Texting takes off but has perils

What's better than talking on telephones in public places? Cell phone addicts already know the answer -- sending text messages.

In June, Americans sent 75 billion text messages, an increase of more than 160 percent from the previous June. Texting is paying off royally for carriers, who have boosted the cost of sending messages without a texting plan 100 percent over the past two years.

They're now offering plans for unlimited texting running $20 per month on top of the normal phone charges.

If it seems unbelievable that mobile subscribers send and receive 357 text messages per month (according to Nielsen Mobile), the consequences make the statistic seem more ominous than trendy. The recent commuter train accident in California might have been caused by an engineer who was texting en route. A study by Britain's Royal Automotive Club found that reaction times of texting drivers are worse than those who are legally drunk.

Let's couple that with another appalling result: Nearly 50 percent of 18- to 24-year-old drivers say they text while they drive. Texting means taking hands off the wheel, using your thumbs to manipulate a tiny keypad, and trying to read text on a tiny screen. It also involves putting your brain into lockdown while you try to figure out what you want to text next.

Drivers yakking on cell phones are enough of a hazard. When will we get smart and ban hand-held phone use in moving vehicles?

If security is always a challenge on the Internet, the recent hacking of Sarah Palin's e-mail account at Yahoo reminds us that even password-protected activities properly managed can lead to grief.

Web mail, in particular, is a problem. This is the use of services like Yahoo's or Google's Gmail, where your messages are stored online rather than in your local computer, making them accessible from anywhere you can find a Net connection. Sadly, they're also in an environment where hackers find it easier to get in the back door.

But if you're feeling safe because you retrieve your mail from your own Internet service provider, consider this: ISPs are under pressure to broaden their income base, one possibility being to sell user data to advertising firms that extract behavior patterns and supply targeted ads. So-called "deep-packet" inspection technologies make mining such data a feasible though expensive possibility.

We also live in an environment where companies with very deep pockets in the entertainment industry have demonstrated their interest in monitoring user activities to uncover copyright violations. Add to this kind of pressure yet another, the ongoing need to assist law enforcement agencies by monitoring activities that may involve threats to national security.

A number of laws are involved here, including the Federal Wiretap Act, but exactly how an ISP can proceed with user consent -- and how that consent is interpreted in the context of an ISP user agreement -- are issues that have not been fully resolved.

With their ability to track users' behavior, ISPs are in a unique position to gather information and compromise privacy. A research paper by Colorado law professor Paul Ohm warns of a "coming storm" of such activity, perhaps motivated by a number of small ISPs that use services from targeted advertising companies such as NebuAd to inject ads into Web pages.

Privacy advocates, as ever, need to be vigilant.

Amazon's Kindle seems to be a modest success, although it's hard to tell, given the company's habit of keeping sales totals close to its vest.

Citigroup estimates 380,000 Kindles will go out the door this year, hardly enough to make electronic books a force in the publishing industry. But reading the tea leaves is interesting. A new Kindle, smaller and with an upgraded interface, is said to be in the works. At the same time, Sony will introduce its latest e-book device some time in October.

The real harbinger of change, though, may be coming in the form of new reading devices aimed at the business market. IREX Technologies offers up a larger digital ink reader with a 10.2-inch diagonal screen to supplement its earlier 8.1-inch model. This one is explicitly designed to work with the file format of your choice, from Adobe's pesky PDF to Word documents, HTML pages or dedicated book formats such as MobiPocket. A stylus and touch screen using E-ink display technology allow taking notes and marking up documents.

Would anyone pay $650 and up for a device that does much less than the laptop a similar amount might bring?

The answer is that dedicated reading devices with Net connections will be dropping in price as they gradually penetrate the market. Their advantages are immense, particularly if you extend them to the textbook arena, where heavy and expensive tomes give way to a single, easy to use reader.

Whether e-books take off among the novel-reading public is iffier than their likely success in venues where people need to carry multiple texts without the physical overhead of laptop machines.