We believe that Google will preview a major new social service called Google Circles at South by Southwest Interactive today. Update: Google has now officially denied that Circles will launch here, but not that it exists. See final update below, as of afternoon Texas time Google does now deny that Circles exists. If what we've heard is correct, the service will offer photo, video and status message sharing. Everything users share on Circles will be shared only with the most appropriate circle of social contacts in their lives, not with all your contacts in bulk. Circles may be shown off at an event co-hosted tonight by the ACLU, an organization focused on privacy and the liberties it affords. It may not be a big public launch yet, but it's clear that this is a major product in the works at the very least. Please see below the fold for what I hope will be the final update on this for now.

The service has been developed with extensive participation by Chris Messina, the co-creator of numerous successful social and software phenomena online, from BarCamp to Hashtags and much more. Messina declined to comment for this story. Jonathan Sposato, CEO of the photo editing service Piknik that Google acquired last year, is working on Circles as well. Sposato may be the only entrepreneur to have sold not one but two startups to Google - having founded Phatbits, a service that was acquired by Google in 2005 and became Google Gadgets. These are heavy hitting tech leaders and the service should be very interesting.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Google's response. Google is now telling Liz Gannes at the technology blog All Things D that there is no product being developed. That's a real shame, if that's the truth of the matter.

Gannes writes:

When a report emerged this morning of a new social network focused on nuanced sharing called Google Circles, the company said it was not launching anything this week at SXSW. But such a product is not even under development, according to the people supposedly developing it.

Google's Chris Messina, who had been pegged as one of the leaders of Circles, told me directly today that he "didn't know what [the story] was talking about."

A trusted source with credible information, among several conversations I've had, lead me to draw the conclusions I did. I tried to frame them with some cautious caveats, but now Gannes is being told something different. To be honest, this wouldn't be the first time I've been told that a story I broke "was not based in fact" only to see something pretty darned close get confirmed later. I guess we'll see about this one.

There's plenty of evidence indicating that Circles is very real, of course. For example, one RWW reader found that if you look at the Buzz tab on a Google Profile with no linked media accounts, the page reads "nothing shared, try adding more people to your circles."

And now to return to our previously posted report. These details may in fact be a picture of what Google is going to do. They may instead be simply what Google ought to do. Take your pick, we'll know in time, I suppose.

A Matter of Personas

With Circles, I believe that Google will attempt to accomplish something critics from the blogosphere, academia, SXSW 2010 keynoter danah boyd, privacy watchdogs and others have all called on the social networking world to do: to allow our online communication to respect the same boundaries that our offline social lives do.

School and work, friends and family, the sacred and the profane; we've always been able to communicate different things to different people in different circumstances. Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks have collapsed all those contexts into one big bucket. We speak to our "friends" all at once, no matter what we might want to say to one group of people or another. And thus we often feel less comfortable than we might saying anything at all.

This fundamental discomfort has been, many people argue, a limiting factor in the growth, reach and depth of online social interactions. If that problem could be solved, there are big new ways that the online world could grow and evolve. This has been a more sophisticated understanding of privacy, not just as a public/private dichotomy but as a matter of contextual integrity of communication, that we and others have been calling on Facebook to adopt for almost two years.

The development of Circles is likely heavily influenced by the work of ex-Google social technology researcher Paul Adams. Adams has written a book called Social Circles, which will be released this Summer and he published a widely read slide deck about what is wrong with social networking: specifically the lack of respect for context and personas. (The Real Life Social Network) Adams worked on User Experience at Google for four years, but just months after publishing his influencial presentation he left Google for Facebook.

Courting Developers

Given who is working on it, I expect that Google Circles will be as developer friendly as other Google social products, but with a much greater emphasis on design and usability.

Messina and Sposato both have strong backgrounds in working with developers and APIs. Messina was trained as a visual designer and created the full page ad in the New York Times announcing the launch of Firefox, then went on to become a leader in the open web community. His work has included co-creating the international unconference phenomenon called Barcamp, helping build OpenID federated identity system, leading the Activity Streams movement for an interoperable social network user activity data system and initiating the use of #hashtags on Twitter. When he joined Google in January 2010, we wrote extensively about his life and career.

Right: Messina posted this photo on Foursquare today of posters promoting Google's hacker event at SXSW.

It is nearly inconceivable that Messina would be involved and the effort wouldn't be a standards-based platform play. If Circles is unveiled at SXSW, the timing couldn't be better from a developer relations perspective. Google can position itself as going exactly the opposite direction Twitter is. Twitter saw its biggest outpouring of criticism yet when it told developers on Friday that they should not build any more basic interfaces, clients, for using Twitter. It remains to be seen how that will play out, but if a major social network wanted to try to lure developers to build on their platform, this could be a good time to start talking about it.

Google Tries Again

Google has launched many different social efforts over the years but has remained far behind Facebook and Twitter in its efforts. Social networking is an important technology for Google to find success with as it's a key way that people spend time online and that targeted advertisements are delivered to those people.

Google Buzz felt overbearing and bolted on. It also got privacy terribly, terribly wrong. Google Wave was more confusing than collaborative. Google's Open Social interoperable widget platform was hugely hyped as a distributed Facebook killer, but it now primarily focused on enterprise social networks.

Reports emerged last June that Google has been working on a secret social project called Google Me.

In December a screenshot was leaked to TechCrunch showing a new toolbar item on Google.com called "Loop." (Loop seems similar to Circles - I think Circles is better.) I believe that Circles will be a toolbar level service as well.

It's hard to think of a stronger angle to take than support for contextual integrity of communication and conversation, of personas in social networking.

Google has tried and failed in many other (though not all) social efforts. Bringing some of the best thinking and the best innovators in the world to a new effort to tackle one of the world's biggest problems is very ambitious.

Presuming that the things we're hearing are true (I believe they are), then we'll follow up with in-depth coverage of Google Circles once it's launched. That may be tonight, it may be as far in the future as the Google IO developer conference in two months - but I believe we are going to see at least some parts of it today. More clear than the timing is that this is definitely happening: Google is putting some of its most innovative social thinkers behind a major product called Circles and focused on personas.

The ACLU wants to know how law enforcement obtains and uses location data from cellphones. Are they contacting the cellular operators directly? Are they issuing warrants to the operators? If so, is the person who owns the location data aware of the warrant? The implications are far reaching. Law enforcement's access to location data affects law-abiding private citizens, not just those involved in criminal activities.

See the map below for the states that the ACLU requested records from.

The ACLU wrote in a blog post:

One's location might reveal "whether he is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups -- and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts."Okay," I hear you thinking, "Right, but I'm not a criminal. Why should I care?" Think again. Law enforcement's use of cell phone location data has been widespread for years.

The ACLU notes that senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore) asked the head of the National Security Administration Matthew Olsen whether cellphone location data could be used to track U.S. citizens. Olsen replied: ""There are certain circumstances where that authority may exist."

In spook-speak, that means yes.

Prior Cases & Precedents

There are two main cases that the ACLU points out as dangerous precedents. One is the "Scarecrow Bandits" incident, in which a group robbed 20 banks in the Dallas area in 2008. The FBI wanted to get the cellphone location data of every person who was near a specific bank at the time of the robbery. Another instance was in Michigan when law enforcement wanted the cellphone data of people who planned on organizing a labor protest.

There is also the rising use of digital forensics by law enforcement in the field. Dell makes a portable digital forensics unit that can be used to access the data of any portable or mobile device (laptops, smartphones, tablets etc.). For instance, people could get pulled over and a police officer could scan their phone for who they called last, where they are coming from, where they have been and who is in their contacts list. This is not location-specific but unwarranted use of digital forensics is still a concern for privacy advocates and civil liberties groups.

In more recent history, the prime minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron, wants to ban people from using social media in the aftermath of the London riots. It is imaginable that the British police are attempting to gain location data at this very moment about participants in the riots and looting. People who own a flat above a shop and barricaded themselves inside their apartment might then become suspects based on the location of their cellphones at the time. It is a definite possibility that innocent people could be persecuted because of where their cellphones said they were at a particular time, even if they had nothing to do with nefarious events around them.

In terms of the records request, the ACLU is specifically looking for:

• whether law enforcement agents demonstrate probable cause and obtain a warrant to access cell phone location data;
• statistics on how frequently law enforcement agencies obtain cell phone location data;
• how much money law enforcement agencies spend tracking cell phones and
• other policies and procedures used for acquiring location data.

Senator Wyden and a Republican House representative Jason Chaffezt have introduced bill that would create location privacy protections for citizens against unwarranted snooping from law enforcement and the commercial sector.

We have been in touch with the ACLU of Massachusetts (this reporter is based in Boston and has a history dealing with the ACLU regarding cellphone and law enforcement issues) about obtaining the data that law enforcement hands over in regards to the records request. We want readers of ReadWriteWeb to know how law enforcement is using their data and will share that information if and when we get those records. In the meantime, let us know in the comments your thoughts about law enforcement potential use of cellphone location data. Who is to blame? The devices themselves? Zealous law enforcement? The carriers? The U.S. government for allowing this to happen?

We believe that Google will preview a major new social service called Google Circles at South by Southwest Interactive today. Update: Google has now officially denied that Circles will launch here, but not that it exists. See final update below, as of afternoon Texas time Google does now deny that Circles exists. If what we've heard is correct, the service will offer photo, video and status message sharing. Everything users share on Circles will be shared only with the most appropriate circle of social contacts in their lives, not with all your contacts in bulk. Circles may be shown off at an event co-hosted tonight by the ACLU, an organization focused on privacy and the liberties it affords. It may not be a big public launch yet, but it's clear that this is a major product in the works at the very least. Please see below the fold for what I hope will be the final update on this for now.

The service has been developed with extensive participation by Chris Messina, the co-creator of numerous successful social and software phenomena online, from BarCamp to Hashtags and much more. Messina declined to comment for this story. Jonathan Sposato, CEO of the photo editing service Piknik that Google acquired last year, is working on Circles as well. Sposato may be the only entrepreneur to have sold not one but two startups to Google - having founded Phatbits, a service that was acquired by Google in 2005 and became Google Gadgets. These are heavy hitting tech leaders and the service should be very interesting.

Gannes writes:

When a report emerged this morning of a new social network focused on nuanced sharing called Google Circles, the company said it was not launching anything this week at SXSW. But such a product is not even under development, according to the people supposedly developing it.

Google's Chris Messina, who had been pegged as one of the leaders of Circles, told me directly today that he "didn't know what [the story] was talking about."

A trusted source with credible information, among several conversations I've had, lead me to draw the conclusions I did. I tried to frame them with some cautious caveats, but now Gannes is being told something different. To be honest, this wouldn't be the first time I've been told that a story I broke "was not based in fact" only to see something pretty darned close get confirmed later. I guess we'll see about this one.

There's plenty of evidence indicating that Circles is very real, of course. For example, one RWW reader found that if you look at the Buzz tab on a Google Profile with no linked media accounts, the page reads "nothing shared, try adding more people to your circles."

And now to return to our previously posted report. These details may in fact be a picture of what Google is going to do. They may instead be simply what Google ought to do. Take your pick, we'll know in time, I suppose.

A Matter of Personas

With Circles, I believe that Google will attempt to accomplish something critics from the blogosphere, academia, SXSW 2010 keynoter danah boyd, privacy watchdogs and others have all called on the social networking world to do: to allow our online communication to respect the same boundaries that our offline social lives do.

School and work, friends and family, the sacred and the profane; we've always been able to communicate different things to different people in different circumstances. Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks have collapsed all those contexts into one big bucket. We speak to our "friends" all at once, no matter what we might want to say to one group of people or another. And thus we often feel less comfortable than we might saying anything at all.

This fundamental discomfort has been, many people argue, a limiting factor in the growth, reach and depth of online social interactions. If that problem could be solved, there are big new ways that the online world could grow and evolve. This has been a more sophisticated understanding of privacy, not just as a public/private dichotomy but as a matter of contextual integrity of communication, that we and others have been calling on Facebook to adopt for almost two years.

The development of Circles is likely heavily influenced by the work of ex-Google social technology researcher Paul Adams. Adams has written a book called Social Circles, which will be released this Summer and he published a widely read slide deck about what is wrong with social networking: specifically the lack of respect for context and personas. (The Real Life Social Network) Adams worked on User Experience at Google for four years, but just months after publishing his influencial presentation he left Google for Facebook.

Courting Developers

Given who is working on it, I expect that Google Circles will be as developer friendly as other Google social products, but with a much greater emphasis on design and usability.

Messina and Sposato both have strong backgrounds in working with developers and APIs. Messina was trained as a visual designer and created the full page ad in the New York Times announcing the launch of Firefox, then went on to become a leader in the open web community. His work has included co-creating the international unconference phenomenon called Barcamp, helping build OpenID federated identity system, leading the Activity Streams movement for an interoperable social network user activity data system and initiating the use of #hashtags on Twitter. When he joined Google in January 2010, we wrote extensively about his life and career.

Right: Messina posted this photo on Foursquare today of posters promoting Google's hacker event at SXSW.

It is nearly inconceivable that Messina would be involved and the effort wouldn't be a standards-based platform play. If Circles is unveiled at SXSW, the timing couldn't be better from a developer relations perspective. Google can position itself as going exactly the opposite direction Twitter is. Twitter saw its biggest outpouring of criticism yet when it told developers on Friday that they should not build any more basic interfaces, clients, for using Twitter. It remains to be seen how that will play out, but if a major social network wanted to try to lure developers to build on their platform, this could be a good time to start talking about it.

Google Tries Again

Google has launched many different social efforts over the years but has remained far behind Facebook and Twitter in its efforts. Social networking is an important technology for Google to find success with as it's a key way that people spend time online and that targeted advertisements are delivered to those people.

Google Buzz felt overbearing and bolted on. It also got privacy terribly, terribly wrong. Google Wave was more confusing than collaborative. Google's Open Social interoperable widget platform was hugely hyped as a distributed Facebook killer, but it now primarily focused on enterprise social networks.

Reports emerged last June that Google has been working on a secret social project called Google Me.

In December a screenshot was leaked to TechCrunch showing a new toolbar item on Google.com called "Loop." (Loop seems similar to Circles - I think Circles is better.) I believe that Circles will be a toolbar level service as well.

It's hard to think of a stronger angle to take than support for contextual integrity of communication and conversation, of personas in social networking.

Google has tried and failed in many other (though not all) social efforts. Bringing some of the best thinking and the best innovators in the world to a new effort to tackle one of the world's biggest problems is very ambitious.

Presuming that the things we're hearing are true (I believe they are), then we'll follow up with in-depth coverage of Google Circles once it's launched. That may be tonight, it may be as far in the future as the Google IO developer conference in two months - but I believe we are going to see at least some parts of it today. More clear than the timing is that this is definitely happening: Google is putting some of its most innovative social thinkers behind a major product called Circles and focused on personas.

While groups such as the National Writers Union oppose the settlement on the grounds that Google is violating author rights, and Yahoo and Microsoft oppose the settlement for fear of a price fixing cartel, the latest objection adds new perspective.

The argument reminded us of John Battelle's "database of intentions" - an aggregated list of personal search results, page visits and bookmarks. He explains that while the database of intention lives in a number of places, four major players including Google hold the bulk of this information. He wrote, "This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind - a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends."

While this may seem like a paranoia today, it wasn't long ago that rumors surfaced of US intelligence authorities monitoring net usage to gain electronic evidence against members of al-Queda. In response, Darwinder S. Sidhu's 2007 report outlines how the majority of polled Muslim-Americans believe that their Internet activities are being monitored.

The latest Google privacy objection argues that this fear of being tracked is enough reason for consumers to change their behavior. For the complete filing download the PDF

If you thought your casual reading might have a slim chance of being subpoenaed, would you change your reading habits? Let us know in the comments below.