Experts Forecast the End of Privacy as We Know It

Whether privacy will be dead, ailing or invigorated by a strong new privacy-rights infrastructure is a matter of debate, but there is consensus over one thing: It won't be the same 10 years from now as it is today. "The concept of privacy will shift and much of our lives will be exposed," suggested privacy attorney Lisa Sotto, "but we'll have a better understanding of what we want to protect."

Privacy's future appears muddy at best, judging from a survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center.

More than 2,500 Internet experts and analysts were narrowly divided on whether policy makers and technology innovators would create a secure, popularly accepted and trusted privacy-rights infrastructure by 2025.
Fifty-five percent didn't believe a structure to protect privacy would be in place; 45 percent believed such a structure would be created.
"There's lots of contention about how the future will unfold," Pew's Director of Internet, Science and Technology Research Lee Rainie told TechNewsWorld.
Departing from the typical multiple-choice survey methodology, the Pew-Eton researchers asked the hand-picked respondents to elaborate on their yes or no answers. There was a dominant theme in many of their comments, regardless of their views on the likelihood of a strong privacy infrastructure being established in the next 10 years.
"A lot of the people on both sides of the question basically said that life in public is the new norm now," Rainie said. "Privacy is an activity to be achieved in havens or in special circumstances with lots of effort. The default condition of humans in the post-industrial world is you're in public all the time."

Accepting the Fish Bowl

The main driver behind people leading more transparent lives will continue to be the same in the coming years, observed Robert Neivert, COO of Private.me.
"People have begun to accept the concept that they can exchange personal information for services," he told TechNewsWorld. "In the last six or seven years, we've begun to accept that giving up your personal information is a form of currency."
Today's privacy debate will bemuse the denizens of 2025, contended Hal Varian, Google's chief economist.
"By 2025, the current debate about privacy will seem quaint and old-fashioned," he wrote in his survey comments.
"The benefits of cloud-based, personal, digital assistants will be so overwhelming that putting restrictions on these services will be out of the question. Of course, there will be people who choose not to use such services, but they will be a small minority," Varian continued.
"Everyone will expect to be tracked and monitored, since the advantages, in terms of convenience, safety, and services, will be so great," he added. "There will, of course, be restrictions on how such information can be used, but continuous monitoring will be the norm."

Trust in Transparency

By 2025, the tradeoff between privacy and transparency will determine a person's trustworthiness, maintained Jerry Michalski, founder of REX -- the Relationship Economy eXpedition.
"By 2025, you will be considered a non-person if you do not have embarrassing photos or videos online from your misspent youth," he wrote in his comments.
"People who were very parsimonious about sharing personal information will be less credible and will be trusted less," Michalski continued, "because others will not be able to see any of their indiscretions -- the things that make them human and more trustworthy."
Overall, the comments from survey respondents ranged from very optimistic, like those from Vint Cerf, chief Internet evangelist at Google, to disheartening, like those from danah boyd, a research scientist at Microsoft.
"By 2025, people will be much more aware of their own negligent behavior, eroding privacy for others, and not just themselves," Cerf wrote.
"Users will insist on having the ability to encrypt their email at need. They will demand much more transparency of the private sector and, especially, their governments," he predicted. "Privacy conventions will evolve in online society -- violations of personal privacy will become socially unacceptable."

Bloody Mess

The idea of a privacy framework is "a fantasy," wrote boyd.
"I expect the dynamics of security and privacy are going to be a bloody mess for the next decade, mired in ugly politics and corporate greed. I also expect that our relationship with other countries is going to be a mess over these issues," she wrote. "People will be far more aware of the ways that data is being used and abused, although I suspect that they will have just as little power over their data as they do now."
The Internet of Things, which will allow everything from toasters to watches to spew data about their users, will exacerbate the tech assault on privacy.
"Every object will become a spy," said Privacy.me's Neivert.
The level of surveillance that exists now will seem pale once everything starts communicating with the Net.
"Once we start wearing the Internet and our appliances are connected to the Internet, the level of observation, data capture and surveillance is going to explode," Pew's Rainie said.

Class Warfare

What's done with that data doesn't necessarily have to impinge on privacy, noted Alexandra Ross, founder of The Privacy Guruand senior counsel atParagon Legal.
"There can be great consumer benefit with the Internet of Things, but companies must be more transparent with how they're collecting, using and sharing that information so that privacy can be protected," she told TechNewsWorld.
If privacy continues to be eroded, class issues could arise, asserted Alf Rehn, chair of management and organization at Abo Akademi University in Finland.
"As privacy is becoming increasingly monetized, the incentive to truly protect it is withering away, and with so much of policy run by lobbyists, privacy will be a very expensive commodity come 2025," he wrote in his survey comments.
"Sure, some of us will be able to buy it, but most will not," he continued. Privacy will be a luxury, not a right -- something that the well-to-do can afford, but which most have learnt to live without."
Whatever the state of privacy will be in 2025, chances are good that it won't resemble what it is today.
"It will be conceived differently than it is now," said Lisa Sotto, head of the global privacy and cybersecurity practice at Hunton & Williams.
"We'll have more awareness as a society," she said. "As a result of that, we will make more informed and better choices about the use of our data," she told TechNewsWorld.
"The concept of privacy will shift and much of our lives will be exposed," added Sotto, "but we'll have a better understanding of what we want to protect, and we'll use significant constraints to make sure what we want hidden remains hidden." 

Skype Begins Dismantling the Language Barrier

Microsoft on Monday announced the first phase of its Skype Translator preview program, which initially will facilitate conversations between English and Spanish speakers. The translator will convert spoken words both ways.

It also will translate instant messages in 40 languages. Translations occur in near-real time.

Participants must run Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 Technical Preview on a desktop or tablet. You can sign up for the preview here.

Children in two schools -- Peterson School in Mexico City and Stafford Elementary School in Tacoma, Washington -- have tried out Skype Translator, Microsoft said.

How Skype Translator Works

Skype Translator's automatic speech recognition conducts a deep neural network analysis of what was said in a conversation, comparing the words spoken against snippets of millions of previously recorded samples.
The audio then is transformed to a series of words in text that apparently correspond to the meaning of what was stated.

Next, the system corrects the speech, removing disfluences such as "um" or "ah" and repetitions. It then picks the most likely word from a list of words that sound like what was said.

The selected words are translated into another language, then converted to sound.

Technical Underpinnings of the System

In 2011, researchers at Microsoft came up with a new, context-dependent model for large vocabulary speech recognition that they published in 2012.
The architecture is a hybrid of deep neural network (DNN) and hidden Markov model technology that modeled DNNs using senones, reducing errors by 16 percent.
The team also used general-purpose graphics processing units to train and decode speech.
The researchers built giant artificial neural networks to train their speech recognition system. One of them contains more than 66 million interneural connections and is the largest ever created for speech recognition.
Training took about 20 days and consisted of creating a new, slightly more refined model every few hours.
When tested against Switchboard, a phone-call transcription benchmark, the system achieved a word-error rate of 18.5 percent. That is 33 percent better than current state-of-the-art conventional systems.

Fly 'en cuero'

Skype Translator's accuracy is a major concern, as blunders can have unintended consequences.
"There will be translation mistakes," warned Mark Ballam, head of the Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER) at San Diego State University. "How could someone detect or catch it if a mistake is made in the translation?"
Much of a conversation consists of body language and facial expressions, and "nonverbal communications would not be translated using this type of service," he told TechNewsWorld.
"I use Skype, but I don't want to rely on a computer for the nuances in a conversation, said Seth Kaplowitz, professor of international business at San Diego State University College of Business Administration.
Artificial intelligence is getting better, but "I think having a human translator would let you find out how accurate your stuff is," Kaplowitz told TechNewsWorld.

Possible Uses in Business

There are possible uses for Skype Translator, despite its shortcomings.
An instant translation service such as this "is interesting not only for consumers, but for international business users who want to have high-level chats," Alaa Saayed, unified communications industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan, told TechNewsWorld.
Some detailed discussions, such as financial transactions, "may still require the use of a single language or the use of a [human] translator," observed Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.
"The real benefit is not to management, but to everyone else -- from engineers to purchasing and accounting," he told TechNewsWorld.
"This could be very useful for engineers all over the world to communicate with each other and assist each other with design challenges," McGregor continued. "In the tech industry, most business can be conducted with senior managers in English, but many other functions do not have the same requirement for English." 

How to stop sleeping with your phone

It's an unhealthy habit that many people (myself included) do. Here's how to get your phone away from your nightstand for a more restful night's sleep.

• by Sarah Mitroff 
   @sarahmitroff
• December 12, 2014 1:44 PM PST

If you're spending each night sleeping with your phone, you should stop.

Why? Well for starters, the blue light your phone's screen gives off can keep your brain awake and affect the quality of your sleep. Tablets and computers give off that light too, but you're more likely to take your small phone to bed nightly than those gadgets.

Next, there's the concern of cell phone radiation. There is no definitive, conclusive answer of whether or not the radiation all cell phones and smartphones emit can or will give you cancer or any other ailment. However, some research suggests that cell phone radiation can interfere with your sleep, which makes the argument for keeping your phone farther away from you while you sleep more compelling.

Likely, most of us don't need to keep our phones on our nightstands or under our pillows at night. However, if you're already blurting out the reason you must have your phone within arm's reach at all times, even during slumber, I'm here to help you break that habit. Below, I tackle the most common reasons you'd want to keep your phone close and help you find better solutions for each.

Reason one: You use your phone as an alarm

Like many people, I haven't used an alarm clock on my bedside table for years, ever since I got a cell phone. If you also use your phone's alarm to wake up in the morning, there's a better way.

The simplest solution is to move your phone away from your bed to a dresser or other surface. The distance makes it less likely that you'll use your phone right before going to sleep and helps cut down on exposure to radiation. As an added bonus, you're also forced to get out of bed to shut off your alarm, ensuring you won't just keep tapping snooze and sleep longer than you intended.

Reason two: You want to be able to hear important calls and text messages

This is the top reason I've kept my phone on my nightstand for so many years; I don't want to be out of reach in case of a late-night emergency. However, you can keep your phone at a healthy distance and still get important alerts.

Here, Do Not Disturb mode is the perfect solution. Available on iOS, most Androids, and Windows Phones running version 8.1, this feature turns off all notifications and alerts from emails, texts and incoming calls, except from a few important contacts that you program. It's also easy to set up.

The Do Not Disturb features on iOS and Android.

On iOS devices, go to Settings > Do Not Disturb and either turn it on manually, or set it turn on and off on a schedule every day. You can allow calls from everyone, select contacts, or no one at all.

For most Android devices, go to settings and look for Blocking Mode or Do Not Disturb. Most phones will let you control what kinds of notifications you get and from who. For devices running Android 5.0, you can simply press the volume rocker and turn on Priority mode or turn off all notifications.

Lastly, Windows Phones have a Quiet Hours mode that you turn on with Cortana. Just open Cortana, tap the menu button and select Quiet Hours. You can also enable it in system settings.

Make sure to turn up your ringer on your phone so that the calls and messages that do get through Do Not Disturb mode are loud enough to wake you up if necessary.

Reason three: You listen to music as you go to bed

Whether you're listening to an audiobook, music or ambient noise when you nod off, the easiest option is to plug in your headphones and rest your phone close by. However, with the help of some Bluetooth headphones, you can move your phone farther away or even to an adjacent room and still get your tunes. Most phones and accessories that use Bluetooth have a range of 10 meters (33 feet), so keep that distance in mind when finding a spot for your phone.

There are many Bluetooth headphones to choose from, and even ones that are designed for sleep, such as the soft SleepPhones. Of course, it's much cheaper to just use a pair of low-cost wired headphones to listen to music. However, if you're concerned about radiation or the effects of your phone's screen on your sleep quality, it's worth picking up a wireless option.

Reason four: You're checking email or Facebook or playing games before bed and fall asleep with your phone unintentionally

The simplest solution to stop going to sleep with your phone is to set boundaries. Staying up late to play games, hang around Facebook or answer emails from your boss isn't good for your sleep health or stress levels.

Start by picking a designated spot for your cell phone away from your bed, either in your bedroom or someplace else in your home. Put your charger there and any other accessories, like a stand, that you want.

Next, set up a daily routine for your phone. You can either opt to plug it in as soon as you get home or set a phone bedtime, where you plug in your phone at certain time each night and don't touch it again until morning. The more you do this, the more natural it will feel to not have your phone close to you at all times, demanding your attention. And maybe instead of staying up playing Candy Crush, you'll pick up a book or go to sleep without any distractions instead.

Tech's biggest flops and gaffes in 2014 (pictures)

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  14. The Google barges' unceremonious end

  
  

  Remember Google's barges -- the mysterious vessels made of dozens of shipping containers?   initially bobbed alongside Treasure Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. A second was then discovered in the harbor in Portland, Maine. The crafts captivated the tech world, spurring speculation about their purpose. Were they futuristic data centers? Floating retail outlets?

  Alas, despite Google's revelation that the barges were set to become mobile showcases for new technology, the San Francisco vessel was, early this year, moved without fanfare 80 miles east to Stockton, Calif. The Portland craft was dismantled and its shipping containers sent to the scrap heap. The reason: the Coast Guard determined the barges presented fire and other safety hazards.

  An anticlimactic end to something that garnered so much interest, and to a project that was reportedly budgeted at tens of millions of dollars.

It's 2014. Why is my battery stuck in the '90s?

The devices we all rely on continue to evolve radically. So why has the battery industry failed? Here's how you can take charge.

• by Ian Sherr 
   and Shara Tibken 
• December 2, 2014 5:00 AM PST

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When Apple redesigned the MacBook Pro in 2009, it unveiled a new type of battery that ran a whopping 40 percent longer than the previous model.

The laptop lasted as long as seven hours, almost enough time to watch the epic movie "Lawrence of Arabia" -- twice. Phil Schiller, Apple's marketing chief, called the battery "revolutionary." But was it really?

Technological leaps over the past two decades have been astounding. Computers have transformed from utilitarian boxes into svelte rectangles of shiny metal and glass that fit in our pockets. Today's devices are also far more powerful. A new smartwatch has more computing power than the Apollo moon landing spacecraft. Batteries are a different story.

Even though consumer electronics makers, from Apple to Samsung, pour millions of research dollars into eking out more battery life for devices, the technology isn't expected to advance much in the next few years. But that won't slow the rising tide of gadgets that rely on batteries.

Why battery tech has stagnated is a topic of debate among researchers, many of whom claim we're reaching the limits of what science can muster. No matter the reason, consumers will need to find ways to squeeze more juice out of their battery-powered devices.

Two evolutionary trails

To understand what's going on, consider where battery makers have been, where they are now, and the challenges they face.

Michael Sinkula of Envia Systems, an advanced battery startup in California, crunched the numbers and found the energy stored in a battery in 1995 didn't double until more than a decade later, in 2007. Since then, a battery's energy hasn't even risen by 30 percent. And Envia believes most batteries likely won't have doubled again even by 2021.

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But a typical laptop now runs about 10 hours, up from just four hours when President Barack Obama was sworn in for his first term. How's that possible?

Tech advancements generally come from two separate forces: a relentless drive to shrink every part's size and ever improving software to manage it all.

The brains of a computer are its microprocessors, the chips that do the complex math needed for drawing images and for helping Facebook update you about a friend's birthday. For decades, the industry has been shrinking processor size. As they get smaller, they consume less energy, and battery life gets longer.

Batteries are different. Basically, they're collections of metals and chemicals. When they're connected, electricity flows. The problem with chemistry is that making it smaller doesn't always make it better. Think of it like a drink: if you put less beer in your mug, you just have less beer.

Until now, major battery advances came from using new materials. Consumer electronics batteries began lasting longer when they switched from relying on nickel, a type of metal, to lithium.

John Goodenough, a key scientist in the development of modern batteries, says research now is focused mainly on improving lithium batteries. "The periodic table is limited," he says, and advancements are becoming increasingly tough.

Even though more people are working on these problems than when Goodenough announced the breakthrough that made modern batteries possible in 1979, scientists are simply running out of new stuff to work with.

A smartphone that lasts a week -- instead of a day -- requires a radical new technology that hasn't even made it to the drawing board. "The strategy for the next step isn't here," Goodenough believes.

It's possible that in 250 years, when Capt. James T. Kirk hails the starship Enterprise, his communicator may need a recharge first.

The path to lithium

Modern batteries date back to the 18th century, when scientists stumbled upon a way to harness static electricity by inserting a metal rod into a jar coated with foil on both sides and filled with saltwater. Touch the outside of the jar with one finger and the rod with another, and -- zap!

In his book "The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution," Henry Schlesinger describes scientists who played with these devices, known as Leyden Jars. One prominent tinkerer was poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. When he was young, he experimented with help from his sister. He also inspired his wife, Mary, who used electricity as a primary plot device in her novel "Frankenstein."

Shortly before people were reading about Mary Shelley's monster, Alessandro Volta invented the first widely used battery, the Voltaic Pile, by stacking plates of zinc and copper separated by cloth or cardboard soaked in saltwater.

Today's batteries haven't changed much. Cut one in half, and you'll see a material made of metal, such as lithium, on one side, and another material, typically carbon, on the other. In between is the equivalent of the cloth Volta used 200 years ago: a plastic surrounded by a gel or a liquid designed to keep the metals from interacting with one another, but that still lets atomic particles move around.

When a connection, or circuit, is created by touching a wire from one side of a battery to another, electrons flow out, and the light bulb turns on, the stereo blasts sound or the car's lock beeps.

For today's devices, the most popular rechargeable battery, lithium-ion, has been widely used for about two decades.

A market surge

Batteries are the lifeblood of tech. In 1990, just as lithium-ion was poised to flood the market, worldwide demand for batteries reached nearly 200,000 megawatt-hours, according to estimates from consulting firm Avicenne Energy. That's the equivalent of 44.4 billion Energizer Ultimate Lithium AA batteries, enough to circle Earth nearly 57 times.

By 2013, just two decades later, demand had nearly doubled.

Lux Research predicts that spending on batteries to power electronic devices alone could reach $26.6 billion by 2020, up nearly 30 percent from this year. Most of that demand will come from phones andtablets, with both expected to jump about 45 percent over the next six years. Battery spending for transportation, such as cars, will double to $20.9 billion.

Given all the money at stake, many researchers are working to improve batteries. Even so, few breakthroughs have materialized. Plus, almost all major research has shifted to cars and power grids.

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Enterprise tech giant IBM, for instance, has a team of scientists at its Almaden facility in San Jose, Calif., working on battery tech. In 2009, IBM pledged $500,000 and a few researchers to work on what it calls Battery 500: an attempt to invent batteries to propel a car 500 miles. That's enough to go from San Francisco to Los Angeles on a single charge and have some juice left for a trip to the beach.

A key focus is a so-called lithium-air battery. Instead of relying on carbon and other metals, as in a lithium-ion battery, IBM and its partners believe they can create a container filled with air that interacts with a piece of lithium to produce electricity. If they're right, it could potentially halve the weight of a battery.

But there's a hitch: to keep the energy consistent and enable recharging, you need pure air. The air we breathe is filled with pollutants and water.

"You would need machinery to clean the air," says Winfried Wilcke, a researcher leading IBM's battery efforts. That adds size, weight and complexity.

Others, including researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Texas, are considering materials such as silicon, sulfur and sodium. But many R&D efforts are targeting these designs for cars first. It will likely be years before such tech powers consumer electronics.

As for efforts to improve lithium-ion batteries, Stanford University in July said it created a battery with pure lithium that can hold more energy. But this battery still has a long way to go as well.

Some scientists paint a dire picture, saying we're hitting the limit of what a battery can do and how much it can improve. "There is no order of magnitude to be had," Wilcke says. Others, like Bill Watkins, head of battery startup Imergy Power Systems in California, are more hopeful. "Never underestimate a bunch of Ph.D.'s with a lot of money," he says.

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Dealing with today's realities

The good news is that companies are finding ways to extend battery life while they wait for new battery technologies.

At Apple, many improvements are coming through software. Its OS X Mavericks operating system, released in late 2013, looks for moments when computer users have several programs open that they're not accessing. The Mac then strategically reduces the processing put toward running programs in the background. Overlay a window on top of a movie playing on YouTube, for instance, and the sound continues, but the video stops updating.

Inside Apple's software is a technology it calls "timers," which wake up the computer's chips from low-power mode so they can complete certain tasks. As Apple's software team built Mavericks, they realized they had too many timers waking the machine too often. Combining them reduced the processor's activity by 72 percent, making the computer more efficient.

OS X Yosemite, released this year, adds even more power-saving features. One tweak lets users get up to two more hours of battery life on a MacBook Air when streaming movies in full 1080p HD.

Companies are making similar strides with mobile devices. Samsung created an "ultra power-saving mode" that can allow up to 12.5 days of battery life for its Galaxy S5 smartphone. The mode switches the screen from color to black-and-gray images and also limits apps, phone calls, messaging and basic Web surfing.

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Some companies, including Samsung SDI, are trying to make batteries safer and more robust. Samsung is working on a type of battery that replaces the gels and liquids of today with solid material. The company hopes to make batteries safer, flexible and less likely to explode. It aims to deliver these batteries by 2015.

Apple, meanwhile, also has focused on squeezing as much battery into its devices as possible. In 2009, when Schiller announced battery life breakthroughs for MacBooks, he showed how underneath the hood the typical brick-shaped battery had been replaced by ones designed like puzzle pieces to fill every available space.

As part of that design, Apple eschewed its decades-old practice of letting consumers swap out the battery. This created even more space that would otherwise have been taken up by battery housing and protective shells built to keep the battery safe while outside the computer.

The result: a battery Schiller could call a revolution. Maybe that's as revolutionary as it gets.