This week we’re looking at what’s going to be big in tech in 2013. One of the most important stories next year will be about what we’re giving up when it comes to the version of ourself we present online. Plus, while we’re talking about living online, a new experiment for an old medium: Lettrs.com. Founder Drew Bartkiewicz, a tech entrepeneur who has a soft spot for snail mail, launched the website this month.

This holiday week we are looking into the future of tech in 2013. Our first guide is General Electric’s chief teechnology officer Mark Little. He’s looking closely at the energy industry. GE has been working a more efficient tech — like tiny cooling devices that could make our laptops and tablets even thinner. But there have been huge leaps and bounds in big tech, too. Plus, If you tried to escape the family this Christmas Eve by firing up your trusty Netflix account, you might have been Scrooged.

A big idea to chew on as you recover from the holiday revelry: A dog is said to be our best friend, but what if technology became mankind’s worst enemy? Cambridge University is starting up an institute to keep an eye on things that could some day wipe out the human race. It’s got a title that would do Albert Camus proud, the ‘Centre for the Study of Existential Risk’.

This Chrismas day, many people will be turning on their new gadgets: Tablets, smartphones, laptops, and televisions. Granted, many of us don’t even really use televisions any more, unless it is to project whatever we’re streaming from the Internet. But if you’re like us, you know and love good televisions, and what it is to plug in and customize your settings just the way you like them. One problem: In 2012 there are so many different settings — with different names depending on the manufacturer — that it can get pretty complicated.

If you were looking for Santa, you would probably head to the North Pole. But we ran into St. Nick just walking down the street in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. And this one, who in the off-season goes by the same Alex Roshuk, attorney at law, is a tech Santa. He’s a longtime hobbyist and electrical engineer, and he invited us into his workshop, which isn’t full of elves, it’s full of drones.

A video gamer has asked for a kind of “ceasefire” today, 24 hours in which people agree not to play shoot ’em up digital games as a gesture of respect to the children and adults killed in the Newtown massacre a week ago. And there’s new data on how social media reacted to the Sandy Hook story. Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has been looking at Twitter, Blogs and op-eds online.

There are apps that let stalkers track their victims. Now there’s a move in Washington to outlaw them. And while they’re at it, some members of Congress would like us all to have a clear idea of which pieces of software for a smartphone keep track of our physical location. One of the sponsors of new legislation that has just come out of committee is Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota.

The net this week is awash with complaints about privacy and Instagram. That’s the photo-sharing application Facebook bought this year for about a billion dollars. A new Instagram policy is set to take effect within weeks that seemed to give the company the legal right to use your photos in advertising. Even though the company says it has no plans to actually use pictures this way, the policy change is angering some users.

It’s likely that Google will go into the holidays with what some see as a nice bouquet of holiday flowers courtesy of the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC could wrap up its antitrust investigation without forcing Google to make big changes to the way it displays search results. At the heart of the case were complaints about the way Google sometimes puts its own products at the head of the pack when listing results.