The whereabouts of more than 100,000 cell phone users have been tracked in an attempt to build a comprehensive picture of human movements. The study concludes that humans are creatures of habit, mostly visiting the same few spots time and time again. Most people also move less than 10km on a regular basis, according to the study published in the journal Nature. The results could be used to help prevent outbreaks of disease or forecast traffic, the scientists said.

A study detailed in Nature exposes the local nature of humans: we like to hang around our homes. But that's not what caught my eye. It's the way the study was conducted.

Americans' right to privacy has been an evolving concept. The U.S. Constitution's initial ten amendments that we call the Bill of Rights guaranteed only that the government could not quarter soldiers in people's residences and that homes could not be unreasonably searched. Much later, after many court cases, the notion of privacy expanded to include a certain expectation of solitude at home, free from outside prying.

The Greek unit of the U.K.'s mobile operator has been fined 19.1 million euros ($26 million) in a wiretapping scandal involving the country's senior officials, the national telecoms regulator said.

Europe's major consumer group BEUC said Wednesday that it feared Internet search engine Google Inc.'s takeover of online ad tracker DoubleClick Inc. would damage European Union privacy rights and limit consumers' choice of Web content.