John M. Simpson, director of Consumer Watchdog's Privacy Project, inked a letter to Mr. Joaquin Almunia, vice president of the European Commission, voicing his organization's concerns over "Google's ongoing anti-competitive behavior," which includes the search giant's proposed $12.5 billion merger with Motorola Mobility. The nearly 3-page letter criticizes Google's business behavior in detail with a particular focus on why Consumer Watchdog feels the merger with Motorola should be blocked.
Google a week ago began rolling out a social search update called "Search, "Plus Your World," which meshes photos, comments, and posts on your Google+ account with your search results. This has drawn the ire of a privacy advocate called EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) concerned over privacy and antitrust issues that could arise from the new search feature.
Facebook has revealed much about the human condition, and now it’s reminding us how vain we humans can be sometimes. According to a recent interview with Facebook’s engineering director Arturo Bejar, the majority of photos flagged by users as inappropriate are actually just unflattering images of the user that reported it.
Facebook's ongoing privacy policy reform will undergo even more changes in the next six month as the social network attempts to improve transparency and do a better job with how it collects and handles private data in Europe. The vow to change comes at the conclusion of a review by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), which oversees Facebook's legal compliance to users outside the U.S. and Canada (Facebook's international headquarters is in Ireland).
The outrage over Carrier IQ was bubbling just below the surface for months before it exploded out of modding circles a few weeks ago. The diagnostics software is on many phones, particularly Android handsets, and is used to gather extensive usage data. After the public outcry, Sprint has announced that Carrier IQ will no longer be used on its phones, and will be disabled on current devices.
The new Facebook is here a little later than expected, but still too soon for some. The Timeline profile is going live for all users. It aims to tell the story of a user’s life in a giant scrollable page. Users are encouraged to fill in relevant details that Facebook might not know. Go ahead, give them more data. Cunning.
For a few hours today, Facebook users were able to snoop around in other users’ private photos thanks to a flaw in the Facebook code. Interestingly, the issue was present in the abuse reporting tool. The flaw did not expose all a user’s photos, but several choice snapshots could be harvested with the hack. Facebook patched the exploit, but not until the Internets snatched some of Zuckerberg’s personal photos.
Some of the biggest technology firms in existence are reportedly squaring off against India’s telecommunications minister over the filtering of user-generated content. According to several individuals that have been present at meetings, Minister Kapit Sibal is demanding that the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo proactively screen user content for disparaging or defamatory statements. 
Where data is concerned, there are few companies that even come close to rivaling the size of Facebook’s data reserves, constantly replenished by a ceaseless stream of Likes and much more. But as they often say, with large amounts of data comes great responsibility. And that is where the European Commission (EC) seems to have a problem with the world’s largest social network.
Dolphin Browser HD is one of the most popular alternative browsers on Android, which is why the latest news on that front is so disconcerting. According to an exhaustive investigation by Android Police, Dolphin HD is sending all user URLs in plain text to a Dolphin webserver. The goal is to match URLs to a webzine whitelist service that Dolphin then provides to users, but as Android Police said, this is “an amateur solution.”
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