Facebook

Sen. Charles Schumer of New York has come out swinging against new announcements by Facebook that modify how much member data is shared with third-party companies, suggesting that the Federal Trade Commission needs to promptly address the issue of social-network privacy.

A press release from Schumer's office announced that he has written to the FTC to ask that the agency "examine the privacy disclosures of social-networking sites to ensure they are not misleading or fail to fully disclose the extent to which they share information...(and) provide guidelines for use of private information and prohibit access without user … Read more

LONDON--Thanks to the volcanic ash pouring out of Iceland, I had some extra time in London last week, giving me an opportunity to try my hand at shuttle diplomacy between Facebook and a British police agency called the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center, or CEOP.

I came to London en route to a tech conference in Spain that was canceled due to the air travel issues and also to give a talk at a Family Online Safety Institute conference in Bahrain that starts Tuesday.

As I wrote recently, CEOP is pressuring Facebook to add a reporting button (some call … Read more

As acolytes sat in nodding wonderment listening to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg tell them how the world really is (not very private at all) and how it's going to be (even less private), the people behind Gawker Media were enduring (or perhaps even enjoying) sometimes nasty critiques. They had, after all, revealed something terribly private about one of the world's great personalities, the iPhone.

Many lawyers have opined on the legality of Gawker's actions. I am sure that they are all right. Lawyers always are. At least that's what they tell me. I just wish some … Read more

It's almost become a joke: Facebook makes a change to its privacy settings that opts you in to a bunch of scary stuff, the entire Internet flips out about it, it rolls back the change, and then a few months or years later, it makes the same or a very similar update, opting you in to it again. It would be funny, if it weren't getting so damned insulting.

Here's the latest. In the wake of its F8 conference the other day, Facebook rolled out a slew of changes aimed at transforming the Web into one giant … Read more

While Mark Zuckerberg this week focused on finding ways that people could use Facebook to share every article of journalism and, who knows, maybe even clothing with their Facebook friends, a mayor in New England used the site to share much more.

April Capone Almon, mayor of East Haven, Ct., seems to be a woman who truly dedicates herself to her constituents, and, indeed, to her Facebook friends. And when I say "herself," I really mean "her self."

Almon has more than 1,600 Facebook friends, but as she waded through her friends' status updates, she … Read more

Is this the ultimate early adopter penalty? If you buy more than two iPads to send to your friends overseas or give to your family, you risk a lifetime ban on future purchases? That just can't be right. Also not right: the sweet little child who calls tell us how to get porn on the iPhone. Just upsetting. Plus: Palm deathwatch and Facebook's privacy untangled (er, sort of).

Lenovo interested in buying Palm http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTOE63M04J20100423 http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=33519… Read more

In one of the more intriguing tech tales of late, a blog site ended up in possession of what is believed to be a prototype iPhone 4G that was either left, lost, or stolen in a Silicon Valley bar.

Last weekend, Engadget posted photos of what appeared to be a yet-to-be-announced, next-generation Apple device that was allegedly found on the floor of a bar in San Jose, Calif. A tipster had apparently sent the photos to the gadget blog for posting.

Come Monday morning, Engadget rival Gizmodo upped the ante and said it was actually in possession of what appeared … Read more

Facebook made several important announcements on Wednesday. I'll leave the details to others--this is a music-focused blog, after all--but I think that Facebook's leaders have positioned it as the infrastructure provider of the emerging social Web and potentially as the first Internet company to challenge Google's dominance in online advertising.

Basically, now that everybody (400 million users) is on Facebook, the company is trying to extend itself to the rest of the Web, allowing you to broadcast your likes and dislikes from other sites back to your Facebook friends, and allowing your Facebook social graph to extend … Read more