I got the numbers straight from the Bits post, but you can download the full report from 11mark for all the demographics. You have to register though, and I didn't want to be the guy who creates an online account to just read a report on what people do while they make dooty. I have standards.

Facebook logs and saves a lot of data about you and what you do on their site. This shouldn't be surprising given the more time people spend on Facebook, the greater the cash flow, but just how much data do they store? Austrian law student Max Schrems, because European law states that citizens can do this, requested all the data Facebook had about him. He got back a CD with 1,222 PDF files.

There was his log ins (above). There was message activity:

And geolocation for pics from his trip to Vienna:

But again, it's not surprising. People use Facebook, a free service, to upload pictures, update statuses, and share links with their own free will. It's more surprising that people are surprised by this — or that Facebook used a CD to transfer Schrems' data.

[taz via infosthetics]

Mostly because of the popularity of smartphones, location data is all the rage nowadays. You're almost always connected no matter where you are. Rich location data can help provide you a new sense of place, and at the same time, this sort of data can paint an interesting picture of what's going on in your country or around the world. Hence, Infochimps, the one-stop shop for data folk and developers, just announced their new Geo API.

The API lets you easily access location data from a variety of sources, such as Geonames, the American Community Survey, and Wikipedia, all through a single API, meaning you don't have to fuss around with multiple APIs run by a bunch of different groups with their own rules and syntax.

In addition to letting you query for records, the API also makes it easier to query across regions. For example, when you're looking at a map and you have thousands of locations across a country, or even just hundreds within a small location, the map is pretty useless. You've probably seen these sort of maps, piled high with pushpins and running slow as mollasses.

The good maps out there aggregate and process the data as you zoom out and in. The good thing is that the Infochimps API will handle that for you.

Above is a map that clusters over 100,000 schools in the United States. Try to build an interactive map that shows all 100,000 points, and you'll get an unusable application.

Bottom line: the API should make it a lot easier to get the data how you want it, which let's you get to the fun part sooner.

[Infochimps Geo API]

[census.ire.org via @bryanboyer]

Jonathan's Card is an experiment in social sharing of physical goods using digital currency on mobile phones. I stumbled on the idea while doing research for a blog post about Broadcasting Mobile Currency.

Based on the similarity to the "take a penny, leave a penny" trays at convenience stores in the US, I've adopted a similar "get a coffee, give a coffee" terminology for Jonathan's Card.

Simply save the picture of Jonathan's Starbucks card onto your smartphone and use it to buy your coffee. If you like, add money to the card so that someone else can buy a coffee.

The best part is that Stark provides a simple API that returns the balance on the card every minute. When do people buy coffee? How do people give and take? Are people more likely to give when there's a large balance or when there's nothing left? Lots of fun things to look at.

[Jonathan's Card via @kn0thing]

Our raw data, previously posted only as SPSS files, is now available in comma-delimited (.csv) format for all reports going back to 2003. We hope that making our data available in this open-source format will make analysis easier for researchers who don’t own a copy of SPSS to analyze our data.

This should be fun. Recent datasets include the social side of the Internet, health tracking habits, and reputation management.

[Pew Research via @kzickhur]

Researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden have found that the iPhone records cell tower access, and hence your location, in an easy-to-read file that is transferred as you switch devices. And they do this whether you like it or not.

The more fundamental problem is that Apple are collecting this information at all. Cell-phone providers collect similar data almost inevitably as part of their operations, but it’s kept behind their firewall. It normally requires a court order to gain access to it, whereas this is available to anyone who can get their hands on your phone or computer.

Allan and Warden provide an open-source application, iPhone Tracker, that maps that data. The good news is that the data doesn't seem go to be anywhere other than your own backups and devices. Privacy concerns aside, this kind of makes me wish I had an iPhone; although I suspect my map would be painfully boring.

[iPhone Tracker via Marco]

So not only was I wrong, but now we're taking steps backward. The budget for these technologies will be cut from $37m to $2m. According to Federal News Radio, USASpending.gov and Apps.gov/now will remain online until July 30 and then go black soon after.

For some reason it costs $4m just to keep USASpending operating for a year. Really?

As for Data.gov, it has always felt rough around the edges since launch and never got off the ground. There's a lot of data there, but it's old. Still, it is a sign of progress, and there is so much potential there that it's a shame to see the efforts that have already been put in go to waste. Plus, when you compare the cuts to the billions of dollars spent elsewhere, it's sad how little value these sites have.

Or maybe what's sadder is that $37m wasn't enough to build something worth keeping. I wonder how Data.gov.uk is doing. Hopefully better.

Do you want to see these sites keep going? Sunlight Foundation has an open letter to Congress seeking signatures.

However, here's the million dollar question: is Data.gov worth saving?

[Federal News Radio & Sunlight Foundation via ReadWriteWeb]

Not many people understand the importance of data privacy. They don't get out how little bits of information sent from your phone every now and then can show a lot about your day-to-day life.

As the German government tries to come to a consensus about its data retention rules, Green party politician Malte Spitz retrieved six months of phone data from Deutsche Telekom (by suing them), to show what you can get from a little bit of private mobile data. He handed the data to Zeit Online, and they in turn mapped and animated practically every one of Spitz' moves over half a year and combined it with publicly available information from sources such as his appointment website, blog, and Twitter feed for more context.

This profile reveals when Spitz walked down the street, when he took a train, when he was in an airplane. It shows where he was in the cities he visited. It shows when he worked and when he slept, when he could be reached by phone and when was unavailable. It shows when he preferred to talk on his phone and when he preferred to send a text message. It shows which beer gardens he liked to visit in his free time. All in all, it reveals an entire life.

Press the play button and watch him go, or use the timeline on the bottom to skip to specific spots. Slick, well-designed, and thorough reporting.

Want to see the data for yourself? Download the spreadsheet. Zeit did omit phone numbers, but it should be easy to see how that could add a whole other level of complexity.

Then again, some people already share all this information via Foursquare and Twitter. Is that a good thing?

[Zeit Online via @aaronkoblin]

A quick scan of the data available, however, does seem to indicate that a lot of it is spotty or outdated (like on data.gov), which doesn't make it especially useful. For example, some data sets are only one data point, while others are only a single year. At least it's a start.

[Health Indicators Warehouse via @periscopic]