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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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

Coming in June from start-up Meronymy is a new RDF enterprise database management system, the Meronymy SPARQL Database Server. The company, founded by Inge Henriksen, began life because of the need he saw for a high-performance and more scalable RDF database server.

The idea to focus on a database server exclusively oriented to Linked Data and the Semantic Web came as a result of Henriksen’s work over the last decade as an IT consultant implementing many semantic solutions for customers in sectors such as government and education. “One issue that always came up was performance,” he explains, especially when performing more advanced SPARQL queries against triple stores using filters, for example.

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Christopher Dawson has commented on Google’s recent changes to their privacy policy. Dawson writes, “I live, eat, breathe, work, and play Google and there aren’t many people more aware of Google’s business model and the amount of data it collects than I. So is it just sheer stupidity and naiveté that has me utterly embracing the Google ecosystem and relatively unconcerned about newly announced privacy policies that have caused so much consternation this week? Before you jump down to the talkbacks to tell me how stupid I really am, read on for another couple paragraphs.” Read more

Dr. Kieron O’Hara has examined how the semantic web might be used to implement a so-called ‘right to be forgotten.’ O’Hara writes, “During the revision of the EU’s data protection directive, attention has focused on a ‘right to be forgotten’. Though the discussion has been largely confined to the legal profession, and has been overlooked by technologists, it does raise technical issues – UK minister Ed Vaizey, and the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office have pointed out that rights are only meaningful when they can be enforced and implemented (Out-law.com 2011, ICO 2011). In this article, I look at how such a right might be interpreted and whether it could be enforced using the specific technology of the Semantic Web or the Linked Data Web.” 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

A recent article covers Austin non-profit CLOUD, the Consortium for Local Ownership and Use of Data. According to the article, CLOUD “is trying to create tools and standards for how the Internet of the future will handle the bits of your online identity currently scattered all over the digital landscape.” With a concept reminiscent of David Siegel’s personal data locker, “CLOUD is working to create a contextual markup language — a kind of additional layer of tagging and filtering atop the existing Internet — around identity. The goal is to create tools to better manage ID data. It would decentralize data so your entire online profile wouldn’t be duplicated everywhere, just the bits that you might need for, say, a doctor’s appointment or to sign up for a library card.” Read more

Pete Warden recently commented on anonymized data, stating, “One of the joys of the last few years has been the flood of real-world datasets being released by all sorts of organizations. These usually involve some record of individuals’ activities, so to assuage privacy fears, the distributors will claim that any personally-identifying information (PII) has been stripped. The idea is that this makes it impossible to match any record with the person it’s recording. Something that my friend Arvind Narayanan has taught me, both with theoretical papers and repeated practical demonstrations, is that this anonymization process is an illusion.” Read more