All Things Digital

On July 3, Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court in California made a ruling particularly worthy of the nation’s attention. In Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation Inc. v. Bush, a key case in the epic battle over warrantless spying inside the United States, Judge Walker ruled, effectively, … that the president lacks the authority to disregard the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The story of how Al-Haramain’s lawyers negotiated the journey thus far to Judge Walker’s ruling … is a surreal saga, involving a top-secret document accidentally released by the government, a showdown between Bush lawyers and a federal judge, the violent destruction of a laptop computer by government agents, and possibly even the top-secret shredding of a banana peel.

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Want to know how well a company protects its customers’ data? Don’t talk to its security and compliance officers. Instead, try its marketing department.

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The Singularity is a conceit of modern science fiction: a place inside vast computers where whole universes are simulated whose reality is every bit as sharp and instantaneous as the physical world we inhabit. Books like Charlie Stross’s “Singularity Sky” and the Matrix movie trilogy have done a great job of representing such alternative, computer-calculated realities.

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Google’s breadth of services is truly awesome, and the amount of information the company touches concerning our lives and world can sometimes feel downright frightening. While almost no one takes the old phrase “Don’t Be Evil” seriously anymore–now that there are billions of dollars on the table and Chinese autocrats to satisfy–regular evaluations of Google’s ethical positions still seem advisable.

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Google is facing the wrath of privacy advocates once again over concerns that it’s not posting its privacy policy “conspicuously” enough to comply with California law. On Tuesday, a coalition of groups that have questioned Google’s practices in the past sent a four-paragraph letter to CEO Eric Schmidt, charging that “Google’s reluctance to post a link to its privacy policy on its home page is alarming.”

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Online advertising has ballooned into a roughly $45 billion-a-year business, to the benefit of Google, Yahoo, ad networks and innumerable specialty and hobbyist Web sites. One corner of this ecosystem that hasn’t managed to cash in on advertising is, by some measurements, the largest: broadband providers. So it may have been inevitable that they would seek additional revenue by monitoring their customers’ online activities and creating behavioral profiles that could yield hyper-relevant ads.

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The FBI has backed down on a secret request for information about a user of the Internet Archive digital library, thanks to a legal challenge from two prominent advocacy groups. The case, which was brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the archive, dates to last year but only became public on Wednesday. That’s because the type of request involved, known as a national security letter, is accompanied by a gag order that forbids the recipient from disclosing its existence or discussing it with anyone except his attorneys, who are also gagged. As a result of a settlement, the FBI agreed to withdraw the national security letter and to lift the gag order.

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The last time cookies became a matter of public debate was when the “Sesame Street” character Cookie Monster was accused of encouraging poor eating habits among toddlers. Today’s controversial cookies are the small text files that track where people go online. Web sites do a poor job of explaining how and why this information is used, even as details about our lives are increasingly knowable online. Risks to privacy make this a race between smarter self-regulation on the Web and threatened new regulation by the Federal Trade Commission.

Most privacy advocates understand that advertising pays for the otherwise free Web, but worry that cookies can be used for more than matching advertising to individual interests. Some want a “do not track” approach on the Web, similar to the “do not call” rules that block unwanted marketing phone calls. This sounds attractive but could undercut much of the marketing power of the Web.

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How worried are you about the amount of private and personal stuff you have posted on social-networking sites? I’ve always been pretty relaxed–both because I’m very careful about how much information I give away, and because I think I know my way around privacy settings.

But an investigation by my colleagues at Click has made me think again. They set out to explore just how much data is accessible to developers who make applications for Facebook. What they found was that it was relatively simple to write an application that would give the developer access to lots of personal data–not just from those who’ve installed that application, but also from their list of Facebook friends.

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Perhaps the scariest term in business today is “behavioral targeting.” It also turns out to be one of the best practices around to assure the combination of consumer choice and marketing effectiveness on the Internet. And in that gap lies a dilemma for the marketing and media industries–and, indeed, for all citizens. For if fear overtakes reality, it could dramatically limit the accessibility and diversity of the Web.

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Hackers have turned their attention to Facebook’s hundreds of independent applications. The results are not terribly surprising, but do not tell a good tale: App developers don’t seem to know a thing about basic security, and are putting private user information at risk. As a result, malicious hackers are able to access and change what should be private user data managed by the application providers.

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The Associated Press reported yesterday that it was able to use an undisclosed method to access private photos on Facebook, including some from Paris Hilton at the Emmys and others from Facebook founding CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vacation in November of 2005.

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Facebook launched a bunch of new privacy controls today and has received a significant amount of positive press as a result. The praise is perhaps not so deserving–as the new privacy controls can be easily evaded.

The new privacy settings allow users to customize which friends can view specific details in their own profile. Users can lock down specific bits of information to their friends, friends of friends, or even particular individuals. There is, however, a significant design flaw present in this new feature.

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Google finalized its $3.1 billion purchase of ad-delivery giant DoubleClick Tuesday after European Union regulators ruled that the purchase does not violate anti-monopoly rules in Europe, which removed the last legal hurdle for the hotly contested acquisition. … DoubleClick is an ad serving and management company that Web publishers use to display and target visual and rich-media advertising. The technology uses a DoubleClick cookie that reports back every time a user visits a site using the system, letting DoubleClick know that user 453689 likes to read motocross stories and GQ magazine and spends a lot of time playing online Flash games. Google can merge that database with its deep knowledge of users’ search histories, along with its growing database of URLs visited by Google users who don’t realize that Google opts-in users to its “Web History” program, which continually tracks their every step on the Internet.

So what does the purchase mean for citizens on the Web?

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A few months ago, I shopped around for a Web site to help keep track of my spending habits. I was looking for a service that would charge me nothing yet work flawlessly, protect my privacy and make me feel good about myself–a tall order, I’ll admit. I settled on a little start-up called Wesabe, mostly because the founders seemed so committed to, well … to being cool dudes. The company has a detailed and very encouraging policy on privacy and data ownership and has recruited privacy-obsessed Alpha Geeks like Cory Doctorow and Clay Shirky to serve on its advisory board. In its frequently asked questions, Wesabe comes across as positively saintly: They won’t sell ads because ads encourage you to spend, they plan on making money by helping people reach their financial goals, and their security measures are at least as impressive as those used by your credit card company. If Wesabe were a person, I’d be seriously smitten.

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