ReadWriteWeb

After an enterprising hacker discovered a privacy problem in beloved new social app Path yesterday, its creators have issued an update and an apology. "We commit to you that we will continue to be transparent and always serve you our users, first," CEO Dave Morin writes.

Path was uploading iPhone users' address books to its servers without asking. Today's update, version 2.0.6, now prompts users to opt-in to the "Add Friends" feature, which is not mandatory. Path has deleted all the existing contact info from its servers.

Today is International Data Privacy Day, an event backed by companies like Intel, Ebay, Facebook and Microsoft, and dedicated to educating data owners about best practices in protecting the privacy of consumer data.

The need to keep people from being exploited on account of violations of their privacy is clear, well-known, intuitive and amply articulated by highly capable people. The up-side of making use of peoples' data is far less so. The two concerns are closely tied together. That's something Bill Gates is likely very aware of, if his comments 10 years ago are any indication.

Google updated its privacy policy on Tuesday. It replaced more than 60 separate policies with a single one that treats Google users and their data as the same across all Google services. Reactions were shrill. "The End of 'Don't Be Evil'" was trotted out for the umpteenth time. The Washington Post quoted privacy experts saying, "There is no way anyone expected this." My, that sounds terrible!

But it's not true. Everyone watching should have seen this change coming. Google executives have maintained for so long that their new direction is one unified Google product. The new policy doesn't track any new data. It doesn't change the user's settings. Users can still export all their data and leave Google forever. All this does is change perception.

Facebook has cut a deal with political website Politico that allows the independent site machine-access to Facebook users' messages, both public and private, when a Republican Presidential candidate is mentioned by name. The data is being collected and analyzed for sentiment by Facebook's data team, then delivered to Politico to serve as the basis of data-driven political analysis and journalism.

The move is being widely condemned in the press as a violation of privacy but if Facebook would do this right, it could be a huge win for everyone. Facebook could be the biggest, most dynamic census of human opinion and interaction in history. Unfortunately, failure to talk prominently about privacy protections, failure to make this opt-in (or even opt out!) and the inclusion of private messages are all things that put at risk any remaining shreds of trust in Facebook that could have served as the foundation of a new era of social self-awareness.

Along with Sunday morning's secrets, PostSecret founder Frank Warren announced that the $2 PostSecret iPhone app is now closed. Warren received complaints from users, Apple and the FBI about bad content on the anonymous art app. He says that users, moderators and his own family were threatened, citing two specific incidents he can't discuss further. Launching the app now displays only one secret announcing the closing.

Whereas submissions to the PostSecret blog are curated by hand, the app was an experiment allowing any iPhone user to generate secrets instantly and anonymously. Warren says that users shared over 2 million secrets, and that "99%" of them "were in the spirit of PostSecret." The app launched in September, becoming the best-selling app in the U.S. and Canada overnight. It is now gone from the iTunes store, the Android version never arrived, and the PostSecret App website no longer loads.

Final update: Three months after ReadWriteWeb first described these plans in detail, Google announces Google Circles as part of a larger social initiative. It is as we reported it.

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.

Facebook's new Timeline profile feature is great, even if it is a little strange. It's narcissistic, but that's a big part of the fun of it, and I'm not sure that other peoples' timelines are nearly as interesting as mine is to me.

It's an incredibly feature-rich new type of social network profile. It's a re-imagination of what a profile can be. It makes me want to use Facebook more, to share more data with Facebook so that it can be preserved and displayed so nicely, years into the future. While other Facebook features have pushed users into posting publicly by default, or posted their activities from other places they didn't understand would become part of the public record, I think Timeline is a genuine value add to incentivize users to share more. I think it's great.

Somewhere along the complex supply chain of the mobile world's chips, antennas, touchscreens, operating systems and inter-linked celular networks traveling around the globe - someone has been caught capturing and transmitting more of your data than you'd probably like. There are probably any number of parties doing something similar but mobile usage data capture service Carrier IQ has been found to have code installed, with the phone companies' blessing, on millions of phones without the knowledge of consumers.

We're all awash in a sea of data, we have been for some time, but as we meet that data we learn that it is made of people. We've met the data tsunami and it is us. That's bound to make a lot of people uncomfortable. If a future based on that data unfolds in the wrong way, it could end up a major hindrance to the quality of human life.

What started last week as a relatively minor controversy over one company's tracking of smartphone users' behavior has ballooned into a full-fledged scandal. The curious digging of developer and researcher Trevor Eckhart revealed that an application called Carrier IQ (CIQ) has been logging and transmitting a ton of information about what people are doing with their phones, including personal data like phone numbers dialed, URLs visited and the content of text messages. First the Electronic Frontier Foundation came to Eckhart's defense after CIQ sent a cease-and-desist letter to the developer. Now U.S. Senator Al Franken is demanding answers from CIQ.

The controversy initially swirled around Android-based smartphones from a variety of manufacturers. Last night, iPhone hacker Chpwn reported that he had found traces of CIQ in Apple's iOS operating system, although what he found looks less alarming than what Eckhart initially saw elsewhere.

Here's our nominee for most evil Web service of the week: FindHisPorn.com. For a one-time low price of $49.99 only $19.95! Limited time offer!, you can allow a dubious piece of Java voodoo onto your PC (Windows only) and let it scrape the contents of your hard drive and show you all the porn it finds. It's just perfect for spying on that special someone in your life.

Find His Porn is cynically exploiting the paranoid and freaked-out, violating privacy, jeopardizing security and taking people's money. It has been created under a total veil of secrecy. Oh, it's also "perfect for ✓ Boyfriends, ✓ Husbands and ✓ Kids" with the "goal of empowering women everywhere." With its marketing finely tuned, Find His Porn profits off of people's engrained norms, broken trust and technical ignorance.