Your cell phone is out of your control

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Here's the takeaway from the Carrier IQ fiasco: Mobile phone owners have no clue what data-gathering tools are running on their devices, and little ability to control them.
Tiny Carrier IQ's sudden jump into the national spotlight ignited widespread confusion and anger. The flap began late last month after Android developer Trevor Eckhart released a 17-minute YouTube video indicating that the little-known application was sending everything you do on your phone back to your carrier -- including what websites you visit, what your texts say and what keys you press.

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Carrier IQ and the carriers amplified the anxiety by staying relatively mum.

To continue reading click here: http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/28/technology/carrier_iq/index.htm

Dropbox adds auto-import from your camera

(WIRED) -- Dropbox is trying out a neat new feature that will give it magical Photo Stream-like abilities. Everybody's favorite cloud-storage app has added photo and video import.
In a new "Experimental Forum Build" of the app for Windows, Mac and Linux, photos and videos will be slurped up from any memory card or camera connected to the computer. These will then be sent spinning off to the DropBox servers, ready for access by all your other Dropbox-connected devices.
There have already been some well reasoned complaints over in the Dropbox forums. For instance, some people might take so many photos that they don't want them all clogging up their limited cloud storage. This feature also adds complexity to the Dropbox application itself, when it's already pretty easy to have a third-party app store selected photos inside your Dropbox folder.

To continue reading click here: http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/27/tech/mobile/dropbox-camera-auto-import/index.html