Sharing your information, private or otherwise, with other companies is big business. Not only can your friends find you in the field, companies can connect with you too through the rapidly expanding geographic capabilities of positioning utilities. The basic privacy and protection that you once had within your home sitting alongside your Dell Dimension desktop is now compromised significantly by the new geo-tagging utilities building the out-of-home market.

Dubbed Recognizr, the app essentially works like this: the user points the camera at a person across the room. Face recognition software creates a 3-D model of the person’s mug and sends it across a server where it’s matched with an identity in the database. A cloud server conducts the facial recognition since and sends back the subject’s name as well as links to any social networking sites the person has provided access to.

Democrats have retreated from adding new privacy protections to the primary U.S counterterrorism law, stymied by Senate Republicans who argued the changes would weaken terror investigations. (It’s always Red vs. Blue… notice that?)

Almost three quarters of the American public are in favor of full body x-ray scanners at airports and 51% are in support of racial and ethnic profiling to deter terrorism in the skies. Have we truly reached (gone back to) the point in America where skin color denotes your level of danger? Are we fully prepared for the massive terahertz radiation exposure that these machines offer? THz waves have been discovered to ‘unzip’ double-stranded DNA. What are the implications and where is America headed?

Countries that have historically friendly relations with the United States on Thursday will begin issuing passports to residents traveling abroad complete with facial-recognition software and digital chips. The U.S. Border Security Act of 2002 requires that as of Thursday, passports issued by VWP nations must be electronic. It also requires that U.S. ports of entry have technology in place to compare and authenticate the high-tech documents.

But what of the health effects of terahertz waves? At first glance, it’s easy to dismiss any notion that they can be damaging. Terahertz photons are not energetic enough to break chemical bonds or ionise atoms or molecules, the chief reasons why higher energy photons such as x-rays and UV rays are so bad for us. But could there be another mechanism at work?