SiliconBeat

Just to set some context, I’m about the last person you want to ask about things like privacy, because, for the most part, I just don’t care. Granted, I am perhaps totally alone on the Internet when it comes to this viewpoint. But there it is.

So it was with a deep sigh and a giant eye roll that I read about the latest dust-up involving Facebook and privacy. In a nutshell, Facebook has tweaked its Terms of Service to say: Read the rest of this entry »

A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008 was filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by four affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Joining as plaintiffs in the action was Tom Campbell, a former U.S. Congressman who represented a portion of Silicon Valley for five terms and who recently stepped down as dean of Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley, as well as Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, privacy advocates went into a tizzy over the ruling by a New York judge that YouTube must turn over all its data about which videos that its users watch to Viacom. The latter is suing YouTube, which is owned by Google, over copyright infringement.

It’s a reminder, of course, of what lies at the heart of the Internet. In essence, companies like Google have turned the Internet into a vast collector of personal data which they then use to figure out how to get us to watch, read or buy more stuff. The amount of knowledge a company like Google has about your personal Web surfing habits would likely boggle your mind if you knew the full extent of it.

But the outcry left me wondering just what everyone was so worked up about.

Read the rest of this entry »