Is this a license to freak out? Walters says no:

The ultimate purpose for this analysis was to demonstrate that “community” for the McCowen prosecution was quite a bit more receptive to, and accepting of, sexual subjects than the prosecution either suspected or wanted to ever admit.

Should the Google Trends obscenity defense get its day in court, it's not likely anyone will be taking the stand, defending their sexual interests after being presented with a Google Doc breaking down their search history. What the frequency of search terms could reveal is that one's neighbors are searching for the same things, no matter what they tell their spouse. Just looking up how to hire an escort, for example, doesn't mean one's going to do it. But prosecutors may not be able to claim that a sex act disgusts a community when computer logs show no one can stop Googling it.

Everyone agrees that an individual's sexual curiosities should never stand trial. Overwrought privacy fears, however, shouldn't stop us from using anonymized search data to define community standards accurately and scientifically. A judge can no longer declare that he knows indecency when he sees it. Thanks to Google, we now have real data on the subject. Not using it seems obscene.

Slide rival Rock You's Super Wall saw traffic plummet 70 percent in the last week. InsideFacebook's Justin Smith speculates the dip is due to "some kind of punitive action against the application" over privacy concerns by Facebook, "perhaps by restricting feed access or by lowering the application’s notification or invitation limits." Another source tells us Flixster, the widgetmaker behind the Movies app, is going through similar punishment from Facebook over privacy concerns.

We've spoken to Google in the past about this and received a snide response telling us to look more closely at their blogs.

God save the queen from getting shot walking her corgis around Westminster! To show just how committed the revolutionaries are to privacy, VP of search products Marissa Mayer replaced a mention of "Google" on the homepage with "Privacy" and a link to the company's policy declaration. The noted populist also underscored her sacrifice by pointing out the ascetic homepage's lack of corrupting excess. Put that in your tea and sip it, limeys!

SECTION 4. Section 1702.104, Occupations Code, is amended to read as follows:

Sec. 1702.104. INVESTIGATIONS COMPANY. (a) A person acts as an investigations company for the purposes of this chapter if the person:

(1) engages in the business of obtaining or furnishing, or accepts employment to obtain or furnish, information related to:

(A) crime or wrongs done or threatened against a state or the United States;

(B) the identity, habits, business, occupation, knowledge, efficiency, loyalty, movement, location, affiliations, associations, transactions, acts, reputation, or character of a person;

(C) the location, disposition, or recovery of lost or stolen property; or

(D) the cause or responsibility for a fire, libel, loss, accident, damage, or injury to a person or to property;

(2) engages in the business of securing, or accepts employment to secure, evidence for use before a court, board, officer, or investigating committee;

(3) engages in the business of securing, or accepts employment to secure, the electronic tracking of the location of an individual or motor vehicle other than for criminal justice purposes by or on behalf of a governmental entity; or

(4) engages in the business of protecting, or accepts employment to protect, an individual from bodily harm through the use of a personal protection officer.

(b) For purposes of Subsection (a)(1), obtaining or furnishing information includes information obtained or furnished through the review and analysis of, and the investigation into the content of, computer-based data not available to the public.

We all got a letter saying that a break-in occured on May 26 and Google was notified on June 9. Here's the fun part: "We've been informed by Colt that specific personal information for employees and dependents included names, Social Security numbers, birthdates, addresses, hire dates, and relationships." Employees are getting a free year of identity-theft protection.

How kindly of Mother Google! No such protection was provided to the North Carolina students whose personal data was made available by the search engine in 2006.

I am the owner of ten Facebook profiles. Every single one of my profiles has at minimum 200 friends. I have aggregated the friends for each persona organically. I will briefly mention the manner in which I compiled a list of genuine friends for each persona.



Step 1: Develop a persona with an intense interest on specific subjects/topics
Step 2: Integrate that individual into communities/forums based on their interests
Step 3: Stimulate conversation inside communities/forums and interact with other users
Step 4: Establish the persona inside the communities/forums
Step 5: Begin to add friends organically



The ten profiles I have are as follows, and can be sold separately if requested:

• Samantha (age 19) – loves music, makes art, and enjoys the outdoors
• John (age 35) – health purist, into yoga, active runner, amateur cyclists, and into healthy eating.
• David (age 23) – Computer programmer, big gamer, into the latest gadgets, and is a blogger
• Michael (age 42) – Intellectual, reads books, enjoys poetry, has a weakness for fast food, and loves his two kids
• Carrie (age 26) – Fashionista, craves gossip magazines, doodles potential outfits, and follows celebrity developments
• Erik (age 29) – Big beer drinker, watches a ton of sports, likes sports cars, and likes to cook
• Holly (age 18) – Big into volunteering, loves reading, loves school, and interested in travelling abroad
• Peter (age 19) – Athlete, big into college life, likes drama and mystery movies, and can’t live without mac and cheese
• Shannon (age 33) – Design aficionado, into exploring a city’s culture, active artist, and
  is latched onto her iPhone
• Kristin (age 40) – Live at home mom, loves cooking for her family, wishes she had a new car, wants a vacation to the beach, and is really into gardening

These personas are geographically dispersed, and they all live in major cities across the United States. I am leaving the last name of the profiles absent, as not to be identifiable by Facebook employees. I am not providing a screenshot of the profiles either, but they are available if a serious request is made.



All of these Facebook personas engage on a daily basis with other Facebook members, they share content, and they update their status. They have a variety of applications installed on their Facebook page, and they have a substantial amount of comments left on their wall. Additionally, these personas post pictures they find interesting on their Facebook page.



I currently am testing the waters, and would like to see if any marketers are interested in using these. Under the right conditions and for a fair price you will receive full control of these personas, as well as associated emails. A walk through each of the characters is possible if an individual is serious about their interest, and is willing to assign a value to the persona ahead of time.



I would love to hear from you. Please contact me at: pseudopr@gmail.com for questions

Verizon may, but is not required to monitor your compliance, or the compliance of other subscribers, with the terms, conditions or policies of this Agreement.

Verizon PR has long made much of its pro-privacy policies, and its lawyers have even fought the record industry in court to protect subscribers (or, more cynically, to minimize the cost of investigations). This latest change suggests Verizon's becoming friendlier to spying on its customers. Maybe it's time for a 2008 update, Ivan?

Byron Ng, the inquisitive Canadian computer technician who found a hole in MySpace's linkup with Yahoo, tipped me off to this trick, which works with a wide range of widgets, he says, whether or not you're friends with a given user. (SuperPoke has a private-actions option, but it's hard to find and few people seem to use it.)

Is it scandalous to learn that, say, Slide CEO Max Levchin has "bitten" Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg? Not especially (though Levchin went through a rather disturbing biting phase last month). What it tells us, really, is just how unseriously people take the widgets on Facebook. That these applications have remained wide open just goes to show that they don't do anything worth hiding. And where's the fun in that?

How did Ng get them? Here are his instructions, which involve no real hacking or unauthorized access — just typing in Web addresses. They work because Yahoo allows its users to add their MySpace profiles to their cell phones without checking their credentials; it requires a login, but accepts any login, not the specific user's login.

This points to a flaw in the notion of data portability, a movement which seeks to have personal information shared between social networks and other websites. Data portability was borne out of a wrongheaded assumption: That data needs to be shared. Most consumers, I believe, aren't particularly interested in the concept; they belong to a few social networks at most, and don't find managing their online personas to be a particular challenge. The technophiles of Silicon Valley, however, join every network they hear about, and find retyping their personal information and manually adding friends maddeningly inefficient.

It's all well and good to speed things up, but how far, how fast? The example discovered by Ng just demonstrates the tendency of Web companies to take shortcuts with security. With data portability, we won't just have to worry about how well a particular social network guards their personal data; we'll now have to worry about every partner website it connects with.

Technical experts — every engineer in the Valley considers himself one — will no doubt weigh in with elaborate approaches to assuring security. I'm skeptical that any of them will work. It's a combinatorial problem; not only will the protocols have to be designed to be airtight, but we'll have to trust that each website implements them flawlessly. It only takes one weak link to break the chain. Already, Facebook has cut off Google's connectivity to its profiles in a dispute over whether Google's software is secure enough. Even the fame-seeking likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan deserve better.

Wired cofounder Louis Rossetto explained in the magazine's 15th anniversay issue:

Faced with fierce competition for those eyeballs, Old Media is hawking the apocalypse: The world is inundated by war, poverty, destruction, fascist Republicans! It's about to be swept away by tidal waves unleashed by melting polar ice caps! More on how this is humanity's own fault — after the break.

That would be "bryant"; the party was a farewell to Buyukkokten's loft at 767 Bryant, #204, known as Studio 767. Buyukkokten himself posted over 80 pages of photosto his .Mac homepage. No password, as of yet.

While promising to protect the data of individuals, the company did say it will deliver reports on data in the aggregate — a prospect an epidemiologist might relish. According to the terms of the privacy policy, there's nothing to stop the company from divulging your medical history to authorities in the case of, say, a National Security Letter or any old subpoena from the courts. Not to mention employers snooping on you while you browse Google Health at work.

Facebook evangelist Dave Morin touts the ability to take one's real identity from Facebook to other websites. And indeed, that's one reason why I mocked MySpace's move; its users' pseudonymous logins have no particular value as sources of identity.

But do I really want to interconnect all my online identities? That's the premise of the "data portability" movement — that we really want nothing more than to take our friends with us from one website to another. And yet I'm content to segregate, say, the work acquaintances I have on LinkedIn from the more personal relationships I track on Facebook. Would Valleywag's commenters want to have their real names attached to their accounts? Some are happy to, while for others, that's a deal-breaker — and the site would be the lesser if it lost them.

Mark Zuckerberg's original, brilliant insight — to connect Facebook's identities to real names, schools, and workplaces — is its advantage over rival social networks like Bebo and MySpace. But I'm not sure I want a Web with non anonymity. Morin and others will hasten to note Facebook's privacy options — but surely they realize that when others give up their anonymity, there will be peer pressure for most to do so.

Real identity has value, say, when conducting commerce, which is why it's laughable that eBay partnered with MySpace and not Facebook — just another sign of that company's clueless technological leadership. But anonymity has its benefits. Facebook Connect threatens the anonymous Web. For that reason, I can't wish Facebook Connect anything more than partial success.

Hi [Redacted], We sincerely apologize for this issue and are working to resolve it as quickly as possible. In the meantime, I recommend disabling fan photos through the Photos application editing interface by selecting "Do not allow fans to add photos". This will hide any current fan photos from view. We'll let you know as soon as we have more information. Thanks for contacting Facebook, Jack Customer Operations Facebook

When I had submitted my license last fall, I originally was using the upload-form they provided within Facebook, but that upload form was defective, and customer support told me back then to directly email them. I did. A real person at Facebook had a scan of my license in their inbox since the upload-form system wasn't working properly the week they launched the service. A real person could've caused all this.

The whole idea behind free Facebook Pages for musicians, business and brands is to get them in the door, get them hooked, and get them to pay for ads to promote their page. Don't expect Ping Pong Music to open their wallet anytime soon now. "It just upsets me a little to think they could let this happen," our source tells us.

Specifically, they said Google's engineers would create cookies that "crumble," or self-delete. But then, after the deal went through, Google CEO Eric Schmidt publicly backtracked on this pledge. Bharat's patent is just further proof of Google's institutional, tech-obsessed indifference to privacy.

[G]ive us the ability to preempt that illegal activity where it comes through a choke point as opposed to the point where it is diffuse on the Internet.