Alex Reid

Canada’s Privacy Commissioner has just released the final report of her Office’s consultations on the subject of Online Tracking, Profiling and Targeting, and Cloud Computing.

Jennifer Stoddart said:

“Most people have no idea about the rich trail of data they leave behind when they browse the Internet, use social networking sites, or engage the geo-location functions of their mobile devices,” the Commissioner said.

Organizations that track the online activities of Canadians must be more upfront about their practices, Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart has concluded… “it comes down to meaningful consent, which entails informed consent”.

Montreal web developer and blogger Cedric Sam put together a brilliant Google Map mashup displaying election results of each of the 308 federal ridings – poll by poll!

He “used cartographic data from the Geogratis.gc.ca website. I imported the Shapefiles to a PostgreSQL database with Postgis. Then, I processed results by polling divisions from the 2008 election, data available on the Elections Canada website. It was put in a separate table on the same database. A custom program in Python using the very handy libkml (a code library developed and supported by Google) took the data and outputted pretty KML code. It was packed as a KMZ and uploaded to my webspace. [E-mail me, if you want to exchange ideas on the code]

The webpage itself is rich in JavaScript and the code can be seen here. I use hashes to make the webpage bookmarkable and loadable with a given riding pre-loaded.”

Sam has a lot of cool things going on, check out his blog here: http://smurfmatic.net/blog/

New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been pushing for more public information to be handed over to geeks to achieve three goals; more civic transparency, offering more services for less money and promoting the city as the next tech mecca.

For the second year in a row, the City of New York has embarked on a call to arms to geeks with its own annual data competition, releasing over 350 public data sets and asking tech companies to make apps that are not only useful but may be the basis of the next Google or Facebook.

This year’s $10,000 grand prize went to Roadify, an app that sends alerts to mobile phones about subway, bus, and driving conditions, allowing users to add comments and real-time updates as they commute.

It isn’t just about the money though, it’s about the pride and attention. Some of the competition judges included Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai.

Some of the finalists included DontEat.at, an app that sends a text message when you check in to a restaurant that has a risk of being closed for health code violations; Sportaneous, a geo-map app that helps users find and join pick-up games close to them with other users that match their skill level; and Parking Finder, an app that locates nearby parking garages and their parking rates.

Edmonton is getting their own Hackathon, a codefest where developers, programmers, engineers, designers and even marketers get together for a collaborative technical project.

This isn’t the first for Edmonton or Alberta, as the first hackathon happened in Calgary in 1999, focusing on cryptographic development (according to wikipedia, “part of the reason for holding it in Canada was to avoid legal problems caused by United States regulations on the export of cryptographic software”).

This hackathon – sponsored by Microsoft – will focus on creating an emergency information application that can be used “in cities all over the world. An application that will help families prepare during a disaster. An app that will list emergency muster points, emergency info, alerts during disasters, and what you can do.”

This is Edmonton’s third official hackathon to take place at 9:15am Wednesday, October 20th, and continue until 9:15am Thursday, October 21st. To join this hackathon, click here.