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[Commentary] Your privacy is being debated by lawmakers in Sacramento and Washington D.C., and there's a good chance you're going to lose out.

In Congress, a poorly written bill could erode your privacy, while in the California Legislature, a good bill that would protect your privacy is coming under fierce attack. Internet companies -- including Google, Facebook and Amazon -- have for years been collecting vast amounts of personal data about their users and often share that information with other companies, particularly Internet marketing firms. The two bills under consideration could significantly affect who has access to that personal data and how much users must be told about how their data is used. The bill before Congress, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA for short, is nominally intended to allow the government and companies to more effectively respond to coordinated computer attacks on their networks. The bill, which passed the House earlier this month but has now reportedly stalled in the Senate, would allow companies to share with federal agencies information about cyberattacks without requiring those agencies to get a warrant.

The California bill, by contrast, could be a boon for consumers' privacy. Dubbed the "Right to Know Act," and sponsored by Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, it would update an existing state law requiring direct marketers to disclose to their customers, when requested, the information they collect about them and with whom they share that information. Internet marketers claim the bill is unworkable, that it would put an undue burden on them and would open them up to frivolous lawsuits from customers claiming they didn't get the information they requested in a timely fashion. But direct marketers have had to live within this kind of law for the past eight years, and online companies that operate in Europe already have to comply with similar transparency laws there. You can bet that the real reason they're putting up such a fuss is because they don't want you to know just how much information they're collecting or who they're selling it to. According to the bills' analysis, some companies have placed as many as 100 tracking tools on their websites. The information they're harvesting can include sensitive financial, health and location information.

According to supporters of the bill, access to that kind of information has caused real harm, including the unwilling outing of gay teens and physical harm done to women whose location was disclosed to their abusers. "People want to have control and knowledge about what information is being gathered and what it's being used for," said John Simpson director of the privacy project at Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group. "That's not an unreasonable expectation." Hear, hear.

[Commentary] We used to turn on the television to see people who were happier, funnier, prettier versions of ourselves. But at the turn of the century, something fundamental changed and we began to see scarier, crazier, darker forms of the American way of life.

Click on ambitious cable channels now, and you will find a high school science teacher who makes meth when he is not dissolving his enemies in vats of acid (“Breaking Bad”); a successful Madison Avenue advertising executive whose entire life is a lie (“Mad Men”); a forensics investigator who is a serial killer on the side (“Dexter”); and a New Jersey gangster, this one in Atlantic City, who is very much the family man (“Boardwalk Empire”). It has been a winning formula, but the execution risk is high. In “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution,” to be published in July by Penguin Press, the author, Brett Martin, suggests that the programming was produced by men who were as tortured and sometimes as despotic as the antiheroes they hung their plots on.

When it comes to watching television on tablets and smartphones, viewers can download apps for big national services like HBO, ESPN and Netflix. And, since earlier this month, there is the "Watch KHQ" app for TV viewers in Spokane, Wash., who want to catch up with their local NBC affiliate.

"Watch KHQ" has its limits: Because the station doesn't yet have the Web rights to stream NBC's prime-time lineup or game shows like "Jeopardy," the app can't show much of what KHQ airs. But for TV stations such as KHQ, the app is an example of technology experimentation that is becoming a high priority for local broadcasters nationwide. Stations are trying to keep up with a rapidly changing television marketplace, where consumers are increasingly watching video online and via mobile devices. Broadcasters want to get the content that appears on their stations onto mobile devices before others do.

Chat apps such as WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage have overtaken the text message as the favorite way to tap out a note to friends, undermining the traditional SMS cash cow for mobile operators.

The data, collected for the Financial Times by telecoms and media consultancy Informa, highlights the rapid rise of a technology that did not exist five years ago but is seen by some as a potential challenger to Facebook’s dominance in social networking. There were more instant messages being sent daily by the end of last year than there were text messages, Informa said. The consultancy expects “over the top” messaging to more than double to 41bn per day this year – more than twice the number of text messages expected to be sent. The transfer in technology has big implications for the telecoms industry, which will generate more than $120 billion from text messages this year, according to Informa.