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Today is International Data Privacy Day, an event backed by companies like Intel, Ebay, Facebook and Microsoft, and dedicated to educating data owners about best practices in protecting the privacy of consumer data.

The need to keep people from being exploited on account of violations of their privacy is clear, well-known, intuitive and amply articulated by highly capable people. The up-side of making use of peoples' data is far less so. The two concerns are closely tied together. That's something Bill Gates is likely very aware of, if his comments 10 years ago are any indication.

Facebook has cut a deal with political website Politico that allows the independent site machine-access to Facebook users' messages, both public and private, when a Republican Presidential candidate is mentioned by name. The data is being collected and analyzed for sentiment by Facebook's data team, then delivered to Politico to serve as the basis of data-driven political analysis and journalism.

The move is being widely condemned in the press as a violation of privacy but if Facebook would do this right, it could be a huge win for everyone. Facebook could be the biggest, most dynamic census of human opinion and interaction in history. Unfortunately, failure to talk prominently about privacy protections, failure to make this opt-in (or even opt out!) and the inclusion of private messages are all things that put at risk any remaining shreds of trust in Facebook that could have served as the foundation of a new era of social self-awareness.

Facebook's new Timeline profile feature is great, even if it is a little strange. It's narcissistic, but that's a big part of the fun of it, and I'm not sure that other peoples' timelines are nearly as interesting as mine is to me.

It's an incredibly feature-rich new type of social network profile. It's a re-imagination of what a profile can be. It makes me want to use Facebook more, to share more data with Facebook so that it can be preserved and displayed so nicely, years into the future. While other Facebook features have pushed users into posting publicly by default, or posted their activities from other places they didn't understand would become part of the public record, I think Timeline is a genuine value add to incentivize users to share more. I think it's great.

Somewhere along the complex supply chain of the mobile world's chips, antennas, touchscreens, operating systems and inter-linked celular networks traveling around the globe - someone has been caught capturing and transmitting more of your data than you'd probably like. There are probably any number of parties doing something similar but mobile usage data capture service Carrier IQ has been found to have code installed, with the phone companies' blessing, on millions of phones without the knowledge of consumers.

We're all awash in a sea of data, we have been for some time, but as we meet that data we learn that it is made of people. We've met the data tsunami and it is us. That's bound to make a lot of people uncomfortable. If a future based on that data unfolds in the wrong way, it could end up a major hindrance to the quality of human life.

A few recent legal developments affecting U.S. online privacy have rightfully troubled privacy advocates and civil libertarians on American soil. In addition to the Patriot Act's relaxed regulation of law enforcement's access to private data, recent court rulings have made it clear that U.S. authorities can secretly request data from tech companies without the user ever knowing.

If this seems objectionable from the standpoint of U.S. citizens, imagine how it looks to outsiders who are storing their data there. Some European companies who do business with U.S. technology companies are concerned enough to start looking elsewhere for infrastructure.

If you think there's a lot of demand for data storage now, you better brace yourself. According to projections pulled together by CenturyLink, we're in for a deluge of big data. By 2015, CenturyLink says that we'll see a four-fold increase in data being created and replicated.

This year, CenturyLink projects that 1.8 zettabytes of data will be created. By 2015, the projection is 7.9 zettabytes. That's the equivalent of 18 million times the digital assets stored by the Library of Congress today.

App developers are looking for ways to gain users and keep them in the fold through actionable data. There are a variety of ways to do this and several startups have popped up in the last couple of years to focus on particular elements of analytics, advertising, marketing and engagement layers. At this point most of these startups are focusing only on one or two of these problems.

Analytics and engagement startup Apsalar wants to change that. The company has been working all summer on products for analyzing data, engaging users across app platforms, optimizing the time spent in apps and helping developers monetize their users. It is a holistic approach that none of the other competitors have fully grasped yet.

The travel geeks at Thomson have created a data visualization you can dance to. They tracked the top-level dance genres over the past century, and expressed the data as an animated map that moves from parent genre to descendant, proliferating over time.

The mapmakers used data from the books Bass Culture, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life and The All Music Guide to Electronica, as well as Wikipedia. They marked the birth of each genre in five year periods. As well researched as it might be, the exercise wasn't without controversy, however.

A freely accessible index of 5 billion web pages, their page rank, their link graphs and other metadata, hosted on Amazon EC2, was announced today by the Common Crawl Foundation. "It is crucial [in] our information-based society that Web crawl data be open and accessible to anyone who desires to utilize it," writes Foundation director Lisa Green on the organization's blog.

The Foundation is an organization dedicated to leveraging the falling costs of crawling and storage for the benefit of "individuals, academic groups, small start-ups, big companies, governments and nonprofits." It's lead by Gilad Elbaz, the forefather of Google AdSense and the CEO of data platform startup Factual. Joining Elbaz on the Foundation board is internet public domain champion Carl Malamud and semantic web serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack. Director Lisa Green came to the Foundation by way of Creative Commons.

Mobile analytics firm Flurry is expanding its product offering with an announcement today of AppCircle Re-Engagement, a tool for iOS developers to attempt to energize users who have downloaded apps but may not be using them. Flurry has correctly identified the problem of decreasing app engagement over periods of time and now enters a crowded and growing space of tools for developers to increase app participation.

Flurry is extending its analytics program to target specific demographics. The company couches this ability as a new offering for developers. In reality, it is not. There are a variety of companies that provide analytics and ways to market from actionable data.