The economy may be struggling, but these days Cupid has found some profitable new niches. With about 95 million single adults in the United States, the online matchmaking industry is booming, to the tune of a billion dollars in revenue projected for 2012.

Publicly available cell-phone applications from application markets are releasing consumers' private information to online advertisers, according to a joint study by Intel Labs, Penn State and Duke University. Researchers at the participating institutions have developed a realtime monitoring service called TaintDroid that precisely analyzes how private information is obtained and released by applications "downloaded" to consumer phones. TaintDroid is an extension to the Android mobile-phone platform that tracks the flow of sensitive data through third-party applications.