A man who forgot to remove a thumb drive from a shared computer that he was using, waived his privacy claims to the content on that device, a federal judge in Florida has ruled.

The ruling, by Judge Maurice Paul of the U.S. District Court for the northern district of Florida, was in response to a motion filed by Octavius Durdley an emergency paramedic with the Bradford County Emergency Services (BCES) in Florida.

Durdley was charged last September with possessing and distributing child pornography based largely on evidence gathered from a personal thumb drive of his that he had inadvertently left behind in a shared work computer.

Facebook’s lawyers have been getting pretty nasty lately. We recently covered the company’s threats against the creator of a useful Greasemonkey script, and now a developer named Pete Warden has shared the sordid details of his legal run-in with Facebook — where they threatened to sue him for his activity aggregating publicly available data found on Facebook.

You should read the full story, but basically, he built a simple crawler for public Facebook info, initially for his own purposes. He made sure that Facebook’s robots.txt didn’t block such crawlers — and he also emailed someone at Facebook (who he had dealt with before), but didn’t hear back from anyone. As his crawler worked, it started collecting a bunch of interesting data, and so he set up a website to let people explore some of this (again, public) data.

After playing with some of the data himself, he started making some interesting maps and charts with the data, and did a simple analysis of geographic locations of Facebook friend connections to show people what you could do with the data. He noted that if others (such as professional researchers) wanted to dig into the data, he would let them access a version of the data set (with identifying info stripped). The chart he released got picked up by a variety of sites and quickly got passed around.

Broadening wiretap laws to include videotaped surveillance could either safeguard privacy or thwart efforts to recover stolen property, a U.S. senator was told Monday at a hearing not far from a school that’s being sued for trying to find missing laptops by activating their webcams.

Sen. Arlen Specter, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, said at a field hearing of a Senate subcommittee that he believes existing wiretap and video-voyeurism statutes do not adequately address concerns in an era marked by the widespread use of cell-phone, laptop and surveillance cameras.

Legal threats from Facebook have led to the destruction of a social science dataset about to be released to researchers.

Lawyers from the social networking site contacted Pete Warden, an entrepreneur based in Boulder, Colorado, in February after he announced plans to release data he had collected from the public profiles of 210 million Facebook users.

Warden says that Facebook threatened legal action if he did not delete the data. He duly destroyed all the records, saying he did not have the funds to contest a lawsuit.

You have been tagged in 12 photos – even if you’re not signed up to the Web site.

European regulators are investigating whether the practice of posting photos, videos and other information about people on sites such as Facebook without their consent is a breach of privacy laws.

The Swiss and German probes go to the heart of a debate that has gained momentum in Europe amid high-profile privacy cases: To what extent are social networking platforms responsible for the content their members upload?

Just two days after launching its Buzz social networking tools, Google last night said it has tweaked the technology address early privacy concerns.

Google last night disclosed in a blog post that the quick updates makes it easier for users to block access to their pages and eases the path to finding two privacy features.

“We’ve had plenty of feature requests, and some direct feedback,” wrote Todd Jackson, a product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, in the blog post. “In particular there’s been concern from some people who thought their contacts were being made public without their knowledge (in particular the lists of people they follow, and the people following them). In addition, others felt they had too little control over who could follow them and were upset that they lacked the ability to block people who didn’t yet have public profiles from following them.”

Google earlier this week threw its hat into the social networking ring when it announced new Gmail features designed to make the e-mail service more of a social networking hub. Google Buzz is the company’s attempt to make the flood of social posts, pictures and video easier to weed through, and to make it easier to find important information.

ATHENS, Greece -  A privacy watchdog lifted its objections Monday to a Greek Web site publishing panoramic street-level images online, making a similar decision in favor of Google’s Street View service more likely.

Greece’s Data Protection Authority, or DPA, said it was satisfied by assurances given by operators of the Greek Internet site kapou.gr, including its use of face-blurring technology and limits on storing original images.

DPA officials said they were concluding talks with Google over similar concerns. They gave no date for a likely decision on Google’s service.

The authority had ordered in May that both services suspend operations in Greece until the issue could be clarified and safeguards against potential privacy abusers could be guaranteed.

Source AP

Privacy is no longer a social norm, according to the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg commenting on the rise of social networking

U.S. judges questioned the FCC’s authority to punish Comcast Corp for blocking online file-sharing services on Friday in a case that could wind up curbing the regulators’ campaign for a free and open Internet.

Facebook’s privacy pullback isn’t just outrageous; it’s a landmark turning point for the social network. Facebook has blundered before, but the latest changes are far more calculated. The company has, in short, turned evil.