It is a rare criticism of elite American university students that they do not think big enough. But that is exactly the complaint from some of the largest technology companies and the federal government. At the heart of this criticism is data.

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Mr. X lives in ZIP code 02138 and was born July 31, 1945.

These facts about him were included in an anonymized medical record released to the public. Sounds like Mr. X is pretty anonymous, right? Not if you’re Latanya Sweeney, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor who showed in 1997 that this information was enough to pin down Mr. X’s more familiar identity–William Weld, the governor of Massachusetts throughout the 1990s.

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In a vault beneath the British Library here, Jeremy Leighton John grapples with a formidable challenge in digital life. Dr. John, the library’s first curator of eManuscripts, is working on ways to archive the deluge of computer data swamping scientists so that future generations can authenticate today’s discoveries and better understand the people who made them.

His task is only getting harder. Scientists who collaborate via email, Google (GOOG), YouTube, Flickr and Facebook are leaving fewer paper trails, while the information technologies that do document their accomplishments can be incomprehensible to other researchers and historians trying to read them.

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Seeking. You can’t stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google (GOOG) searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges’ instructions and go look up facts for themselves.

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Ever since Netscape started storing cookies in its browsers, there has been a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature to the web. The Jekyll web promised a more personalized experience, with sites serving ads for products and services that you would actually be interested in–ads that are more like useful information and less like glaring interruptions. The Hyde web wanted sites to stalk you, recording little bits of data about your online life until they knew more than you’d be comfortable sharing even with some friends.

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Until three weeks ago, few people outside corporate data centers knew much about deduplication technology, which makes data storage more efficient by culling repetitive documents. That changed when data storage companies NetApp (NTAP) and EMC (EMC) got into a bidding war last month for a leading provider of the heretofore obscure software.

Their target is Data Domain (DDUP), for which EMC is offering $30 a share and NetApp $25 a share. While the clash surprised people who don’t know about the technology, it was no shock for Darren Thomas, who heads Dell’s (DELL) data storage division. “We always knew” that deduplication was hot, he says.

This week, Dell jumped into the fray when it announced a new deduplication box that combines technology from software maker CommVault (CVLT) with Dell hardware. The new product – along with new deduplication services that Dell is offering – may give a hint into the company’s M&A strategy, which has been taking shape in recent months.

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Amazon (AMZN) has unveiled a new service called AWS Import/Export that is designed to “accelerate moving large amounts of data” to and from Amazon’s S3 cloud-based storage solution. Only it doesn’t rely on improved network infrastructure–instead, it relies on the good old fashioned US Postal Service.

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Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, believes in logic the way Tina Brown believes in buzz. He rarely approves a story idea unless the writer backs up the thesis with data.

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A somewhat self-serving survey ahead of an information security trade show in London next week reveals a third of workers can potentially be bribed into handing over company data.

A poll of 600 workers at busy London railway stations found more than a third (37 per cent), admitted that they would hand over their organisation’s most sensitive data for inducements ranging up to a million pounds.

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There are computer hacks, and then there are REAL hacks, like of the saw variety. Silicon Valley got a wake-up call in the latter variety Thursday, when vandals hacked into fiber-optic cables beneath the ground, knocking parts of three California counties offline.

Some 52,000 households in Santa Clara County were expected to be without phone and Internet until at least late Thursday night, according to a county spokesman. Other counties experienced outages as well. Cellphones were also impacted since the cables that were cut handled all voice and data traffic in and out of the area.

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The number of consumers signing up to access the Internet via PC data cards has come nearly to a screeching halt, according to new data from comScore (SCOR).

The research firm reports today that the number of U.S. subscribers signing up for mobile broadband services using data cards grew just five percent sequentially in the fourth quarter, after a long string of double-digit gains. ComScore notes that PC data card adoption grew 163 percent overall in 2008, after 157 percent growth in 2007. But the five percent growth in Q4 was down from 22 percent sequential growth in Q3; in the 2007 Q4, there was 28 percent sequential growth.

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It was touching to see that Douglas Bowman, Google’s (GOOG) visual design leader, chose, in announcing his resignation, to stroll down Steve Wozniak Honesty Avenue.

In a blog post, he summed up his feelings, as all the best designers should, in one simple statement: “I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.”

He talked of how data was being collected (and one can only wonder what fine, laborious methods are used in the process) to judge the acceptability of a shade of blue, the width of a pixel, or the hair bang length of a brand manager.

Well, he didn’t mention that last one, but I am prepared to believe it might be possible.

I know that there are some engineers out there who will delight in yet another triumph for alleged data over some subjective, sniffy, superior artist. I also know that there will be many, many artists and other sentient human beings who wish that they would just take a run and jump.

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Today I decided to conduct an experiment. I started calling people I knew and asking if they had one or more videogames in the house. Then I asked if they breast-fed their children. To my great shock, most answered “yes” to both. One couple I contacted switched to formula after their child’s birth, and told me that they didn’t play videogames. The data, based on my first round of calls, was conclusive: If you play videogames, you are much more likely to breast-feed your children.

You’re probably ready to shoot five thousand holes in my argument. For one, I only called people I knew—we’re talking about a small sampling of individuals who happen to be friends with someone who writes about games for a living. Second, my friends are firmly in their 20s and 30s, which means they grew up playing games. I could have asked them almost anything and linked it with playing games. I did my job though, and you clicked on the headline. You may comment on this story, as well. It’s a good way to get readers, this tactic of linking a popular topic on a tech Web site to any other controversial topic.

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It appears that President Barack Obama gets to keep his BlackBerry after all, but some experts are questioning whether the Research In Motion (RIMM) device will provide enough security for the president.

At a press conference Thursday, a White House spokesman said the president will keep his BlackBerry “to stay in touch with senior staff and a small group of personal friends in a way that use will be limited and that the security is enhanced.”

Microsoft (MSFT), however, has questioned the wisdom of the president relying on a device whose maker is based in Canada. “You would be sending your data outside the country,” says Randy Siegel, a Microsoft enterprise mobile strategist who works on federal government projects. “We wouldn’t want the casual musings or official communications of the most important person in the world being intercepted by others.”

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For all the talk about privacy and security, it seems that a lot of people are downright sloppy when it comes to who they provide personal information.

A couple of prime examples this week occurred where large numbers of unsuspecting or naive [people] happily handed over their usernames and passwords to a third party simply because the service looked cool.

First up was SocialMinder, which is offering a service that lets you get control of your Gmail and LinkedIn contacts. To use it, you have to hand over usernames and passwords to an unknown company offering a beta service. Even worse, SocialMinder is using the information to spam your contacts, unless you realize what they are trying to do, and opt out.

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