The FCC has issued an interim report on Google's wifi data capture as part of the Street View project. There's some good stuff in here about the different reactions of the US regulators and various European bodies (including, inevitably, a German prosecutor).

Well, that was quick: "only content that is ‘safe,’ ‘public’ and has sharing enabled can be pinned to Pinterest." Mind you, the headline is kind of misleading (I think- I should install the "pinmarklet" and test it.)

"The data is a privacy issue because we have an enormous ecological disaster created by badly-designed social media now being used by people to control and exploit human beings in all sorts of ways." "The thing you’re working on is simply one of 100,000 implications of that disaster."

[[ These new technologies are "challenging our Constitutional categories in really dramatic ways," says George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen. "And what's so striking is that none of the existing amendments give clear answers to the most basic questions we're having today." ]]

"The joint operation, dubbed Operation Safe Pilot, fed in the names of 45,000 pilots in Northern California, cross-referenced them with the names of those who got any Social Security benefits, and came up with some 3,200 violators." Apparently this is probably but not certainly illegal in the US. I assume the UK's Data Protection Act would forbid this, but I'm not sure. One to watch.

"I found his other blog in under a minute. ... How did I do it? The unlucky blogger slipped up and was ratted out by an unlikely source: Google Analytics." Interesting (and I wouldn't have thought of it).

"Why is it that some technologies cause moral panic and others don’t? Why was the introduction of electricity seen as a terrible thing, while nobody cared much about the fountain pen?"

"To receive their [DMs], he had to follow them in return" "These new followers seemed out of place among the politicians, journalists, and celebrities on his list" "He made a common mistake between a direct private message and a public reply, and sent the picture out to the tens of thousands of people". File under 'tools shape culture'.

"Malte Spitz from the German Green party decided to publish his own data collected from August 2009 to February 2010. However, to even access the information, he had to file a suit against telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom." "Each of the [35 thousand] rows of the spreadsheet represents an instance when Spitz’s mobile phone transferred information over a half-year period."  "Taken together, they provide what investigators call a profile – a clear picture of a person’s habits and preferences, and indeed, of his or her life." Naturally, it's a German politician - and a Green - who's pushing the envelope on this. (Would any American dare? Or care?)

Andy Miah: "How should we regard the business card in a digital age, both in terms of its future, and in terms of what their function may be as historical artifacts? For a few years now, I have been photographing business cards that I have received and I decided today that they should go into the public domain."

"This is a website delivery service and an online art gallery. For those who do not have websites, here you have one, made with the bare essentials."

The first in-depth user research study on the usage of the "Location" field within Twitter profiles has just been published by the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

"How much will it cost?" "Well, it's a gift; we didn't pay for it. But it will be the cost of storing what is, right now, around 5 terabytes, and the staff effort of maybe one full-time person over the years."

"Horrifying as this vision is, it simply distracts from the main lessons of the Wikileaks affair: the increasing control of (relatively) unaccountable corporations and states over the key components of the Internet, and their increased willingness to use this control in politicized ways to impose a 'dissent tax' on content they find objectionable." A long piece by Zeynep Tufekci that sags a little in the middle, but which is definitely a worthwhile read and eminently quotable in parts.

"It was better to keep everything clean and in the moment. If it’s relevant now, it belongs on Facebook, but the old stuff is no longer relevant so it doesn’t belong on Facebook." Interesting, and arguably something that the design of the service itself encourages: if old stuff is inaccessible, why not explicitly delete it? (Personally I want date-accessible archives. Perhaps that's a sign I'm old and weird.)

Fetching EXIF data from Twitpic to find the locations of Twitter users, even if they have geolocation turned off. This raises a few questions for me, such as "why don't Twitpic strip (or hide) EXIF". (Personally, I do use Twitter geolocation (although this seems to be rare: most people seem wary of it, for some reason), so if I posted via Twitpic I'd rather they offered to set the metadata from the EXIF location.) I note the site's been there since at least May, so perhaps nobody cares that much.

"Exposed offers a fascinating look at pictures made on the sly, without the explicit permission of the people depicted. With photographs from the late nineteenth century to present day, the pictures present a shocking, illuminating and witty perspective on iconic and taboo subjects." Closes 3 October, 2010.

"In the comic books, it took Stark 40 years to make this move. For Superman or Spiderman or Batman or virtually any other superhero from the prior century (save some like the X-Men) their secret identities were their most sacred possessions, the keys to their undoings, and they fought as hard to protect them as to save humanity itself. But in the 21st century, Tony Stark’s approach to privacy reflects how Millennials now think of the concept."

"Nine out of 10 British people are happy to use full-body scanners being rolled out at UK airports." "The poll of 10,000 people, including 977 Britons... found acceptance of the scanners was highest in the UK." "One in three surveyed in Germany and Belgium objected, and only 45% in Hong Kong and 24% in Mexico were in favour."

An interesting interview (assuming it's true) on Facebook, privacy, administration tools ("You’ve previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use."), statistics and user analysis, and an upcoming compiled PHP. As an aside, it seems Facebook now has a London data centre.

Originally entitled "Zuckerberg: People Are Comfortable Without Privacy, So We Threw Them All Over The Cliff", this is a good read on the way Facebook's userbase is being driven from default-private to default-public, and the reasons for the change.

To go with the David Brin "Transparent Society" piece (also in Wired, but a year later) and this week's Times coverage of the Internet Eyes scheme (see delicious passim). (Thanks Phil.)

"The defendants were offered £25,000 by The Sun for the pictures, taken on a Middleton family holiday on the Caribbean island of Mustique. But the pair turned it down, saying they wanted £50,000 for the photographs, and were then reported to police by the newspaper." Nice to see the Sun have a good set of values there, eh.

The Press Complaints Commission upholds a complaint on the Express story that used Facebook details and photos of Dunblane survivors, stating that the use of information on social networks is only justified if the people are already public figures, and that "circumventing privacy settings to obtain information will require a public interest justification". It concludes "the breach of the Code was so serious that no apology could remedy it".

"Messages to Become Public By Default" Facebook really are trying to be Twitter, aren't they?

'"I have been spitting teeth ... since I first heard of this request, but at every turn I am alternately advised to keep my head down or laughed at for my naivety," said Gibson, who plans to reopen the Drapers Arms in Islington, north London, in April.' The Drapers used to be a 2lmc hangout, way back when.

'Sebastian Przygodzki took a photograph with his camera, which upset Rebecca Smith and her friends called police ... Sheriff Kenneth Hogg said the matter "could be best described as exceptionally unchivalrous"'. Hence a £100 fine for "breach of the peace", one of those handy UK "anything can be illegal" laws.

"I tried Twittervision on the iPhone ... Today, I see a tweet from @davetroy ... his app must have followed him on my behalf [so] he can now see all my private tweets" This is bad. I do not like Dave Troy.

"Improved user experience" or "massive privacy invasion"? What will the web 2.0 koolaid commenters say? Bet now!

"It was fanastic. In literally less than 3 minutes, I'd gone from frantic about making my flight to all the way to the metal detector" "anybody who's a privacy zealot is not gonna be able to get behind the whole Clear thing."

"... the prior existence of ethnic ID cards was one of the most important factors facilitating the speed and magnitude of the 100 days of mass killing in Rwanda."

How srm (secure rm) works, because I keep losing the URL