France's data protection watchdog has set up a meeting with Google to closely examine its controversial privacy policy.<p>

The search giant consolidated 60 privacy policies into one single agreement in March. The EU expressed concern over the legality and impact of the change.<p>

France's information commission, the CNIL, said it was not yet "totally satisfied" with Google's explanation of the amendments.

When Oink shut down yesterday, I used their export tool so that I could do something useful with the information I gave them. In requesting my data, which I did simply by filling out a form with only my username, I received the email below. In looking at the link, it seemed that my publicly available username (cristina) called for the download.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt has promised that the firm will simplify the process by which Android phone users agree to share their data.

It follows questions in the US Senate about how much location information is stored by mobile handsets.

Speaking in the UK at a conference on privacy, he also revealed that Google planned to offer web users more control over their online profile.

Mr Schmidt insisted that the company took the matter "very seriously".

The <a href="http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/">RetroShare</a> network allows people to create a private and encrypted file-sharing network. Users add friends by exchanging PGP certificates with people they trust. All the communication is encrypted using OpenSSL and files that are downloaded from strangers always go through a trusted friend.

In other words, it’s a true Darknet and virtually impossible to monitor by outsiders.

RetroShare founder DrBob told us that while the software has been around since 2006, all of a sudden there’s been a surge in downloads. “The interest in RetroShare has massively shot up over the last two months,” he said.

Part of the problem is that the entire concept of simplistic internet “Do Not Track” systems is based on a number of false premises. Maybe the biggest misleading assertion is that internet advertising is essentially equivalent to the invasive telephone solicitations the “Do Not Call” registry was created to quash.

But most internet ads — occasional egregious exceptions notwithstanding — aren’t anything like some phone-calling stooge interrupting your dinner. And reducing the value of web ads to advertisers — either through ad blocking systems or “Do Not Track” regimes that encourage random rather than personalized ads — fundamentally undermines the primary funding mechanisms that help to satisfy our (let’s admit it!) essentially selfish desires to keep most web services free.

We're entering this strange phase of privacy where people truly can't fathom what is being done with their "personal data". When they hear changes are coming, they for some reason equate that it means Google will be rifling through their old love letters and home videos and selling them to the highest bidder. For all the articles out there that detail how to circumvent Google's new privacy policy, there's a real lack of anything that truly explains why.

It's also another fascinating example of the sense of entitlement people feel to free online services (news, search, maps, encyclopaedias) -- and how that is at odds with their understanding of how these companies make money.

As Bits reported earlier this week, developers who make applications for Apple iOS devices have access to a person’s entire photo library, as long as that person allows the app to use location data.

It turns out that Google, maker of the Android mobile operating system, takes it one step further. Android apps do not need permission to access a user’s photos, and as long as an app has the right to access the Internet, it can copy those photos to a remote server without any notice, according to developers and mobile security experts. It is not clear whether any apps that are available for Android devices are actually doing this.

Developers of applications for Apple’s mobile devices, and Apple itself, came under scrutiny this month after reports that some apps were taking people’s address book information without their knowledge.

As it turns out, address books are not the only things up for grabs. Photos are also vulnerable. After a user allows an application on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to have access to location information, the app can copy the user’s entire photo library, without any further notification or warning, according to app developers.

The Department of Homeland Security monitors your updates on social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, to uncover “Items Of Interest” (IOI), according to an internal DHS document released by the EPIC. That document happens to include a list of the baseline terms for which the DHS–or more specifically, a DHS subcontractor hired to monitor social networks–use to generate real-time IOI reports.

In other words, many companies are taking advantage of Internet Explorer’s poor cookie blocking implementation for their own purposes. Their excuse is that P3P is dead and IE’s cookie blocking would break their website, so they just work around the browser’s privacy controls.

Apple's dominance on tablets and smartphones presents a threat to accurately measure and optimize the performance of paid-search marketing campaigns… While Mac users also rely on other browsers, Safari remains the dominant search browser used on the iPhone and the iPad, which results in higher rates of undercounted conversions on Apple devices. All browsers can present challenges for advertisers, but Apple's focus on consumer privacy limits the viability of third-party cookie-based tracking systems.

Marin's research also suggests that the conversion tracking issue is a much bigger problem than previously thought. On average, advertisers using third-party cookie-based tracking systems are undercounting conversions by 38%, severely limiting visibility into campaign performance. The white paper, however, does provide somewhat of a workaround.

[Safari's] blocking [of] third-party cookies can make iOS conversion rates appear lower than conversion rates on Windows, but the study found that the actual conversion rates for iOS, minus for the third-party cookie based undercounting, were on average 23% higher than on Windows.

When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too? We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies.

My gut feeling is that we've passed beyond the era where it made sense to concentrate on Internet privacy controls and issues mainly in terms of specific technologies as we've done in the past.

As noted above, cookies are neither good nor bad, neither intrinsically righteous nor evil. Cookies, like the other local storage mechanisms that have now been implemented, are merely tools. And as with other tools, how they are used is under the control of the entities who deploy these complex functionalities…What we really need to be concentrating on are the fundamental issues of trust and transparency.

If we as users feel confident that individual firms are doing their best to be transparent about their policies and are handling our data in responsible manners, then putting our trust (and data) in the hands of those firms is a solid bet.

It’d be nice if the Journal wasn’t so caught up in its own “privacy scoop” that it paused to wonder if perhaps Apple has an agenda here as well. I’m not arguing Google doesn’t have an agenda – it clearly does. I’m as saddened as the next guy about how Google has broken search in its relentless pursuit of beating Facebook, among others.

In this case, what Google and others have done sure sounds wrong – if you’ve going to resort to tricking a browser into offering up information designated by default as private, you need to somehow message the user and explain what’s going on. Then again, in the open web, you don’t have to – most browsers let you set cookies by default.

"The Google code was spotted by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer and independently confirmed by a technical adviser to the Journal, Ashkan Soltani, who found that ads on 22 of the top 100 websites installed the Google tracking code on a test computer, and ads on 23 sites installed it on an iPhone browser."

Could this happen on Android is a fairly cut-and-dry question. The answer is no, as in, a snowball's chance. No, nien, nyet, non. Why it can't happen on Android still only hints at the bigger problem.

The big deal is that privacy and security is not a big deal in Silicon Valley. While technorati tripped over themselves to congratulate Mr. Morin on finessing the bad publicity, a number of concerned engineers e-mailed me noting that the data collection <a href="http://gawker.com/5883549/dont-forgive-path-the-creepy-iphone-company-that-misled-us-once-already">was not an accident</a>. It would have taken programmers weeks to write the code necessary to copy and organize someone’s address book. Many said Apple was at fault, too, for approving Path for its App Store when it appears to violate its rules.

since Gmail added OAuth support in March 2010, an increasing number of startups are asking for a perpetual, silent window into your inbox.

I’m concerned OAuth, while hugely convenient for both developers and users, may be paving the way for an inevitable privacy meltdown.

We care deeply about your privacy and about creating a trusted place for you to share life with your close friends and family. As we continue to expand and grow we will make some mistakes along the way. We commit to you that we will continue to be transparent and always serve you, our users, first.

Developer Arun Thampi was doing a bit of hacking around with Path 2, trying to get a version of it running on OS X as an experiment, when he discovered that the app actually uploads your entire address book when it is launched. This obviously raised concerns about what the app is doing with that information and, in fact, why it needs it at all.

A lot has been said about our new privacy policy. Some have praised us for making our privacy policy easier to understand. Others have asked questions, including members of Congress, and that’s understandable too. We look forward to answering those questions, and clearing up some of the misconceptions about our privacy policies that first appeared in the Washington Post.

So, here’s the real story:

"These measures won't put an end to online piracy; to do so, you would need a 'Net so architected around control and authentication that it would hardly resemble the 'Net we have today. Can a plan on the lines proposed cause the jolly pirates running The Pirate Bay to scuttle their boat? Possibly not. Will it provide a simple way to take down specific live streams of sporting events in real time? No."