This summer, the fifth anniversary of Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance passed quietly, adrift on a tide of news that now daily sweeps the ground from under our feet.

Netflix believes, algorithmically at least, that I am the kind of person who likes to watch “Dark TV Shows Featuring a Strong Female Lead.” This picksome genre is never one that I that seek out intentionally, and I’m not sure it even represents my viewing habits.

The parallel between Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and CCTV may be clear, but what happens when you step into the world of data capture? The philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously requested in his will that his body be dissected and put on public display.

Computer algorithms have gotten much better at recognizing patterns, like specific animals or people's faces, allowing software to automatically categorize large image collections. But we've come to rely on some things that computers can't do well.

The parallel between Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and CCTV may be clear, but what happens when you step into the world of data capture? The philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously requested in his will that his body be dissected and put on public display.

At the end of June, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had hit a new level: two billion monthly active users. That number, the company’s preferred ‘metric’ when measuring its own size, means two billion different people used Facebook in the preceding month.

The satellite company Planet is used to breaking records. In 2014, a rocket exploded with a payload of the company’s satellites inside—26, the biggest loss ever.

Like most every­thing today, the campaign was launched with a hashtag. But instead of promoting a new album or a movie release, #AllEyesOnISIS announced the 2014 invasion of northern Iraq—a bloody takeover that still haunts global politics two years later.

The dark web—the portion of the deep web only accessible through specific software—exists to serve the needs of hackers-for-hire, hitmen, internet drug kingpins, child pornographers, and their inevitable customers. That’s the public consensus. Then there’s the counter-narrative.

Janet Vertesi, assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, had an idea: would it be possible to hide her pregnancy from big data? Thinking about technology—the way we use it and the way it uses us—is her professional life’s work.

The scariest thing about Mishka Henner’s “Feedlots” photographs is that they are so beautiful. In one photograph from the series, a pool of bright red swirls interrupts a field of greyish boxes.

The Listener creates a physical space which makes tangible, and sometimes cacophonous, the discrete and near-constant data broadcast from devices such as smartphones. It exposes how this data can be used to identify and track individuals, and reveal personal information about their movements.

Be careful about what you say in your living room if your new TV is on. News broke earlier this week that Samsung’s Web-connected SmartTV can listen to, record, and send what the television hears to a third-party company. The television doesn’t watch you watch it back, but it is listening.

Cybersalon explores the controversial role of Tor encryption and it’s impact on contemporary culture, and what recent events mean for human rights workers, activists and whistleblowers around the world.

http://www.cybersalon.org/darknet/

Amid all the noise the Sony hack generated over the holidays, a far more troubling cyber attack was largely lost in the chaos. Unless you follow security news closely, you likely missed it. I’m referring to the revelation, in a German report released just before Christmas (.

Criminal investigations often use photographic evidence to identify suspects. Here we combined robust face perception and high-resolution photography to mine face photographs for hidden information.

Editor's note: This is the eighth installment of the Living With Data series exploring how our online data is tracked, collected and used.

There's a new wrinkle in Brazil's plan to build a $185 million undersea fiber-optic cable that would connect it to Portugal and help the country avoid surveillance by U.S. intelligence authorities, reports Bloomberg: The cable will be built without the help of any U.S. companies.

Every day a piece of computer code is sent to me by e-mail from a website to which I subscribe called IFTTT. Those letters stand for the phrase “if this then that,” and the code is in the form of a “recipe” that has the power to animate it.

No tool in existence protects your anonymity on the Web better than the software Tor, which encrypts Internet traffic and bounces it through random computers around the world.