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Google Australia will today be sent a "please explain" letter from two privacy organisations demanding to know why the company has been collecting personal Wi-Fi network data from Australian homes alongside the images it takes with its Street View cameras.

The letter comes in response to recent reports that the company has been quietly collecting Wi-Fi data around the world when taking pictures of streets and houses for its mapping service.

Street View, which has already rolled out in a number of countries including Australia, displays panoramic street-level photos taken by specially equipped vans which are also equipped with Wi-Fi receivers that scan private network signals as it drives through neighbourhoods

The Street View photos are overlayed onto Google Maps and concerns that Wi-Fi data could potentially be used to match mobile devices to residential addresses has privacy campaigners on alert, and they claim Google has failed to adequately explain the purpose for which they are collecting this data in Australia.

"The question is why an organisation like Google that already knows so much about individuals, that is driving around and taking photos of every street in Australia, is collecting data that could enable it to physically map that information to a physical street and presumably a physical house," asked Geordie Guy, vice chairman of the Electronic Frontiers Australia.

The EFA and Australian Privacy Foundation are jointly drafting a letter which will be sent to Google today.

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Has Stephen Hawking been rewatching his box set of the Alien movies?

It would appear so, as his opinion of whether we should make contact with any alien life forms we discover in the future has suddenly hardened. According to a new documentary series he has made for the Discovery Channel : "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans."

Hawking believes we would be well-advised to keep the volume down on our intergalactic chatter and do all we can to prevent any "nomadic" aliens moseying our way to take a look-see. Should they find us here tucked away in the inner reaches of the solar system, chances are they'd zap us all and pillage any resources they could get their hands on. Our own history, says Hawking, proves that first encounters very rarely begin: "Do take a seat. I'll pop the kettle on. Milk? Sugar?"

"Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach," says the theoretical physicist in Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking. "To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like."

Any alien who manages to reach Earth is, by definition, going to be far more advanced than us. Contrary to the claims of our own alien abductees, Hawking thinks it unlikely aliens will come all this way just to prod and poke us, take some samples, and pop back home in time for Show and Tell. Logic dictates that we will be the Stoke to their Chelsea.

It's all well and good Hawking warning us now, but couldn't he have told us to be more careful a few decades ago? After all, we've been pumping out our musings for all to see and hear since the very first radio telecommunications were broadcast a century ago. Any alien with their antennae pointed in our direction would already have quite a good sense of our intellectual capabilities. All they need do is take their pick from any of our cultural offerings being broadcast into the ether. (Let's just hope they didn't tune in when Battlefield Earth was showing, as that paints us in a poor light on so many levels.)

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Scientists are taking a new look at hallucinogens, which became taboo among regulators after enthusiasts like Timothy Leary promoted them in the 1960s with the slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Now, using rigorous protocols and safeguards, scientists have won permission to study once again the drugs’ potential for treating mental problems and illuminating the nature of consciousness.

After taking the hallucinogen, Dr. Martin put on an eye mask and headphones, and lay on a couch listening to classical music as he contemplated the universe.

“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating,” he recalled. “Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.”

Today, more than a year later, Dr. Martin credits that six-hour experience with helping him overcome his depression and profoundly transforming his relationships with his daughter and friends. He ranks it among the most meaningful events of his life, which makes him a fairly typical member of a growing club of experimental subjects.

Researchers from around the world are gathering this week in San Jose, Calif., for the largest conference on psychedelic science held in the United States in four decades. They plan to discuss studies of psilocybin and other psychedelics for treating depression in cancer patients, obsessive-compulsive disorder, end-of-life anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction to drugs or alcohol.

The results so far are encouraging but also preliminary, and researchers caution against reading too much into these small-scale studies. They do not want to repeat the mistakes of the 1960s, when some scientists-turned-evangelists exaggerated their understanding of the drugs’ risks and benefits.

Because reactions to hallucinogens can vary so much depending on the setting, experimenters and review boards have developed guidelines to set up a comfortable environment with expert monitors in the room to deal with adverse reactions. They have established standard protocols so that the drugs’ effects can be gauged more accurately, and they have also directly observed the drugs’ effects by scanning the brains of people under the influence of hallucinogens.

Scientists are especially intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported throughout history by religious mystics and those who meditate. These similarities have been identified in neural imaging studies conducted by Swiss researchers and in experiments led by Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins.

In one of Dr. Griffiths’s first studies, involving 36 people with no serious physical or emotional problems, he and colleagues found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them...

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A related question is often asked: To what extent is a digital person separate from the person who is roleplaying them? The question is often asked. Many consider it impossible to create and sustain a personality that is substantially different from the RL persona. Others argue that current virtual reality is too crude to enable deep immersion into an alternate identity. The first argument may be true, but it hardly rules out the possibility of developing a digital person that is somewhat different from the RL self. As for the second argument, the crudeness of current VR may be an advantage. It enables those who want to play around with alternate identities or character creation, but does not yet raise the kind of existential questions that plagued people in Greg Egan’s Permutation City or the Matrix movies. As online worlds grow in sophistication, it should enable increasingly complex explorations of alternate identities. The end result may seem very strange to us, but perhaps less so to the people who get to use them, especially if they emerged from many small steps from the previous generation of online worlds.

Developments in AI may also allow avatars to become increasingly autonomous. With eye-tracking software, a user could look at a point in the virtual space, and their avatar would head toward it. This might seem like nothing more than a convenient tool, but if an avatar can infer objects of interest from the direction of the user’s gaze, that would represent a basic step toward developing theory of mind.

This is something that interests search engine providers. Yahoo’s Usama Fayyad commented, “With more knowledge about where you are, what you are like and what you are doing at the moment…the better we will be able to deliver relevant information when people need it.” This would suggest mind uploading might benefit from progress in search software. After all, to develop as complete a model of a person’s state of mind as possible, eventually you must build something close to a copy of that mind. At Google, Peter Norvig sees us moving away from typing words into a search engine. Instead, “people will discuss their needs with a digital intermediary…the result will not be a list of links, but an annotated report (or a simple conversation) that synthesizes the important points.”

A “digital intermediary” sounds less like a tool and more like a person that collaborates with users, helping to gather and organize information. As storage capacities grow and computers and sensors shrink, some researchers foresee the emergence of computing ecosystems that can automatically capture and store “digital memories” of everything that happens in a person’s daily life. Such a gigantic store of accumulated data would require an AI competent at organizing information. Positive feedback might occur: the better digital intermediaries get at finding meaningful patterns in data, the more they know about the user. The more they know about the user, the better they get at finding meaningful patterns.

Digital intermediaries might develop into what Ben Goertzel has called “digital twins”: “An AI-powered avatar…embodying one’s ideas and preferences and [making] a reasonable emulation of the decisions one would make.” Some have argued that this approach is unlikely to capture enough information about a person to equal a mind upload. I agree. I think “digital twins” are unlikely to convince people that they are the person they claim to be, if subjected to lengthy interrogation by close family and friends. But they are more likely to be developed before “mind children”, as will software designed around partial understandings of the structure and functions of the brain. How will regular interactions with digital intermediaries, digital twins, and a clearer understanding of how the mind works affect concepts of “self”?

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