper that makes a serious case for data paranoia. They argue that de-identification doesn’t work -- in theory or in practice -- and that those who say it does are promoting a “false sense of security” by naively underestimating the attackers who might try to deduce personal information from big data.

Journalistic earnings stories can feel robotic, even when written by a news organization as prestigious as the Associated Press. Acknowledging this fact, the AP has decided that it will just have robots produce stories on companies’ earning reports.

The AP announced that it will be moving toward full automation of 150- to 300-word earnings reports. The system, to be rolled out in August, will work by pumping data from Zacks Investment Research into Automated Insights, a firm that specializes in computer-generated prose. Naturally, the reports will still conform to AP style, the system of grammar and word choice that is standard in much of American journalism.

There are obvious benefits to having robots write earnings reports. For one, it facilitates a massive increase in the volume of content. The AP hopes to ramp up from providing 300 manual reports each quarter now to as many as 4,400 with the new system. An automated system also frees up reporters to work on more creative efforts, including analyzing the reports and writing stories based on them.

The “Internet of things” is one of those odd phrases that can mean many things and nothing at the same time. Between 26 and 50 million “things” will be connected to the Internet by 2020, according to various forecasts.

But not all of those things need an Internet connection, points out Davor Sutija, who runs Thinfilm, a Norwegian company working in the field of printable electronics. They don’t all need IP addresses. All they need is the ability to pass on the information they gather to something that can process the information, often via a connection to the Internet.

“Smart” objects only need to be smart enough to do that job. Unlike traditional electronics, which are made of silicon wafers mounted on boards etched with circuitry, a new generation of printable (and sometimes bendable) electronics are made in the same way as a newspaper -- by depositing an ink-like substance on a thin film (hence the name) made of a type of plastic commonly used for soft drink bottles. The result is a sheet of electronics that can be over a kilometer long, is cheap and flexible, and can be embedded into everything from clothes to food packaging.

In patient monitoring, the electronics could even make human communications more effective, for instance.

[Commentary] Silicon Valley has become a social clique with its own subculture. We’ve created a make-believe cult of objective meritocracy, a pseudo-scientific mythos to obscure and reinforce the belief that only people who look and talk like us are worth noticing.

After making such a show of burning down the bad old rules of business, the new ones we’ve created seem pretty similar. Because the talent market is tight, that insularity presents a problem. It’s hard to find good people to hire.

The problem with gathering a bunch of logically-oriented young males together and encouraging them to construct a Culture gauntlet has nothing to do with their logic, youth, or maleness, but more with the fact that all cliques are self-reinforcing. There is no way to re-calibrate once the insiders have convinced themselves of their greatness.

The first step toward dissolving these petty Cultures is writing down their unwritten rules for all to see. The word “privilege” literally means “private law.” It’s the secrecy, deniable and immune to analysis, that makes the balance of power so lopsided in favor of insiders.

Then, try, just for a moment, to suppose that it’s probably unnatural for an industry to be so heavily dominated by white and Asian middle-class males under 30 who keep telling each other to only hire their friends. You want a juicy industry to disrupt? How about your own? [Bueno is senior engineer at MemSQ and the author of “Lauren Ipsum," a children’s novel about computer science and critical thinking]

[Commentary] Based on the uproar from American Internet and legal experts, I had assumed a privacy ruling by the European Union Court of Justice in May was an assault on free speech and our right to information.

I also assumed it would mostly be sex offenders or hucksters who would ask to have a search term delinked from something they don’t like on the web. But without forgetting, there can’t be much forgiving, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, author of “Delete: the virtue of forgetting in the digital age" (the book that inspired Europeans to rethink their online privacy policies) points out. And it’s hard to look forward, not back. And many, many people want slivers, or even whole swaths, of their past to be forgotten. [Zomorodi is the host and managing editor of New Tech City on WNYC, a public radio station in New York City]

U2opia mobile, a Singapore-based company founded by Indian entrepreneurs, has catapulted to 17 million users in 36 countries as a result. To understand why, you have to unlearn Facebook—its blue background, viral videos, photo uploads -- as you know it.

And put yourself in the position of someone who has never been on the Internet before.

U2opia takes dumb phones and uses the so-called Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) protocol to allow such phones to connect to specific Internet services such as Twitter and Facebook tailored for the small screen and text-only functionality. This is done through the company’s proprietary platform Fonetwish, which has signed agreements with Facebook and Twitter.

An estimated 62% of the phones used in the world are dumb phones, officially called “feature phones” by manufacturers and networks. Their market share is much higher in emerging markers. Since its launch in 2011, the platform has steadily acquired users on 53 operator networks in 36 countries. They’re in places as far apart as Senegal, Somalia, South Sudan, Chad, Niger, Haiti, Honduras, Columbia, El Salvador, Cambodia, Palestine, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India and Mauritania, among others. U2opia’s real achievement is not in making Facebook available on feature phones. It is that it used the global lure of Facebook and Twitter to build an emerging markets user base that is of interest and value to all manner of clients.

We may not understand the full impact that wearable computers -- fitness trackers like the Fitbit, and augmented-reality devices like Google Glass, for example -- have on our privacy. In fact, one of the first computer scientists to work on wearable tech says we should be more wary.

Alex “Sandy” Pentland, director of the MIT Human Dynamics Lab, is an expert on the intersection of society and big data. Thanks to the revelations by Edward Snowden, many people now realize that their metadata (e.g., not the contents of your email, but the time and place you sent it from) is often up for grabs, regardless of how many privacy barriers they’ve put in place.

But Pentland doesn’t think we’re scared enough. Pentland wants us to be afraid of data collection, not of wearables themselves. Wearables, he told The Verge, will also allow us to be more social and productive, and supplement our memories with easily accessible information. We need them -- but we also need data privacy laws to evolve before the technology becomes ubiquitous.

The solution, Pentland said, is to make individuals the masters of their own data. “That’s the most important thing,” he said. “Control of the data.”

[Commentary] Mobile is counting on the developing world (and its estimated 5 billion mobile subscriptions) in a big way. As Mozilla demonstrates a $25 smartphone, undercutting on price has long been the industry’s strategy to wooing emerging market consumers. However, content also matters significantly.

On smartphones, content manifests in apps, meaning mobile providers and companies must ask: Is the battle for cheaper smartphones a worthwhile fight, or does the real war lie in making their content accessible? There are considerable obstacles to actively reaching consumers in emerging markets. More than a third of these consumers, for example, find content too expensive to access, while 32% are not aware of any kind of incentives or promotions to drive purchases.

The Trojan horse in the room is that a majority of app stores require access to credit payment methods, while more than one in five (21%) emerging market consumers do not have access to credit or bank facilities. In addition, a majority of potential smartphone users in emerging markets do not have access to banking or credit card accounts, and as such cannot use the Apple App Store or Google Play, even if they wanted to.

Yet another obstruction is translation. One in six (18%) emerging market consumers cannot view content from app stores on their current devices, one in four (24%) cannot find the content they are looking for and one in five (20%) find that content is not in their local language. Notably, each of these obstacles are completely avoidable, and by focusing on remedying them, companies could easily pull ahead of the pack in reaching their target customers.

With a nod toward the sheer importance of content -- especially that which is globally branded -- 60% of consumers state that when purchasing it, they want a format that suits their device, rendering mobile manufacturers somewhat irrelevant in this regard. No doubt: app stores are where brands active on mobile should place their focus. As devices diversify, content is a constant denominator in the eyes of emerging nations, and so king.

[Veremis is o-founder, CEO and chairman of Upstream]

Sensors in your phone that collect seemingly harmless data could leave you vulnerable to cyberattack, according to new research. And saying no to apps that ask for your location is not enough to prevent the tracking of your device.

A new study has found evidence that accelerometers -- which sense motion in your smartphone and are used for applications from pedometers to gaming -- leave “unique, trackable fingerprints” that can be used to identify you and monitor your phone.

Here’s how it works, according to University of Illinois electrical and computer engineering professor Romit Roy Choudhury and his team: Tiny imperfections during the manufacturing process make a unique fingerprint on your accelerometer data. The researchers compared it to cutting out sugar cookies with a cookie cutter -- they may look the same, but each one is slightly, imperceptibly different. When that data is sent to the cloud for processing, your phone’s particular signal can be used to identify you. In other words, the same data that helps you control Flappy Bird can be used to pinpoint your location. Choudhury’s team was able to identify individual phones with 96% accuracy.