Big Brother is watching. That is the message corporations routinely send their employees about using email.

But recent cases have shown that employees sometimes have more privacy rights than they might expect when it comes to the corporate email server. Legal experts say that courts in some instances are showing more consideration for employees who feel their employer has violated their privacy electronically.

Driving the change in how these cases are treated is a growing national concern about privacy issues in the age of the Internet, where acquiring someone else’s personal and financial information is easier than ever.

“Courts are more inclined to rule based on arguments presented to them that privacy issues need to be carefully considered,” said Katharine Parker, a lawyer at Proskauer Rose who specializes in employment issues.

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Face.com is opening its photo-tagging system, based on facial-recognition technology, to Facebook members Wednesday.

Photo Tagger, which launched to a limited group of users in July, scans a user’s photo albums on the social-networking site, then lets him tag faces it identifies. It groups multiple shots of each person, making it easy to tag large albums, and users can also adjust or remove incorrectly tagged pictures.

Once a member has been identified, the app prompts him or her to approve the tag–a crucial privacy step, since he or she may not want to be labeled in a photo. It also works with a member’s current photo-privacy settings on Facebook.

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TIME to revisit the always compelling–and often disconcerting–debate over digital privacy. So, what might your movie picks and your medical records have in common?

How about a potentially false sense of control over who can see your user history?

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Despite growing concerns about online privacy on social networks such as Facebook, marketers at the Social Data Summit in New York on Thursday professed enthusiasm for social media marketing.

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In my last post, I had promised to say more about my article on the limits of anonymization and the power of reidentification. Although I haven’t said anything for a few weeks, others have, and I especially appreciate posts by Susannah Fox, Seth Schoen, and Nate Anderson. Not only have these people summarized my article well, they have also added a lot of insightful commentary, and I commend these three posts to you.

Today brings news relating to one of the central examples in my paper: Netflix has announced plans to commit a privacy blunder that could cost it millions of dollars in fines and civil damages

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Oh, those clever birds at Twitter. When the microblogging service announced recent changes to its terms of service, its executives knew exactly how to spin the news. For starters, media outlets dutifully went with headlines along the lines of “Twitter Changes TOS, Opens the Door for Ads,” because in a blog post about the changes, Twitter founder Biz Stone chose to make the most noise about the possibility of advertising. Granted, the actual legal language was rather broad (“The Services may include advertisements, which may be targeted to the Content or information on the Services, queries made through the Services, or other information. The types and extent of advertising … are subject to change.”).

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There have been a few cases recently that have involved previously-anonymous commenters getting outed by the courts. Where’s the line between free speech and getting unmasked?

You’re anonymous when you post comments online–except when you’re not. Though many Internet users still believe that their identities are as hidden as they choose to make them, online anonymity is not always guaranteed and, in fact, there’s no way to stay truly anonymous. There is always a company somewhere that has information that can be traced back to you, whether it’s Google (GOOG) or your ISP, and judges have shown themselves willing to issue subpoenas to unmask anonymous posters.

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The Federal Trade Commission is planning three public discussions, starting in December, devoted to technology and consumer privacy.

According to the FTC, the roundtables will address topics such as social networking, cloud computing, online advertising and mobile marketing, the goal being “to determine how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting beneficial uses of the information and technological innovation.”

Behavioral advertising, in particular, has come under fire by privacy groups. Earlier this month, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumers Union and other related organizations called for stronger rules limiting what kinds of personal information are collected by marketers and how long they can hold on them.

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Mr. X lives in ZIP code 02138 and was born July 31, 1945.

These facts about him were included in an anonymized medical record released to the public. Sounds like Mr. X is pretty anonymous, right? Not if you’re Latanya Sweeney, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor who showed in 1997 that this information was enough to pin down Mr. X’s more familiar identity–William Weld, the governor of Massachusetts throughout the 1990s.

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Ten privacy groups urged Congress on Tuesday to take greater steps to limit advertising that tracks consumers’ behavior online.

The coalition, which included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumers Union and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, singled out behavioral advertising, in which Internet users are tracked, analyzed and served ads based on the information gleaned from their movements, in its recommendations. Doing something about the practice has become more urgent as consumers go online for increasingly sensitive transactions, members of the group said on a call with reporters.

“We want consumers to be able to take advantage of all of the new technologies without the technologies taking advantage of the consumers. Right now, that balance is not there,” Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, said.

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Veterans suffering anxiety and paranoia following the theft of a government hard drive containing the medical histories and Social Security numbers of 198,000 of their brethren cannot recover financial damages, a federal appeals court says.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in largely dismissing a class-action, ruled Wednesday that the veterans could recoup at least $1,000 under the Privacy Act if they could show financial damages, not mental anguish.

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European privacy regulators could be about to throw a spanner into the works of attempts by social networking sites such as Facebook to find new ways to increase profits as they try to restrict the way internet groups release personal data.

The European move marks the first attempt by regulators to address the “open” internet platforms that the social networks, led by Facebook, have rushed to create.

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Those who are deeply disturbed about the rise in location-based applications and services and their impacts on personal privacy can breath a small sigh of relief tonight. Google (GOOG), which recently entered the space with its Latitude location network feature, has agreed to take a stand for user location privacy, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It’s the second company doing location services after Loopt to adopt the policy, which the EFF summarizes as basically, “come back with a warrant.”

What’s at stake here is actually pretty big. If a company like Google knows your whereabouts at all times because of Latitude, authorities may want the right to demand that information from Google. But Google is saying it will require authorities to provide it with a wiretap order before such information is given out.

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A federal judge dismissed a Pittsburgh couple’s suit against Google (GOOG), rejecting their claim that the Internet giant’s Street View feature violated their privacy.

Google Maps’s Street View, which launched in 2007, shows street-level maps of some cities. The couple, Christine and Aaron Boring, sued Google in April (our Law Blog colleagues wrote about it), accusing it of negligence, unjust enrichment and trespassing, in addition to privacy violation, because photos of their home appeared in Street View.

The judge, Amy Hay, said in her ruling that “While it is easy to imagine that many whose property appears on Google’s virtual maps resent the privacy implications, it is hard to believe that any–other than the most exquisitely sensitive–would suffer shame or humiliation.”

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