Facebook's tactics are the same as other sites which browser makers mark as malware. Time to mark Facebook as such.

"If I’m not paying for the product, I am the product. As is true for many free services on the web today, I have no contractual relationship with IFTTT. I pay for the service it provides by surrendering access to my data. OAuth helps me negotiate how much access, but if I give up none then IFTTT is powerless."

What Dave Winer wants in a file sharing and storage app.

"Politicians and media companies are coming at these questions at the wrong starting line: as if we go to the internet to take a piece of private information and squirrel it away there. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re sharing."

Interesting piece on why privacy matters.

"A Princeton University student whose Web site revealed the breadth of student information publicly available on Princeton servers has drawn criticism from the university and support from some students who say privacy safeguards should be tightened."

"We find the publics we wish to join based not merely on gross labels, generalizations, and borders drawn about us—red v. blue, black v. white, nation v. nation—but instead on our ideas, interests, and needs: cancer survivors, libertarians, Deadheads, vegetarians, single moms, geeks, even privacy advocates. We finally tear down the elite of the public few and each become public people in our own right. . . ."

We're losing our liberties at the border when the Department of Homeland Security can seize electronics without warrants or probably cause.

"Want to keep your users? Just make it easy for them to leave."

We should be careful before we assume the background of the Espionage Act applies to Julian Assange as well.

"So, why don’t you have your own policy? Why can’t you be as trustworthy on the Web as you are walking into any store off the street? The reason is that you have no status on the Web itself beyond the minima implied by the term “user.” Whatever status you experience is what’s granted by site owners. You are the client. Your position is submissive. The dominant party is in charge, and there are a billion-plus of those."

"And what truly worries me about Wikileaks is not the immediate damage that has been done by the release of this sort of information, but the fact that the latest drop has created an enormous, nearly unanimous backlash in the United States.

Most of the libertarians I know are ambivalent, for heaven's sake--if you can't get the libertarians united on actions that increase transparency, you've sure as hell lost the rest of the country. That's a ripe environment for new laws that reduce transparency. Maybe we'll be less effective--but we'll also be less free."

A bad-ass answer from Cody Brown about how Kommons can be used for investigative journalism. If it's in public it carries more weight.

Wonderful little comic about the TSA's reactions to security threats.

"The only difference between Wikileaks and other news organisations is that Wikileaks is doing its job properly. This is not a symptom of its greater intelligence, merely its ability to comprehend the ramifications of new technology. Wikileaks is like a symbol of globalisation."

Google and its new privacy tools.

"Social streams may eclipse RSS, but the blogosphere's roots run deeper."

Quick summary of the black market for data APIs.

"If you decide not to bother, if you opt out of using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, et al, then there’s now an opportunity cost: you miss making connections that have personal or economic value. That’s why people quite willingly give up what we used to think of as privacy: because it’s worth it to them. These are the new economics of privacy."

China is cracking down on Uighur dissent websites.

Jeff Jarvis critiques the recent Wall Street Journal article about cookies and news sites.

"But this is often the case with technology and privacy. Technology spawns fears — and worries these advocates — because it introduces change and it’s really change that they fear."

"The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."

An effort to create a post-once-share-everywhere social network/service.

"History never repeats, but it does rhyme.  We share everything now; we worry that we overshare.  Now it’s time to take our sharing to the next level.  We need a social2.0, something that reflects what we’ve learned in the past half-dozen years."

Steven Levy, author of "Hackers," discusses Zuckerberg's role in the broader history of computing.

Nicholas Carr is getting a bit paranoid about Google and web services.

There is a distinct difference between the publics you create for yourself and the mass, wide open public of everyone. Facebook needs to recognize this.

"Don't be fooled by the hype of the tech industry, the rules aren't what they say they are. It's much more cut-throat. I give Zuckerberg a lot of credit for putting his plan out there for all to see. That's a lot more than Google or Apple has done."

Mark Cuban argues that the uproar over privacy and Facebook is misplaced.

"Now, it might not be likely that a loose confederation of software companies and engineers can turn Facebook’s core services into shared protocols, nor would it be easy for that loose coupling of various online services to compete with Facebook...But in the internet I’d like to live in, we’d have that option, instead of being left with the choice of letting Facebook use us, or being left out of the conversation altogether."

"What pisses me off the most are the numbers of people who feel trapped. Not because they don’t have another choice. (Technically, they do.) But because they feel like they don’t. They have invested time, energy, resources, into building Facebook what it is. They don’t trust the service, are concerned about it, and are just hoping the problems will go away."

Building up the "Facebook is not to be trusted" argument.

Notes from Danah Boyd's talk at WWW 2010. A great manifesto for cautiously dealing with Big Data.

There's an opportunity for Facebook, or another startup, to seize the role of the clearinghouse for online identity.

"Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent." – How long before someone sues the hell out of them?

"Secrecy is the crux of institutional power -- the principal weapon for maintaining it -- and there are very few entities left which can truly threaten that secrecy."

"Google said on Friday that for more than three years it had inadvertently collected snippets of private information that people send over unencrypted wireless networks."

The Diaspora team gives their pitch for funding on Kickstarter. The idea for a decentralized, individually owned social network is great.

Ilse Aigner, the German minister of consumer protection, has fired an opening shot in trying to get Facebook to change some of its policies.