ReadWriteWeb

When Amazon launched its Kindle Fire tablet last month, it sparked discussions among most tech enthusiasts and bloggers over things like whether or not they'd buy one and whether the new device should be seen as a competitor to Apple's tirelessly dominant iPad. One detail about what Amazon unveiled was cause for concern for some.

Silk, the Web browser that will ship with the new tablet, utilizes Amazon's powerful cloud computing infrastructure to help serve up Web pages faster and even predict your browsing habits. Naturally, this split architecture and its potential to capture private user data caught the attention of organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who inquired with Amazon about the privacy implications Silk presents.

Google announced today the closure of a number of services it's offered for years, including the much-maligned social network Buzz. Buzz wasn't just forgotten, though. It wasn't just a pre-cursor to Google Plus. It wasn't just rolled out awkwardly in February, 2010.

It was, according to the US Federal Trade Commission, an egregious enough violation of consumer privacy that all of Google will now be subject to independent privacy audits for the next 20 years. Many people still don't believe that Buzz violated anyone's privacy at all. I think it's important, as Buzz fades into the sunset of history, that such opinions be reconsidered and Buzz's wrongdoing be taken seriously. Lest it be repeated and so that social software can be built effectively in the future.

Gmail users got a hefty dose of reality today when it was revealed that Google handed over one user's private data to the U.S. government, who requested it without a search warrant.

The contacts list and IP address data of Jacob Appelbaum, a WikiLeaks volunteer and developer for Tor was given to the U.S. government after they requested it using a secret court order enabled by a controversial 1986 law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, according to the Wall Street Journal. The law allows the government to demand information from ISPs not only without a warrant, but without ever notifying the user.

If you think recently-unveiled products like the Facebook Timeline and Amazon's cloud-powered Silk Web browser have raised privacy issues, an innovation that lies just around the corner could blow them both out of the water.

Facial recognition technology has been around for decades, but until recently it's been slow, inefficient and largely limited to proprietary implementations, such as databases used by law enforcement. That could all be about to change, and the results are bound to send shivers down the spines of digital privacy advocates.

California's Reader Privacy Act has been signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown. The bill was authored by California State Senator Leland Yee, and sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The act will become law in 2012, and provides similar privacy protections to those that are enjoyed by library patrons.

That's good news for California residents and businesses, but it's still not enough. The law, which will take effect on January 1, only applies to books and eBooks. It means that government or third parties won't be able to demand access to reading records, without proper justification and transparency about how the records are disclosed.

Wikipedia visitors can now leverage a new level of security and privacy regarding their reading habits, thanks to the site's newly announced support for HTTPS browsing. Ryan Lane, a Wikipedia Operations Engineer, writes that HTTPS "allows you to visit our sites without having your browsing habits tracked, and you can log in without having your password or user session data stolen." Visitors seeking to navigate the site securely can simply visit https://en.wikipedia.org to begin.

Wikipedia has made several steps away from the growing trend of encouraging users to share their data with one another, in some cases explicitly contrasting the giant encyclopedia's policies and ethos with Facebook's.

The changes that Facebook is making to the profile via the Timeline and media sharing are some of the biggest to ever come to the platform. Yesterday at Facebook's developer confererence, f8, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said with a smile, "We have been working on this for a year, we are extremely excited."

The Timeline, with its new media and lifestyle sharing features is a significant boost to Facebook's social graph. What Zuckerberg announced yesterday was the equivalent of putting the Open Graph API on steroids. That is good for Facebook and good for users, to a certain extent. But claims of invasion of privacy by Facebook and its ecosystem will skyrocket as well. What will Timeline do to user privacy and how will users respond?

Location based social network Foursquare has quietly released a new feature that allows places user categorize as their homes to be included in the system but not expose their exact addresses. Venues categorized as homes will now show up as a general area on a map, instead of a pin and street number, as restaurants and stores are displayed. The move was first reported by the independent blog AboutFoursquare.

It's a great little change that will enable users to check in at home without exposing too much information. This new feature will also allow people whose homes were listed on Foursquare against their wishes to easily obscure their addresses. Respecting home/away privacy is a key part of making people feel safe enough to expose their location at all, anywhere. Foursquare's approach is reminiscent of the new private location geofences Flickr launched earlier this month.

In a sign of how strongly Internet-related issues can affect real-world politics, the German branch of the Pirate Party has won 15 seats in Berlin's regional parliament.

The Pirate Party, which was was originally founded in Sweden in 2006, is a political party whose platform is built around issues like reforming copyright and patent law, digital privacy and radical government transparency. The organization "promotes in particular an enhanced transparency of government by implementing open source governance and providing for APIs to allow for electronic inspection and monitoring of government operations by the citizen," according to its Wikipedia entry.

Last week, Diaspora, the open-source, privacy-aware social network of our nerdy dreams, posted its first public response to the launch of Google Plus and the recent efforts around privacy and selective sharing at Facebook. For a reaction to news that two Web behemoths are drinking Diaspora's milkshake in terms of features, the blog post sounds pretty upbeat, with perhaps just a hint of caginess. "We're proud that Google+ imitated one of our core features, aspects, with their circles," the Diaspora team writes. "We're making a difference already."

Let's not get into whether Diaspora can take credit for features of Google Plus and Facebook. There are things about Diaspora that still are unique among its competitors. Not only is it open-source, it's decentralized and distributed. Users are encouraged to set up their own servers. But these are not features for normal human users. In that category, the social networking superpowers seem to have Diaspora cornered.