Profile Station

Continuing its effort to become a more open social networking site, Facebook is introducing a new privacy (or lack thereof) option that lets you make your entire profile viewable to everyone.

Previously, Facebook let you open up different elements of your profile as far as the networks you belong to, meaning everyone in your designated region, school, or employer. Now, you can make your profile, status updates, photos, and wall posts available to anyone on Facebook. The privacy settings still allow a high-level of specificity, so you can make only certain profile elements visible to everyone and others visible to only specific people.

This decision speaks to Facebook’s move earlier this month to make Pages and Profiles two very similar entities. With the option to make profiles public, the only truly major difference remains that a Facebook Page is more like Twitter in that it can be a one-way relationship (with “Fans” as the equivalent of “Followers”), whereas profiles and their friends’ lists remain mutual relationships.

It also makes the Facebook of yesteryear a distant memory. It’s hard to believe at one point the site was limited to just college students with .edu email addresses, at only a handful of universities.

Despite relying on different legal standards, courts have generally upheld laws authorizing law enforcements compulsory collection of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) as reasonable under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. However, several developments might call this judicial consensus into question. First, whereas prior laws authorized compelled extraction of DNA samples only from people who had received a criminal conviction, new state and federal laws have expanded law enforcements DNA collection authority to include people who have been arrested or detained but not convicted on criminal charges. On the federal level, the U.S. Department of Justice implemented this expanded authority with a final rule that took effect January 9, 2009.

Saskatchewan's decision to put the brakes on high-tech driver's licences shows their benefits don't outweigh the invasion of people's privacy, according to one of Canada's top privacy watchdogs.

Chantal Bernier, assistant privacy commissioner of Canada, is applauding the province's decision to back away from the enhanced licences until legislation addresses concerns about how personal information is used and how vulnerable it is to hackers.

"It's highly significant," Bernier said in an interview with The Canadian Press. "The province seems to come to the conclusion ... that the cost-benefit analysis is not convincing."

Intruding on a person's privacy is only justified when the benefits outweigh the risks, she said. And more people seem to be coming to the conclusion that concerns associated with enhanced driver's licences don't justify going ahead with the cards in their current form.

The high-tech licences - which are being brought in by Ontario, British Columbia and Manitoba - are intended to be used as identification instead of passports at U.S. land border crossings. Starting in June, all travellers crossing into the United States by land or sea, including American citizens, will need a passport or an acceptable alternative.

In response to concerns from Saskatchewan privacy commissioner Gary Dickson, that province temporarily pulled proposed legislation this week that outlined how the licences would work.

Most of the privacy questions revolve around the card's embedded radio-frequency identification chip.

Google stepped up its attack on the telecommunications industry on Thursday with a free service called Google Voice that, if successful, could chip away at the revenue of companies big and small, like eBay, which owns Skype, telephone companies and a string of technology start-up firms.

Google Voice is an expanded version of a service previously known as GrandCentral, a start-up that Google acquired 20 months ago. It is intended to simplify the way people handle phone calls, voice mail and text messages. The service will initially be made available only to existing GrandCentral subscribers; Google says the general public will be able to use it in the coming weeks.

SiteTweet allows you to post specific messages about your site on twitter.

Example: You want to tweet every time someone searches for a specific keyword on your site or you want to update your twitter account every time someone views your About page, SiteTweet is the twitter app for you.

WordPress users rejoice! SiteTweet has a WordPress plugin that makes tweeting site behaviour a breeze.

Quickie

• Tweet site behaviour automatically on twitter
• WordPress plugin for SiteTweet integration
• Receive details on goal completions
• Register specific searches
• Receive notifications from visitors from specific sources

SiteTweet Says

sitetweet allows webmasters to post immediate messages on Twitter about specific behaviors on their site.

Usually installed on strategic pages, you can configure sitetweet to send a special message when a user performs a certain action on your site. You can use Twitter’s options for private posts in case you want to control who follows your login.

After several years of saying that it doesn’t target ads based on profiles of users, Google took a giant step into behavioral targeting by beginning to target ads on its AdSense network (although not on search or display advertising… but that only seems to be a matter of time at this point).

On the whole, the move raises concerns for privacy advocates. Industry has long promised improved self-regulation, but has only delivered on dribs and drabs of improvements. Until the whole process becomes more transparent to the consumer, as well as easier to understand, users are going to continue to be confused and wary of a business model that tracks their online usage.

Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, talks us through the timeline of one of the more important cases he has worked on: the al-Marri, or domestic enemy combatant case. It asks the fundamental question: Can the government detain you indefinitely without charge or trial? The case has a long timeline with twists and turns through both the Bush and Obama administrations, and a brief time before the Supreme Court. Jonathan explains how it all happened from the beginning.

Cute as Hell is a new social network for pet owners that just launched in beta. It’s created by Erick Laubach, who also has a travel social network called Driftr under his belt.

Pet-related social networks aren’t exactly scarce, but Cute as Hell is interesting because it takes several tried and true viral concepts and integrates them into the network. It can probably best be described as a cross between Cute Overload, Hot or Not (for pets) and MySpace. Two features that make this so are the so called cuteness rating and the Thunderdome. The former lets visitors rate pets by their cuteness, while the latter is a tournament where pets can compete for the title of the cutest pet.

The advantage of this approach is the fact that the site can be fun even if you’re not part of the social network; you can merely browse it for cute animals. Considering the popularity of sites like Cute Overload, it might bring in a significant number of visitors. It also engages users to participate in the site more, instead of just maintaining their pet’s profile and adding friends.

Other features currently available are social shopping (users can rate and review products), comments and photos; videos, Facebook and iPhone app, as well as questions and answers are coming soon.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "You may recall that in an RIAA case, SONY BMG Music v. Tenenbaum, the district court ruled that an oral argument about the constitutionality of statutory damages could be streamed, and the RIAA has been fighting that with a petition for 'mandamus or prohibition' in the appeals court, which is opposed by the press. Interestingly, it now turns out that the appeals court's oral argument about the streaming will itself be recorded and then streamed. It is hard to imagine how a court which routinely streams its own oral arguments can rule that it is somehow inappropriate for similar oral arguments in the district court to be streamed as well."

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