Twitter has reportedly stopped the flow of data to US intelligence agencies which is currently delivered via a private data mining service.

China’s “ghost cities,” where towns are built at high-speed but struggle to find residents, are a well-known phenomenon. But while there are lots of pictures of these uncanny cities online, it’s really difficult to figure out how many actually exist.

Parks and Rec jumped a few years into the future for its last season, and that jump has mostly manifested in holographic tablets. Last night's episode, however, took on the more in-depth subject of data-mining pretty seriously, and with characteristically goofy wit. It's just a liiittle too realistic though.

As part of Apple's ongoing glasnost campaign, Tim Cook was on Charlie Rose last Friday. Part two airs tonight and it looks like it will be a lot meatier, just based on the clip released today: Cook will apparently talk more about the role of privacy at Apple, including their choice not to release or mine user metadata.

So, this sounds creepy: Some hospitals are identifying high-risk patients by buying loads of consumer data (i.e. credit card purchases, store loyalty programs, etc.) and plugging it into algorithms so they can step in before the customer gets sick. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, it's currently being used by…

Helmets? Check. Breathing tanks? Check. Hoses? Ditto. Algorithms? Yep: the New York City Fire Department is using data mining to predict which of the city's buildings are at highest risk of catching fire. Now that's metadata we can get behind.

What if, instead of marketing to a general demographic, you marketed to a specific individual? What if, instead of waiting for a patron to commission new work, an artist simply designed it based on someone's psychological profile? If an online ad asked for you by name, could you resist?

There's been a lot of talk about the NSA and its data-gathering policies. The news sounds kind of scary. But you might be thinking that the NSA can't have literally every foreign and domestic call made in the U.S.. That would be a crazy amount of data right? Well, yes it would be, and it kind of seems like they have…

On the surface Facebook is a social network, but those in the know recognize that it's actually one of the largest datasets of human trends, preferences and activity ever catalogued. One way to appreciate the vast potential of this dataset is to use the company's new Graph Search to find people who like "shitting…

It's difficult to think of an upside to relinquishing your personal data—your privacy, really—to the prying eyes of the internet. But over at the Atlantic, Brian Fung makes a solid case for why data-mining might actually be doing a world of good behind the scenes.

Path faced a privacy flap when it was revealed that the company was uploading users' address book data to its servers without permission. While it stopped doing that and deleted all the data it had stored, a larger issue remains.

Try reading the news today and not getting depressed about the future. We're looking at tomorrows full of climate change, looming pandemics, and overpopulation. But just how unhappy do these possible future trends make us? Alberto Pepe, a computer scientist at UCLA wanted to find out. So he collected 10,741 public…

Flickr, the popular photo sharing Web site bought out by Yahoo! some months ago, is now collecting and publishing the camera details of its users. Welcome to a Web 2.0 gold mine of data that marketing types will likely skeet over. The first few sets of data released indicate that Canon has a pretty good stranglehold…