Back in September WolframAlpha unveiled its Personal Analytics for Facebook. With Personal Analytics, which The Semantic Web Blog covered here, you could visualize your networks, friends and social activities – and late last month it was updated to give even more insight into you and your Facebook linkages.

Not in the same way that Facebook does with its recently-launched Graph Search (see our story here). It’s not, for example, going to tell you who else out there likes running and lives in Nassau County, NY, or your favorite books that your friends also have read. In its initial debut, Personal Analytics for Facebook would show you things like gender distribution among your friends, or their common names, or who you share the most friends with.

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Heading into the Labor Day weekend, Wolfram|Alpha released a new feature that lets users perform personal analytics with Facebook data, for free. Users can head here and type in “Facebook Report” for an analysis of their Facebook data.

Stephen Wolfram, the creator of the computational knowledge engine, alerted the world to the news in this blog post. “When you type “facebook report,” Wolfram|Alpha generates a pretty seriously long report—almost a small book about you, with more than a dozen major chapters, broken into more than 60 sections, with all sorts of drill-downs, alternate views, etc.,” he writes.

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The Obama administration has announced a blueprint for a consumer privacy bill of rights. The President’s cover letter to the proposal stated, “Never has privacy been more important than today, in the age of the Internet, the World Wide Web and smart phones.  In just the last decade, the Internet has enabled a renewal of direct political engagement by citizens around the globe and an explosion of commerce and innovation creating jobs of the future. Much of this innovation is enabled by novel uses of personal information. So, it is incumbent on us to do what we have done throughout history: apply our timeless privacy values to the new technologies and circumstances of our times.” Read more

Vivek Kundra, the current US government CIO and a major player in the US’s open data initiatives, recently shared his concerns regarding data security. The article states, “In a wide ranging discussion Friday with President Barack Obama’s top science advisers, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra warned of the dangers of open data access and complained of “an IT cartel” of vendors. He also believes the US can operate with just a few data centres. Kundra, who is leaving his job in mid-August, offered a kaleidoscopic view of his concerns about federal IT in an appearance before President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.” Read more