“In the not too distant future, consumers face the prospect that a computer somewhere will compile records about every place they go and everything they purchase,” says Democrat Bob Wise of West Virginia, who heads the House subcommittee that oversees the government’s use of data. “I’m not sure this is the vision of the future that will make Americans comfortable.”

So not only do computers know everywhere we go and (almost) everything they purchase, but we willingly and happily give up that information (Foursquare, Blippy). But it’s not without its limitations – Foursquare is still a minority interest; Blippy stopped being a credit card purchase sharing app; and Beacon went down in a blaze.

If other users already have your email, or other information that identifies you, we may show them your publicly visible Google Profile information, such as your name and photo.

We have a situation here where information you might have thought was private will now become public. It doesn’t really matter that your Google Profile is already publicly visible (remember how angry everyone got when Facebook launched the News Feed in September 2006, even though it only presented “publicly visible” information?). What matters is that your email address will be much more readily linkable with you. This seems to be quite a big shift.

When you use our services or view content provided by Google, we may automatically collect and store certain information in server logs. This may include [...] telephony log information like your phone number, calling-party number, forwarding numbers, time and date of calls, duration of calls, SMS routing information and types of calls.

I find this clause very unclear. When reading it, it seems as though Google is telling me it can make a record of the phone calls I make using my phone if I also use my phone to check my Gmail account. In fact, one could go further and say that this clause lets Google save your phone number and record the time and date of calls you make if you just use Google to search the web on your smartphone. Or am I reading this wrong?

Location information

When you use a location-enabled Google service, we may collect and process information about your actual location, like GPS signals sent by a mobile device.

Again, there is a serious ambiguity here, and it resides in the word “When”. Does “when” here mean “while you are using…”? Or does it mean “if you ever use…”? If I allow Google Maps to access my location one time, am I thereby giving Google permission to “collect and process information” about my actual location all the time?

We will share personal information with companies, organizations or individuals outside of Google if we have a good-faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to:

• meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.
• enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations.
• detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues.
• protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of Google, our users or the public as required or permitted by law.

Well this is the catch-all clause, and you don’t have to think Google will act in bad faith in order for it to raise eyebrows. While it says that Google will share personal information following enforceable governmental requests, it also says that it will share information with others “to protect against harm [...] to the public”, which is an extremely amorphous concept.

And finally, is the reference to terminating employees an intentional joke? Or am I being too grammatically pedantic?

We restrict access to personal information to Google employees, contractors and agents who need to know that information in order to process it for us, and who are subject to strict contractual confidentiality obligations and may be disciplined or terminated if they fail to meet these obligations.

Peer-to-peer car sharing is interesting because of the question of trust. With ZipCar, the interaction is between a company and an individual, but with RelayRides it is between two individuals – the company is much further backstage.

This suggests an interesting dynamic between the extent to which a service is centralized and the degree of trust required between parties to a transaction in order to make that transaction work. This is not a new dynamic: credit card companies remove the issue of trust between seller and purchaser; instead, both place their trust in the credit card company. Even currency, which is guaranteed by the state, is a way of making questions of trust between individuals irrelevant: people just have to trust the state. But with peer-to-peer interactions, trust reemerges as a central issue.

This is a clip – entitled The Photographs of your Junk (will be publicized!) - is based on Gil Scott Heron’s legendary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (in which Scott Heron warns the bourgeoisie that, when it comes, the revolution will not be something that they will be able to to watch from the safety of their living rooms). But beyond Scott Heron’s song providing musical inspiration, there’s not much similarity between the two.

This clip is a kind of modern sermon about the dangers of over-exposure on social network sites and in relation to the ubiquity of cameras in mobile devices, arguing that we are so busy documenting the insignificant minutiae of our lives that we are blind to the important stuff in the world (starving African children, genocide, that kind of stuff). This is a very Frankfurt School type of argument, of course. Social networks connect us, he raps, and put us to sleep.

And then the song moves on to a criticism of surveillance, invasions of privacy, and the longevity of digital images, at which point it kind of loses direction and becomes an unfocused rant about all sorts of modern stuff (why are there photos of Mel Gibson and Charlie Sheen, for instance?).

So really it’s quite an odd piece (and with only 15,000 views at the time of writing, not a hugely popular one either).

From a very brief and not at all scientific scan of the website of the United Network for Organ Sharing, it seems that when describing their activities, the word “donation” is used, and not “sharing”. That is, the “sharing” part is only in the title of the organization.

If there is sharing, it could be between different states and organizations – sharing knowledge about donors and waiting lists – but I’m not really sure about that either.