George Putic of voanews.com writes:

When news broke about U.S. government agencies collecting metadata about its citizens’ Internet and phone communications, many were surprised by its scope. The surveillance covered a vast number of Internet messages and phone calls. The government did not deny the action but pointed out that the collected data contained, not the substance of the communication, but the so-called metadata.

The Communication Workers Union says Telefónica will now be cutting 1,000 jobs as it outsources O2 call centre operations to Capita.

Plans for up to 600 voluntary redundancies have been extended with a further 400 people expected to be made redundant from call centres in Bury, Glasgow, Leeds and Warrington.

New research from marketing company Tradedoubler shows that mobile devices are having a negative effect on high-street consumer loyalty.

The study found that 52% of online shoppers have at least one ‘performance marketing’ application on their mobile, with 32% using a price comparison app.

Mark Bridge writes:

There’s been a lot of talk recently about PRISM, which may allow the US National Security Agency - and anyone they choose - to access some of our personal online information if it passes through the USA. It’s unclear exactly what (if anything) is being shared with whom… and given the nature of national security, we may never know.

However, alongside the possibility of governments seeing information we thought was secure, it’s also worth pointing out that we choose to share plenty of online information ourselves.

A new report from Juniper Research has forecast that over 950 million mobile phone users will be using their handsets for mobile ticketing by 2018.

That’s more than double this year’s anticipated total of 458 million people worldwide, with most of the growth coming from transport-related services.