ReadWriteWeb

Facebook released an upgrade of its excellent iPhone app today and there were two very big changes. Push notifications will now notify you whenever people send you messages, tag you in a photo or comment on your messages - whether you're looking at your phone at the time or not. That is going to change the Facebook user experience dramatically, increasing sychronous conversation and engagement on the site.

More importantly, Facebook added the ability to sync your phone's local contacts with your Facebook contacts list. Remember when Facebook kicked blogger Robert Scoble off of the site for exporting his contacts' emails in bulk? The company said it was important that users maintain control over their contact info. Apparently it doesn't feel that way about phone numbers any more.

Update: Facebook has contacted us and said that the app in fact does not export the phone numbers found on Facebook profiles to the iPhone. It is only exporting profile photos and links to Facebook profiles, associating those with phone numbers you already have on your phone. I was confused when writing about the new sync feature and wrote this post under the mistaken belief that Facebook contacts and the attached phone numbers were being exported. That would have been interesting, but that's not in fact what's happening. I apologize for getting the story wrong.

We reported yesterday that Facebook is aiming to get people to be more public on the site and that anyone who hasn't changed their privacy settings will now see it "recommended" that their status updates, photos etc. be exposed to the whole web. I had a unique opportunity to speak to Barry Schnitt, Director of Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook and quite a frank guy, at length this afternoon about Facebook's privacy policy changes.

Schnitt said "your understanding is basically correct," but disagreed with the negative light I saw the change in. Becoming less private and more public is "a change just like it was a change in 2006 when Facebook became more than just people from colleges," Schnitt told us. "Facebook is changing," he said, "and so is the world changing and we are going to innovate to meet user requests." Do you buy that?

"We live in public" isn't just the name of a film; it's an Internet truism.

For the past ten years, more and more of us have been using blogging platforms to share the details of our personal and professional lives. With the advent of microblogging, the sharing has escalated to include the most intimate, immediate, and even mundane details of one's daily grind. When pressures abound, venting online is second nature; but oversharing can bear disastrous consequences. The cure? Penzu's private-by-design, sharable-by-choice blogging software.

Facebook announced this morning that its 350 million users will be prompted to make their status messages and shared content publicly visible to the world at large and search engines. It's a move we expected but the language used in the announcement is near Orwellian. The company says the move is all about helping users protect their privacy and connect with other people, but the new default option is to change from "old settings" to becoming visible to "everyone."

This is not what Facebook users signed up for. It's not about privacy at all, it's about increasing traffic and the visibility of activity on the site.

Update: See also our in-depth interview with Barry Schnitt, Director of Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook, about why these changes were made.

Would you give a complete stranger your email address and date of birth? How about personal information about your friends?

If results of a new study on Facebook user behavior is any indication, around half of us would answer "yes" to those questions, depending on how old we are. The study also shows that Facebook users are becoming more lax with protecting their personal data than they were three years ago. What do these results signify in light of recent concerns about user privacy on the world's largest social network? And now that some user data will be indexed by Google, will users have to adjust what information they share?

Social networking site Facebook has just announced the formation of the "Facebook Safety Advisory Board," a group of five Internet safety organizations that will council the company on all issues related to online safety. The board members will review Facebook's current safety-related procedures and documentation as well as make suggestions regarding best practices and other procedures. Although the company has sought council from many of the participating organizations in the past, this new board formalizes those relationships so Facebook can gather even more feedback as to how they can improve safety on their site.

Consumer watchdog group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has initiated a lawsuit against multiple U.S. government agencies for failing to disclose their policies regarding the use of social media for surveillance. According to the filing, the government has been making use of social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter to aid in various investigations where the alleged crimes range from the relatively minor infringement of underage drinking, to more serious endeavors, such as the coordination of protesters during the G-20 summit. However, when requests were made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for details about governmental policies, several agencies failed to respond with information regarding what data is collected, under what circumstances and who has access to it.

In a late night post on Facebook's company blog, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a round of upcoming changes that will affect all users of the social network. Specifically, the changes focus on new privacy controls for information sharing. For those who have been following Facebook closely, the announcement doesn't deliver any new information, it only confirms some previously discussed plans. However, for Facebook's user base, now 350 million strong, the updates represent a major overhaul as to how privacy is handled on the site.

A federal lawsuit filed on Wednesday is charging an iPhone development firm with collecting users' cell phone numbers without their permission. The developer, a game-making firm by the name of Storm8, is the entity behind popular games like iMobsters, World War, Racing Live, Vampires Live, Kingdoms Live, Zombies Live and Rockstars Live, among others. The company has five titles ranked in the top 50 free apps list in iTunes and seven titles in the top 100.

According to the pending class-action suit, Storm8 used a well-known backdoor method to "access, collect, and transmit" the wireless phone numbers belonging to their software's users.

Now the company has publicly responded to the suit by posting on their forums a sort of mea culpa as well as their plans to ask for a dismissal of the lawsuit due to its "complete lack of merit."

Earlier this morning, Google launched the Google Dashboard. This new feature gives users a quick overview of the Google products they use and a slice of the data that is connected to these accounts. Google sells this as a way to enhance "transparency, choice and control," though it is important to note that none of this information is new. The dashboard simply brings all of this data together in one place and gives users an easy way to access the privacy controls in the Google services they use.

Proposal Would Kill Beacon, Have Facebook Paying $9.5 Million

Late last week, a federal judge in California gave preliminary approval to a settlement of the class action lawsuit regarding Facebook's Beacon program. The controversial program, launched back in November of 2007, allowed Facebook users to share online purchases made on third-party affiliate websites with their social networking friends. The problem with the program was that it was opt-out instead of opt-in, angering many Facebook users who unknowingly shared information they wished they wouldn't have.

Microsoft announced this week that it has made a deal to include public updates from Facebook in its search engine Bing. Some Facebook users expressed concern that their private activities might be exposed to search. The real story is a little more complex. To put it simply: Facebook is not ever going to knowingly expose private activities on the site to public search. We can say that with as much assurance as we can say almost anything about the internet.

None the less, Facebook has a clear agenda to convince you the user to willingly expose more information publicy by changing your privacy settings. Multiple Facebook execs have told us so when we asked point blank.

Company calls customers in attempt to sell paid version of mobile app

Within iTunes' user ratings section of iPhone application mogoRoad, a real-time traffic monitoring tool available in Switzerland, several users claim to have received phone calls from the development company behind the mobile software. Reportedly, the company is asking the app owners if they would like to purchase the paid version of the application. While unsolicited sales calls are annoying and intrusive, the bigger issue here is how did the company get its customers' phone numbers to begin with? According to mogoRoad, the information came from Apple.

With a product as ubiquitous as Facebook, the public has raised a number of privacy-related concerns including optional settings, privacy policies and data mining. In the past, ReadWriteWeb covered Facebook's plans to sell user data for market research purposes. However, today's article in the Boston Globe suggests that user information can be mined for more than just advertising purposes.

In a surprise announcement, eBay, and Verizon have been awarded the top titles of "Most Trusted Companies for Privacy" by the Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe. According to a recent survey, these companies were shown to offer clear privacy statements, customer-friendly notices, great access to information, solid cookie management and sound data sharing practices. While the companies may excel on paper, it's hard to believe these are the top privacy-related companies based on public sentiment alone. It appears that the Ponemon Institute's expert panel and the 6,486 US consumers surveyed have lost their long term memories.

When the President of the United States warns schoolchildren to watch what they say and do on Facebook, you know that we've got a problem...and it's not one limited to the U.S.'s borders, either. People everywhere are mindlessly over-sharing on the world's largest social network, without a second thought as to who's reading their posts or what effect it could have on them further down the road. For example, did you know that 30% of today's employers are using Facebook to vet potential employees prior to hiring? In today's tough economy, the question of whether to post those embarrassing party pics could now cost you a paycheck in addition to a reputation. (Keep that in mind when tagging your friends' photos, too, won't you?)

But what can be done? It's not like you can just quit Facebook, right? No - and you don't have to either. You just need to take a few precautions.

Facebook announced today that after facing legal pressure from the Canadian government, it will begin working on ways for users to choose which parts of their full profile they are willing to expose to applications they add on Facebook.

Though the company talks about privacy all the time, the fact that it will take an estimated 12 months before this situation is resolved demonstrates how invested Facebook really is behind the scenes in a "let it all hang out" philosophy.

The Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has put together a campaign to raise awareness of privacy issues surrounding Facebook applications, in particular quizzes. According to this group, the millions of Facebook users taking quizzes are revealing far more personal information to application developers than they are aware of. This is mostly due to the fact that Facebook's default privacy settings allow access to all your profile information whether or not your profile is set to "private." Even worse, the ACLU reports that even if you shun quizzes yourself, your profile info is revealed when one of your friends takes a quiz. Want to see how bad the problem is? Just take the ACLU's Facebook Quiz and prepare to be shocked.

In the age of transparency, it appears some of us are embarrassed to be ourselves. Maybe you're a closet Perez Hilton fan, or you check Woot! at work, or perhaps as suggested by PC Pro, you like to bookmark your porn collection. In any case, a number of Firefox 3 users reverted back to version 2 due to the location bar's (awesome bar's) ability to search against browser history and bookmarks. A recent Mozilla blog post walks users through the privacy control enhancements of Firefox 3.5.

A month ago, Canada's privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddard announced that Facebook did not satisfy Canadian privacy law on several counts. After an investigation prompted by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), Stoddard identified several areas where the company could better address privacy gaps for 12 million Canadian users (roughly 85% of Canadian netizens). The complaint raised concerns about "default privacy settings, collection and use of users' personal information for advertising purposes, disclosure of users' personal information to third-party application developers, and collection and use of non-users' personal information." The company was given 30 days to comply with recommendations and if Stoddard is not satisfied with Facebook's response she can go to the Federal Courts for enforcement. Today is Facebook's deadline.