get paid to drive safely

Do you like to multitask while driving? SafeCellApp will PAY you to put down the phone. The new points-based program rewards you for every mile that you drive without distractions.

This app uses iPhone's GPS to track how many miles you've driven safely -- i.e., without talking on the phone or texting. Each mile driven safely equals one point, and 500 points can get you a $5 gift card to retailers like Amazon, Apple, and Macy's. For emergencies, you can press a big emergency button and make a call. And even though your GPS location is being tracked everywhere, you are supposedly the only one who has access to the details of your whereabouts.

At $12, SafeCellApp is considered pretty expensive for an app, but the idea is that you'll make it all back with safe driving. Although you'd have to (safely) drive a whopping 1,200 miles before you break even. Personally, I can't imagine this being an effective incentive to get people to stop calling/texting while driving. The only person I can imagine having the patience to drive without distractions for 500 miles is my mom, and she's the kind of person who would never pick up the phone while driving in the first place.

Somebody Didn't Read the Company Motto

A pair of recent violations by Google employees highlight the risks to individual privacy associated with the growing amount of personal information being collected by companies like Google and Facebook. Engineer David Barksdale was fired after having accessed the accounts of four minors. He viewed their Google Voice call logs, chat transcripts and contact lists in order to gain personal information. According to accounts in Wired and Tech Crunch, his motivation was petty rather than criminal, but it's still troubling. Also troubling is that Google chose to treat this violation as an internal matter rather than as a criminal breach of cyber law.

While this is a case of an individual breaching protocol, Google acknowledged that a similar incident had happened before. They have promised to improve their internal security measures and will introduce more stringent restrictions on employee access to user data. However, these policy changes don't address the core problem of huge repositories of personal information that have the potential to be exploited in a variety of ways by employees or hackers.