ReadWriteWeb

Big Tech is fighting Big Government in California over a proposed privacy bill that would limit the amount of information that companies can share about their users. A coalition of tech companies including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Match.com, Twitter and others sent a letter to the California Senate May 16 opposing the bill, saying it is unnecessary and would be detrimental to the tech industry and thus to California's economy.

Proposed by Sen. Ellen Corbett, the bill would force social networks to institute default settings upon registration of what users share on the services. Users can opt to share more information than the default, which would only list the users' city of residence. Tech companies are fighting on the basis that the bill is Draconian and unintuitive and that, as an industry, technology can do better than the California legislature.

Diaspora, the open source social networking service offering an alternative to Facebook's closed platform, has just provided an update on its development status. Via a blog post on the company's homepage, Diaspora founder Maxwell Salzberg says that the number one feedback request from its users and community is "go faster."

And that is exactly what Diaspora is now promising to do.

According to the Daily Beast, Facebook has hired public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to pitch negative stories about Google to media outlets.

The campaign was uncovered on May 3, when blogger Chris Soghoian posted emails he had received from BM's John Mercurio. "I wanted to gauge your interest in authoring an op-ed this week for a top-tier media outlet on an important issue that I know you're following closely," Mercurio wrote.

Facebook has quietly enabled a new privacy feature that allows users to hide certain types of updates from their walls and from the newsfeeds of friends. Make a new friend? Planning on going to an event? Now you can do those things on Facebook but be discreet about it, thanks to the new Hide All These button. That type of posting will never show up on your wall - or in your friends' newsfeeds - again.

Update: After publishing this story it has become clear that readers are seeing a variety of results from clicking this button and that it does not always result in updates of that type being hidden from the newsfeeds of friends. Facebook analyst Josh Constine theorizes that it may decrease the likelihood of the updates appearing and in some but not all cases remove them. I apologize for incorrectly reporting that the results of the button were simple and consistent; as a large and complicated service, things on Facebook rarely are. Facebook ought to hide update types when users click a button that says hide update types, but apparently it can only be relied upon to do so from a user's wall, not the newsfeed of friends.

Fueled by concerns about privacy, legislation that would limit Websites' ability to track users' browsing history via cookies is currently making its way through the California legislature and the U.S. Congress.

The so-called "Do Not Track" legislation is favored by consumer groups and privacy advocates, but opposed by many online marketers, who fear it may limit their ability to monetize their content and services online. Since this type of data is used to target ads to people based on their history and preferences, some fear that establishing an opt-in-only system could hurt the effectiveness of those ads and, in turn, the revenue they generate. Today, Google became the first browser maker to officially oppose California's version of the law.

TomTom, the maker of portable GPS devices, has apologized for turning over data it's collected from its customers to the police, who in turn have used this information to catch speeding motorists.

The data has been sold to local and regional governments in the Netherlands for use in helping the police establish speed traps, according to the Dutch newspaper AD.

For the last two weeks, it seems like anything anyone can talk about is the fact that our GPS-enabled smartphones are tracking our location. First, it was the iPhone, then the Android and finally Windows Phone 7. Why has this struck such a chord?

According to a study by TRUSTe, a leading Internet privacy service provider, privacy is the leading concern for smartphone users, with security following close behind.

A new photo-sharing startup launches today in private beta, no doubt entering what it an incredibly crowded space. But ZangZing hopes that its approach is unique enough to make it stand out from the rest.

That approach differs from many of the other photo-sharing apps on the market in two key ways. First, ZangZing makes it easy to pull together photos from multiple sources, uploaded by multiple people into one single album. Second, ZangZing emphasizes privacy. Using a photo service, in other words, needn't be a trade-off between privacy and group sharing.

Even before last week's revelations that iPhones and Androids are tracking users' locations, there have been increasing concerns about what sorts of data in general smartphones and smartphone apps are collecting. How does a user know what information is being amassed and shared? (And don't say "by reading the Terms of Service," thanks.) How can they control this?

If you're an Android user, a new app under development by researchers at North Carolina State University can help. TISSA, short for Taming Information-Stealing Smartphone Applications, will give users more granular control of what personal information is available to the apps on their phones.

Mobile carriers in the U.S. will soon have expanded Family Locator solutions in place that offer far more controls than simply tracking family members' whereabouts. Instead, these services will offer tools that allow parents to stop teens from texting while driving, stop "sexting" from occurring and stop kids from communicating with unwanted parties. Parents will also be able to read the content of text messages, preview mobile photos before being posted publicly on the Internet or sent to friends and will be able to specify what types of applications can be downloaded to kids' phones and when those apps can be used.