mr-damon/technology

"If anything characterizes the 21st century, it's our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people," said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. "The cellphone talker thinks his rights go above that of people around him, and the jammer thinks his are the more important rights."

Privacy advocates have grown increasingly worried that digital tools are giving governments and powerful corporations the ability to peek into peoples' lives as never before. But the real snoops are often much closer to home.

"Google and Yahoo may know everything, but they don't really care about you," said Jacalyn F. Barnett, a Manhattan-based divorce lawyer. "No one cares more about the things you do than the person that used to be married to you."

Hmm.

Cellular phones do not pose short-term health risks, but it remains too soon to say whether they can cause brain cancer or whether children face greater risks than adults, British scientists said on Wednesday.

Publishing the largest UK investigation into possible health problems from mobile technology, scientists said the six-year program found no evidence that short-term mobile phone use affected brain function or could cause brain cancer.

But Professor Lawrie Challis, chairman of the 8.8 million pound ($17.90 million) Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research (MTHR) Program, said studies so far had included few participants who had used cell phones for 10 years or longer.

"We cannot rule out the possibility at this stage that cancer could appear in a few years' time," he told a news conference. "Most cancers take 10 years to appear."

Challis also noted that the UK studies that made up the report had not yet examined children. British scientists had shied away from exposing children to radio-frequency (RF) fields, which are generated by devices such as mobile phones and phone masts, for ethical reasons, he said

"Some of the Big Content companies don't like the idea that the law limits their control over how you use what you've legally acquired. These companies know that, by law, anyone can quote, excerpt and even copy their works for things like journalism, homework and research and discussion of all sorts.

"Big media companies are turning increasingly aggressive in their efforts to discourage people from doing what they have always done with the media they bought and programs they have recorded in their own homes."

Attempts to bring affordable high-speed Internet service to the masses have made little headway on the continent. Less than 4 percent of the African population is connected to the Web. Most subscribers are in North African countries and the republic of South Africa.

A lack of infrastructure is the biggest problem. In many countries, years of civil conflict destroyed communications networks, and continuing political instability deters governments or companies from investing in new systems.

"This week, Yahoo unveiled a new advertising program that allows its clients to tailor ads to individual Web surfers based on their own unique search history, geography, and demographic information including age, sex, and occupation.

Yahoo hopes that SmartAds, announced Monday, will give the once high-flying Internet company a leg up on its dominant competitor Google by providing firms with unprecedented access to the habits and hobbies of Web surfers.

With Yahoo's SmartAds platform, if you list San Francisco as your location in Yahoo weather and run a Yahoo search for Las Vegas, Yahoo will automatically generate an ad displaying real-time rates for flights from San Francisco to Las Vegas.

Are you from Chicago with a search history that indicates an interest in SUVs? Yahoo has an ad for you, too -- perhaps one with prices and inventory levels at the dealership just down the road.

But as companies like Yahoo compile and save increasingly detailed information about people who visit their sites, do these efforts constitute a threat to your Internet privacy? And even if they do, should you be concerned if they let you save time and money by bringing you the products that you want when you want them?

According to some industry observers and privacy advocates, including Paul Stephens of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the answer to both questions is yes.

'I absolutely believe it is a threat to privacy,' Stephens told ABC News. '[SmartAds] is disconcerting because it's compiling all sorts of information about you, things that you may have done a year ago on a Yahoo site, that you may have completely forgotten about.'

"The software could get its raw information from a number of sources, including a new type of 'cookie' program that records the pages visited. Alternatively, it could use your PC's own cache of web pages, or proxy servers could maintain records of sites visited. So far it can only guess gender and age with any accuracy, but the team say they expect to be able to 'refine the profiles which contain bogus demographic information', and one day predict your occupation, level of qualifications, and perhaps your location. 'Because of its hierarchical structure - language, country, region, city - we may need to design algorithms to better discriminate between user locations,' Zeng says.

"However, Ross Anderson, a computer security engineer at the University of Cambridge, thinks the idea could land Microsoft in legal trouble. 'I'd consider it somewhat pernicious if Microsoft were to deploy such software widely,' he told New Scientist. 'They are arguably committing offences in a number of countries under a number of different laws if they make available software that defeats the security procedures internet users deploy to protect their privacy - from export control laws to anti-hacking laws.'"

See also: MS Wants To Identify All Web Surfers