In case you missed it, the anti-Facebook, Diaspora launched its network in Alpha recently, and invited a small number of individuals to be early testers. Obviously this Lifehacker Editor was among those fortunate few and was gracious enough to write a post giving us all a look under the hood via screen shots… [Lifehacker]

It was only a matter of time before Google became the target of litigation once again. Despite dispensing with one case of privacy invasion brought by a Western PA family recently, Google may now be back in the court room, as plaintiffs have filed a class action against the internet giant in Texas, alleging (like other similar suits here and abroad) that its Street View wifi sniffing violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Federal Wiretap Act… [Southeast Texas Record]

But Google is not alone in the courtroom right now, facing privacy violations…several sites, including a popular porn site, Wired, and PerezHilton, have been sued as a result of their user “browser history sniffing”… [ZD Net]

And the reason anyone knew about this “browser history sniffing” was this recent study conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Diego… [UCSD]

We mentioned a Firefox add-on recently that not only blocks advertisements for users, but also ensures that such ads don’t “track” their movement online. Well, Firefox creators, Mozilla, are apparently planning a “do not track” feature for the browser themselves [WSJ]

Regardless, at some point after the tomorrow’s “Do Not Track” hearing, we may not even need a Firefox add-on to opt-out of online ad tracking… [MediaWeek]

And now that the EU is publicly discussing what it had been previously reported as pondering – the “right to be forgotten” online – the same may be able to be said for our European friends at some point in the relatively near future [WSJ]

And speaking of “online tracking,” interesting to know that by integrating a Facebook “Like” button into content, site owners are allowing Facebook to track users whether they are Facebook members or not [ThinQ]

And while we’re talking about Facebook and privacy – we know Facebook has been the subject of several lawsuits for its privacy controls, but typically those are based on people asserting that they are not strong enough. In this lawsuit, someone is actually suing Facebook for HAVING privacy controls. Of course, it’s a patent infringement suit, but if I told you that first, the last part of that last sentence probably wouldn’t have been as appropriate… [TechCrunch]

Last link involving Facebook in any way, I promise (for today, anyway) – why the anti-Facebook, “Diaspora”  won’t be anything like Facebook and probably won’t even move the needle much in terms of alternative networks [CNN]

And finally, consumer privacy lessons from the latest Wikileaks fiasco (which you can read more about, here)… [Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society]

Real quick one for you today…

Last week, we mentioned that the anti-Facebook, privacy-focused social networking alternative Diaspora announced its Alpha release, which was invite only. Well, here are two hands-on reports letting you know how the editors’ Alpha experiences fared… [Mashable and Ars Technica]

Ouch – a complaint filed with the FTC yesterday alleges that health-focused social networks allegedly sell marketers info on site registrants (including what sites they visit and what they search for) without disclosing they are doing so… [Chicago Breaking Business]

Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for…well, a moment that we’ve been anticipating, anyway…the privacy-focused anti-Facebook, Diaspora, has launched its alpha release and is offering potential users invites to test it out [Diaspora Blog]

Noise around the internet about Firesheep has somewhat died down, but the threat it poses to those browsing unsecured obviously has not. Thus, the EFF has released a new version of HTTPS Everywhere, which provides the secure browsing experience necessary to combat threats like Firesheep [NetworkWorld]

Foursquare and other location-based services are probably the hottest services of 2010 as far as digital goes, but when working with clients, it requires PR (and marketing) professionals to consider privacy [PR Week]

The privacy implications of Facebook‘s recently-announced Relationship pages, which show publicly-shared information and photos that involve two particular Facebook users… [InformationWeek]

Elsewhere on the Facebook privacy front – Facebook disclosed that a 3rd party was paying for user ID information from Facebook developers, but that it had suspended developers who sold such info and presumably will continue to do so to protect users’ privacy [WSJ]

Furthermore, it mentioned that it had come up with a technical solution that would make it impossible to share user IDs with 3rd parties and that it would be working with browser vendors to further make sure user IDs don’t make it into other peoples’ hands… [AFP]

While we’re at it, this isn’t Facebook related, but Facebook’s execs could probably learn a thing or two from reading this post on how to avoid online privacy issues… [GigaOm]

Hopefully none of your were holding your breath waiting for the anti-Facebook, Diaspora’s public alpha release in October, because it’s now been moved back to Thanksgiving [TechCrunch]

For those of you worried about Firesheep – the Firefox add-on that lets users’ access other users’ social networking profiles (and any other sites/services they may be logged into at the moment) through unsecure wireless networks – you probably want to download FireShepherd [Gizmodo]

So, just FYI – if you’re using Internet Explorer and its cookie blocker, you might be interested to know that a recent Carnegie Mellon study revealed that about 1/3 of the 33,000 sites surveyed still allowed cookies to be installed [NY Times]

The EU is currently debating how to regulate the online ad industry in terms of targeting. One proposal is perhaps a “heavy opt-out,” meaning basically hitting users over the head with the ability to opt-out [WSJ]

Speaking of the EU, could its strict privacy laws impede the development of cloud computing? [NY Times]

Just in case you want to disable Facebook Places and aren’t sure how… [Newsday via Minneapolis Star-Tribune]

Despite its braintrust’s advanced warning that the code wouldn’t be bug free, critics aren’t holding back in evaluating Diaspora’s alpha release [Top US News]

The Wall Street Journal‘s latest Privacy series = how to protect your children’s privacy online [WSJ]

And finally, Google and German officials met today on reconciling Germany’s strict privacy regulations and Google’s Street View features/practices/policies [Reuters]

[Click image to enlarge]

As promised, the anti-Facebook project, Diaspora, released its source code yesterday and an idea of what the social network will look like as well as a tentative alpha release date of “October” [Diaspora blog]

The Federal Trade Commission is still prepping a draft of “privacy principles” for this fall, but admits that it’s still trying to sort out itself what exactly “privacy” means in our modern age [Politico]

And maybe that’s why the Future of Privacy Forum‘s founder doesn’t think any privacy bill will pass this year [Forbes]

What some have called the “anti-Facebook,” aka Diaspora, has announced that it will launch on September 15. To refresh your memory, it’s the “anti-Facebook” because it allows you better out-of-the-box control over what you share with whom…and it’s open source [Diaspora]

Welp, Google may have jumped the gun in France. Without being informed that it was clear to start deploying Street View vehicles again (aka whether it “complied with the orders to limit Street View data collection”), Google went ahead and did so anyway, and one of its cars was stopped yesterday by French officials and searched to make sure it wasn’t still collecting Wi-Fi data [Mashable]

University of Arkansas at Little Rock professors and a PhD student have come up with something they call a Context Based Privacy Model for users’ online protection. This one’s quite jargon-heavy, so rather than paraphrasing, I’ll just give you the idea straight from the horse’s mouth – “the model leverages intelligent, scalable, adaptive, and robust pattern-matching algorithms to allow Internet sites to automatically adjust privacy needs of consumers or organization to the context in which the data is accessed.” [US News and World Report]

Facebook called an “all hands” meeting on Thursday to apparently talk about their privacy fiasco…sidenote: I might as well just start calling these things – “Facebook Privacy Link 1, Facebook Privacy Link 2, etc.” [CNET]

By the way, as a follow up to my Facebook post on Thursday – here’s a visual of Facebook’s privacy settings… [NY Times]

Diaspora – the Facebook that actually cares about your privacy [Gizmodo]