ReadWriteWeb

We're now over halfway through 2011 and it's been another year of technology disruption. This time last year, the focus was on Apple's groundbreaking iPad and the impact it had on how we consume media. This year, the big story has been Google Plus. The reason Google's new social network has shaken things up has been its focus on your privacy.

This is the first in a 5-part series looking back on the significant trends of 2011. Below we review the happenings in privacy this year; including Google Plus vs. Facebook, controversies over smartphones tracking your location data, and new browser features that protect your privacy.

Zynga does games. That is the company's bread and butter. Zynga makes almost all of its money through Facebook. Facebook does not do privacy very well and often faces user backlash whenever privacy settings or options are changed. User backlash against Facebook is inherently bad for Zynga.

Zynga wants users to know that it cares about privacy despite what the Facebook mothership is doing. Hence, Zynga has released a new "game" designed to teach users all about how the social gaming company treats user information, where it is stored and how it is used. Say hello to PrivacyVille.

There seem to be three forces at play when it comes to education and social media. The first is a lack of force, quite frankly - the inertia that makes many educators unwilling and uninterested in integrating the technology into their classrooms. The second is the force of fear - the pressures on the part of administrators, district officials, and politicians to curtail and ban teacher and students' interactions online. (See Rhode Island's recently passed legislation that outlaws all social media on school grounds as a case in point.) And finally, the third force is that of more and more educators who are embracing social media and advocating its use on- and off-campus - for student learning and for teacher professional development alike.

I spent this past week with many of those teachers at the International Society for Technology in Education conference in Philadelphia, and when Google unveiled Google+ on Tuesday, most of us were otherwise preoccupied. But now that many of the early tech adopter teachers are getting their Google+ invites, the question on their minds is "How will this work for education?"

Data collected from customers is routinely anonymized and then sold or otherwise disseminated for research purposes. But does anonymization work? One particularly high profile case was Netflix's release of its customer data as part of its machine learning algorithm contest. According to Forbes' firewall blog, researchers were able to de-anonymize some of this data by doing things like cross-referencing it with IMDB comments. Netflix wound up canceling its later contest.

But is this sort of re-identifying practical, and does it make anonymizing data a pointless endeavor? No says arecent report by Ontario Information & Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian, Ph.D.and Khaled El Emam, Ph.D of the University of Ottawa. The report acknowledges the potential to re-identify data in some cases, but emphasizes that de-identification is an import means to safe guard privacy while enabling important research in areas such as medicine.

With this week's launch of a new tool called "Me on the Web," Google wants to help users better understand and manage their online identities, as well as learn how to remove unwanted content from Google search results.

Through Google's online dashboard, available to anyone with a Google account, this added section helps you track your online mentions, view your public profiles on various social networking sites and blogs, manage your digital identity and even learn the process involved in having items removed from the Web entirely.

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, John McCain accused Barack Obama of being "the guy who worries about the price of arugula," a suggestion that Obama was an elitist. Many scoffed at the remark, but according to Hunch CEO and co-founder Chris Dixon, liberals do prefer arugula while conservatives opt for iceberg lettuce. The connection between lettuce preferences and political orientation is something that Hunch has uncovered through its taste graph and recommendation engine, something that Dixon describes as "the most sophisticated system ever built for predicting human preferences."

On stage today at ReadWriteWeb's 2WAY Summit, Dixon sat down with our own Marshall Kirkpatrick to talk about how Hunch has built its taste graph and how this sort of recommendation engine may shape the future of a more personalized Web.

Facebook changed the security options of millions of international users today. The photo-tagging facial recognition program that Facebook unveiled to North American in July 2010 has arrived in most of the rest of the world today, according to security company Sophos.

Facebook does not tag people in photos automatically, but prompts users to tag friends that the facial recognition system recognizes. The service is opt-out in Facebook's security settings as opposed to opt-in. That aspect of the facial recognition feature and Facebook's approach to privacy altogether is what bothers privacy and security advocates like Sophos.

It was just last week when the privacy-focused Facebook alternative Diaspora posted an update on its development status, promising to "go faster." It may need to do just that not only to please its community and woo new users, but to help stave off the competition from yet another startup that's just announced its plans to also provide a privacy-focused social network.

This one's called Altly, and it announced its plans to build an alternative to Facebook today with a lengthy manifesto on why privacy, personal data control, and data portability should matter.

An article by Nolan Goldberg in the National Law Journal brings up some intriguing legal implications as more lawsuits are filed as a result of large data visualizations and what they mean for our privacy.

Let's be perfectly honest. For those of us who are tied to a Web browser all day, searching the Internet comes in handy for a wide range of work-related purposes. But who among us hasn't snuck in an on-the-job search or two to find a place to eat that night, look up trivial news stories or straight-up distract ourselves with queries like "play Tetris online" or "kitten falling asleep"?

Indeed, the Web sometimes blurs the line between our personal and professional activity, and the folks in charge have a vested interest in ensuring we're maintaining at least a bare minimum level of productivity. Some companies restrict Web access or snoop on employees' browsing, while others are more hands off.