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The Guardian view on internet privacy: The ease with which giant databases can be examined and cross-referenced makes privacy vanish on the internet

    February 8, 2018
    Privacy is necessary for human society to function. The problem is not that the information exists but that it reaches the wrong people. Information on the internet could bring great benefits to society, and to individuals, when huge datasets can be refined to deliver information otherwise unavailable. But once the information is gathered, a precautionary principle has to apply.
    Governments need to keep our trust; but technology erodes privacy in two ways. The first is simply smartphones. Most Britons – 70% – now carry around with them devices which record and report their location, their friends and their interests all the time. The second is the ease with which two (or more) datasets can be combined to bring out secrets that are apparent in neither set on its own, and to identify individuals from data that appears to be entirely anonymised. By the beginning of this century researchers had established
that nearly 90% of the US population could be uniquely identified simply by combining their gender, their date of birth and their postal code. All kinds of things can be reliably inferred from freely available data: four likes on Facebook are usually enough to reveal a person’s sexual orientation.
    Underlying such problems is human psychology. No one forces anybody to reveal their preferences on Facebook: the like button is genuinely popular. The latest spectacular breach of privacy came when the exercise app Strava published a global map of the 3 trillion data location points its users had uploaded, which turned out to reveal the location of previously secret US military bases around the world. But the chance to boast about where you have been and how fast you were
moving is exactly what makes Strava popular. Psychology, as much as technology, made this a massive security breach. The users gave enthusiastic consents, but they were fantastically ill-informed. Then again, how could anyone give informed consent when not even the firms that collect data sets can know how they will be used?

(www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2018/feb/08/the-guardianview- on-internet-privacy-its-the-psychology-stupid. Adaptado)

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The Guardian view on internet privacy: The ease with which giant databases can be examined and cross-referenced makes privacy vanish on the internet

    February 8, 2018
    Privacy is necessary for human society to function. The problem is not that the information exists but that it reaches the wrong people. Information on the internet could bring great benefits to society, and to individuals, when huge datasets can be refined to deliver information otherwise unavailable. But once the information is gathered, a precautionary principle has to apply.
    Governments need to keep our trust; but technology erodes privacy in two ways. The first is simply smartphones. Most Britons – 70% – now carry around with them devices which record and report their location, their friends and their interests all the time. The second is the ease with which two (or more) datasets can be combined to bring out secrets that are apparent in neither set on its own, and to identify individuals from data that appears to be entirely anonymised. By the beginning of this century researchers had established
that nearly 90% of the US population could be uniquely identified simply by combining their gender, their date of birth and their postal code. All kinds of things can be reliably inferred from freely available data: four likes on Facebook are usually enough to reveal a person’s sexual orientation.
    Underlying such problems is human psychology. No one forces anybody to reveal their preferences on Facebook: the like button is genuinely popular. The latest spectacular breach of privacy came when the exercise app Strava published a global map of the 3 trillion data location points its users had uploaded, which turned out to reveal the location of previously secret US military bases around the world. But the chance to boast about where you have been and how fast you were
moving is exactly what makes Strava popular. Psychology, as much as technology, made this a massive security breach. The users gave enthusiastic consents, but they were fantastically ill-informed. Then again, how could anyone give informed consent when not even the firms that collect data sets can know how they will be used?

(www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2018/feb/08/the-guardianview- on-internet-privacy-its-the-psychology-stupid. Adaptado)

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The Guardian view on internet privacy: The ease with which giant databases can be examined and cross-referenced makes privacy vanish on the internet

    February 8, 2018
    Privacy is necessary for human society to function. The problem is not that the information exists but that it reaches the wrong people. Information on the internet could bring great benefits to society, and to individuals, when huge datasets can be refined to deliver information otherwise unavailable. But once the information is gathered, a precautionary principle has to apply.
    Governments need to keep our trust; but technology erodes privacy in two ways. The first is simply smartphones. Most Britons – 70% – now carry around with them devices which record and report their location, their friends and their interests all the time. The second is the ease with which two (or more) datasets can be combined to bring out secrets that are apparent in neither set on its own, and to identify individuals from data that appears to be entirely anonymised. By the beginning of this century researchers had established
that nearly 90% of the US population could be uniquely identified simply by combining their gender, their date of birth and their postal code. All kinds of things can be reliably inferred from freely available data: four likes on Facebook are usually enough to reveal a person’s sexual orientation.
    Underlying such problems is human psychology. No one forces anybody to reveal their preferences on Facebook: the like button is genuinely popular. The latest spectacular breach of privacy came when the exercise app Strava published a global map of the 3 trillion data location points its users had uploaded, which turned out to reveal the location of previously secret US military bases around the world. But the chance to boast about where you have been and how fast you were
moving is exactly what makes Strava popular. Psychology, as much as technology, made this a massive security breach. The users gave enthusiastic consents, but they were fantastically ill-informed. Then again, how could anyone give informed consent when not even the firms that collect data sets can know how they will be used?

(www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2018/feb/08/the-guardianview- on-internet-privacy-its-the-psychology-stupid. Adaptado)

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Rhythm of breathing affects memory and fear

Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered for the first time that the rhythm of breathing creates electrical activity in the human brain that enhances emotional judgments and memory recall. These effects on behavior depend critically on whether you inhale or exhale and whether you breathe through the nose or mouth.

In the study, individuals were able to identify a fearful face more quickly if they encountered the face when breathing in compared to breathing out. Individuals also were more likely to remember an object if they encountered it on the inhaled breath than the exhaled one. The effect disappeared if breathing was through the mouth.

“One of the major findings in this study is that there is a dramatic difference in brain activity in the amygdala and hippocampus during inhalation compared with exhalation,” said lead author Christina Zelano, assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “When you breathe in, we discovered you are stimulating neurons in the olfactory cortex, amygdala and hippocampus, all across the limbic system.”

(Marla Paul. www.northwestern.edu, 07.12.2016. Adaptado.)

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Electric car revolution: calculating the cost of green motoring

(Photograph: Miles Willis/Getty Images)

Adam Vaughan
July 8, 2017

    Streets will be quieter, the air will be cleaner, people will spend less time at petrol stations and car factories might even return to Britain’s shores if the country switches to electric cars in a widespread fashion. But widespread adoption of battery-powered vehicles would not be without challenges too. A large-scale switchover to electric cars could create problems for power grids, could mean roads lined with charging poles and it could also leave a big hole in public coffers as fuel duty dries up.

    With just over 90,000 fully electric and plug-in hybrid cars now on UK roads, such risks and benefits might look a way off. But this week big changes have been announced. On Wednesday Volvo said it will only launch electric or hybrid cars from 2019 and just a day later Emmanuel Macron’s new government pledged that France will ban diesel and petrol cars by 2040. Battery-powered travel could be coming far sooner than previously thought

    According to research published this week by Bloomberg New Energy Finance the proportion of fully electric new cars sold in the UK will be one in 12 by 2030 – up from one in every 200 today. The surge in electric cars will have to be accompanied by thousands of new charging points to plug them all in. Today there are around 4,000 publicly accessible locations with 13,000 plug sockets. Of the 13,000, a fifth are so-called rapid charging connections that will top up a Nissan Leaf, the UK’s best-selling pure electric car, in half an hour.

    The number of sockets is set to soar to 80,000 by 2025, predicts Zap-Map, which has mapped the ones built so far. There are 8,476 petrol filling stations across the UK, most with many pumps, but topping up takes minutes rather than hours. A lot of those will be installed in supermarkets, railway stations and car parks. But there will be also a lot of poles along residential streets, even though there are other innovative fixes such as the charging sockets a German company is building into street lamps.

(www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/08/electric-car-revolutioncalculating-the-cost-of-green-motoring. Adaptado)

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Electric car revolution: calculating the cost of green motoring

(Photograph: Miles Willis/Getty Images)

Adam Vaughan
July 8, 2017

    Streets will be quieter, the air will be cleaner, people will spend less time at petrol stations and car factories might even return to Britain’s shores if the country switches to electric cars in a widespread fashion. But widespread adoption of battery-powered vehicles would not be without challenges too. A large-scale switchover to electric cars could create problems for power grids, could mean roads lined with charging poles and it could also leave a big hole in public coffers as fuel duty dries up.

    With just over 90,000 fully electric and plug-in hybrid cars now on UK roads, such risks and benefits might look a way off. But this week big changes have been announced. On Wednesday Volvo said it will only launch electric or hybrid cars from 2019 and just a day later Emmanuel Macron’s new government pledged that France will ban diesel and petrol cars by 2040. Battery-powered travel could be coming far sooner than previously thought

    According to research published this week by Bloomberg New Energy Finance the proportion of fully electric new cars sold in the UK will be one in 12 by 2030 – up from one in every 200 today. The surge in electric cars will have to be accompanied by thousands of new charging points to plug them all in. Today there are around 4,000 publicly accessible locations with 13,000 plug sockets. Of the 13,000, a fifth are so-called rapid charging connections that will top up a Nissan Leaf, the UK’s best-selling pure electric car, in half an hour.

    The number of sockets is set to soar to 80,000 by 2025, predicts Zap-Map, which has mapped the ones built so far. There are 8,476 petrol filling stations across the UK, most with many pumps, but topping up takes minutes rather than hours. A lot of those will be installed in supermarkets, railway stations and car parks. But there will be also a lot of poles along residential streets, even though there are other innovative fixes such as the charging sockets a German company is building into street lamps.

(www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/08/electric-car-revolutioncalculating-the-cost-of-green-motoring. Adaptado)