My privacy-loving countrymen here in the UK are up in arms about plans to equip household waste bins with RFID chips that will enable the collection services to monitor the amount of rubbish that a household produces. The primary concern seems to be that local governments will intend to start charging households on a scale based on quantity of waste removed – which doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me, and shouldn’t be a concern to anyone ‘doing their bit’ to recycle. The thing that everyone seems to have overlooked is – what is to stop major waste-producers simply putting their rubbish in other people’s bins?

The list of places where you can get a good wifi connection is soon to have a very large addition – in the next few months, the entirety of Singapore will be one big hotspot, thanks to the ‘Intelligent Nation 2015’ program. Not quite so breathtakingly vast is the ‘Frisco Bay Area’s new pilot scheme of free wifi on buses, designed to encourage use by laptop-toting commuters. It surely won’t be too long before places start using ‘wifi coldspot’ as a unique selling point to attract the techno-weary.

GPS has been around for a while, but is now starting to get cheap enough that the average person can start using it – for tracking people, vehicles or pretty much anything else. The TrackStick is a battery-powered USB device that stores GPS location data at preset intervals, which can then be uploaded to a computer in a variety of formats. The implications of this technology for privacy and surveillance issues are immensely complex, but as usual the technology is here before any sort of legal framework is in place. It also take us another step closer to spimes.

Everything has a brand or logo these days, and thanks to the research folk at Philips, you’ll even be bombarded with them in the dark. Their newly-announced ‘Lumalive’ textiles come with miniature LEDs incorporated into the fabric, so that clothing made with it can display changing illuminated graphics and logos. So the march of corporate branding continues apace – at least it’ll make it harder for chavs to sneak up on you in darkened streets.

When you bought you new computer, smartphone or PDA, did you stop to think about the environmental impact that its manufacture has had? Greenpeace has come out swinging with a list of technology companies that create ‘toxic electronic waste’ in the course of their business, in the hope of spurring improvements by increasing public pressure. Apple, Motorola and Lenovo all score badly in the list – no one rated higher than seven out of ten.