So yeah, yesterday we mentioned that Google was reportedly planning on adding a feature to its Goggles app that would allow users to pull in a person’s information just by taking a picture of the person with their phone. Well, according to Google, that ain’t happening… [The Inquirer]

Elsewhere in creepy innovations (literally) – Creepy is a new app (for Windows or Linux) that apparently can tell the user geolocation information for any person who uses Foursquare, Twitter, and/or Flickr to disclose their location – indicating where that user “spends most of his/her time”… [Lifehacker]

And today in privacy litigation – apparently LinkedIn is the latest web giant to get sued for allegedly violating its users’ privacy. Apparently a California man thinks the fact that LinkedIn discloses a users unique ID to third party advertisers (allowing them to place a tracking cookie on his computer, and identify him by name) means a court should award him damages for violating his privacy, though LinkedIn thinks the case lacks merit… [Mediapost]

Finally, we’ve mentioned how some companies aren’t waiting for government to regulate privacy (or at least implement the FTC’s proposed “Do Not Track” concept), including browser makers like Microsoft and Mozilla. Apparently also implementing “Do Not Track” is the AP News Registry… [The Mozilla Blog]

Well, Google probably could have cautioned online marketplace site Etsy against this move (since it was similar to the way Google rolled out Buzz last year)…nevertheless, Etsy yesterday made all of its users’ activity on the site public by default… [Business Insider]

But almost as soon as it flipped that switch on, it realized the error it had made and switched it back off… [Etsy]

Yesterday, the FTC settled its complaint with Twitter over what it deemed to be insufficient security measures that led to Twitter users accounts being hacked in the past. As part of the settlement, Twitter has agreed to “establish a more rigorous information-security policy to prevent user accounts from being hijacked” in the future… [eWeek]

But Twitter isn’t the only party the FTC settled with yesterday. The Commission also settled a complaint with the online ad provider Chitika, in which it had charged that the service was continuing to track users who had actually opted out of their tracking… [Washington Post]

And finally, Microsoft launched the latest version of Internet Explorer – IE 9 – yesterday, which as we’ve been mentioning for far too long here also includes a feature that allows users to opt out of ad tracking… [WSJ]

But if you’re not interested in using IE 9, you can still disable third party (tracking) cookies in Firefox and Chrome…here’s how… [CNET]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation participated in several panels at the Internet Governance Forum in Lithuania this week, advocating for government to protect the data web service providers store about you the same way it protects the data you store on your hard drive, among other things [EFF Deeplinks Blog]

And maybe this isn’t privacy so much as it is security, but if you’re really worried about other people accessing your Facebook or Twitter accounts, AT&T Safe has an iPhone app for you, which sends a notification to your iPhone every time someone (including you) tries to acces your account, and requires some type of verification for the login to proceed (in the example it’s double top secret voice authentification and a password) [Gizmodo]

Digital Society, a “digital think tank,” has just released its report cards on “online security” for many of the top sites on the web, and as you can see from the image above, while Gmail got an A, Facebook and Twitter both got an F! [Huffington Post]

Just in case Google thought it was going to get away from the FTC easily on its Street View breach, maybe not, as The National Legal and Policy Center has asked the agency to review the matter further and more in depth [All Things D]

And finally, it’s easy to think that many big digital names don’t take protecting user data nearly as seriously as they should, but if these comments are any indication, that may not be universally true [Reuters]

According to the results of a recent study, while 88 percent of users are concerned about data privacy in the cloud, and 91 percent “wanted a system that lets them control how their personal data is used by weighing the risks on a per-application basis,” few of them were currently doing anything to protect their personal data [eWeek]

Google‘s new privacy czar talks to CNET about the daunting job she has been promoted to perform [CNET]

Meanwhile, Google’s Street View wifi snafu may have served as fuel for the UK’s Internet Bill of Rights, which one particularly outraged member of Parliament introduced yesterday…the UK also re-opened its investigation of Google and Street View this past Monday after Google admitted it wrongfully collected data [PC Magazine]

We talked about Firesheep earlier in the week, which is a Firefox add-on that allows users to access other users on insecure public wifi networks social networking accounts, but there’s also something called “Idiocy,” which allows users to access other users’ Twitter accounts in the same fashion, and send out a tweet reading – “I browsed twitter insecurely on a public network and all I got was this lousy tweet” [Fast Company]

And finally, speaking of Firesheep, here’s how to avoid any threat from the tool by creating/using a Virtual Private Network [Mashable]

How could we go a week without some sort of Facebook privacy “fiasco?” Facebook’s latest privacy problem is allegedly “leaking” user information (regardless of privacy settings) and information about users’ friends to 3rd party websites, which according to the Wall Street Journal, violates Facebook’s own privacy policy… [WSJ]

So, of course Germany – which has had an issue with basically anything that has privacy implications – is none too pleased with Facebook… [AFP]

And speaking of Germany, Google appears to be “on course” to resume its Street View efforts in the country, despite a soon-to-be-released number of Germans who have “opted out,” citing privacy issues [NY Times]

Before a new website that professed to track celebrities based on users’ (celeb or otherwise) tweets could get off the ground, Twitter stepped in and cut them off… [Forbes]

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, along with its friends at the Center for Democracy and Technology and several other like-minded organizations, has officially launched the “Privacy 2010 Campaign,” which includes a “report card” on how well the Obama Administration handles privacy issues in different contexts [Examiner.com]

And finally, this isn’t privacy news so much as it is security news, but the US is apparently evaluating an Australian plan to have ISPs cut off internet access to users with “infected” devices and alert them to such “infection”… [Associated Press]

Are Twitter DMs less private than we think? Personally, I’m not sure apps having access to my Twitter account and thus my DMs is really all that alarming, but I suppose there is potential for abuse in there somewhere… [PC World]

I believe we may have mentioned this suit when it was originally filed, but nevertheless, two California men filed an amended complaint against Facebook this week, alleging that the company revealed users’ identities to advertisers through referring URLs when users clicked on ads [The Register]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says if he had to do it all over again, he’d make user profile information public by default, among other things, and ReadWriteWeb’s editor responds with a handful of thoughts, including that Zuckerberg’s (specific) comments seemed arrogant and condescending… [ReadWriteWeb]

Heretofore, Twitter hasn’t really had any privacy troubles, unlike it’s other social networking behemoth friend, Facebook. But, with the service planning to record all of the links you click, there are certainly some privacy implications if they don’t provide a way for you to purge this click log or somehow anonymize yourself [CNET]

It looks like Google is off the hook in New Zealand (I’m sure they’ll breathe a big sigh of relief) – the country’s law enforcement officials said today that Google’s “inadvertent” data collection did not violate any New Zealand laws [AFP]

One aspect of Apple‘s latest iTunes feature Ping that you may or may not have heard about is – simple privacy controls, that somewhat mirror those of Twitter [NY Times]

Some might say Zuckerberg wanting his privacy is ironic (and maybe it is just a little), but in this case, it’s not like he’s choosing to share these alleged private details with anyone, the man suing him is allegedly trying to force him to do so… [Reuters]

Congress has announced a petition in support of the Main Fairness Act, which would stop states from requiring internet merchants to report consumers’ purchases to state revenue agencies [Press Release]

If you’re savvy enough to know about The Digital Breakfast, chances are you’re savvy enough to be aware that you’re not the only one who has access to knowing where you go and what you do on the web, which includes your employer being able to discover the contents of your company emails. And while employers are just as able to manually monitor their employees’ communications on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, they probably haven’t seen the value in it, considering the time it would take if they have any substantial amount of employees and a life outside the four walls of their office.

But a new product called SocialSentry could change that…

For a social media junkie (at least an employed one, anyway), SocialSentry could sound somewhat ominous. Not only can SocialSentry help an employer find any of its employees’ public Facebook or Twitter accounts, but it can also allow them to monitor those employees communications via those Facebook and Twitter accounts, for a nominal fee of $2-$8 a month per employee.

It’s billed as a preemptive measure to detect situations like an employee leaking confidential company information through Facebook or Twitter (it will soon be able to monitor LinkedIn, Myspace and others as well) or an employee’s gripe like the one contained in this post’s title image, but really, the tool can be used to monitor any communication through Facebook or Twitter and as Teneros’s (the company that developed the product) Chief Executive told the Times, “[Teneros] only provides the application and software, it is the companies that decide what to do with it.”

Of course, as that little gem of a screen shot illustrates, it’s not like employers couldn’t look up your Facebook account and see what you’ve posted without a tool like SocialSentry. And frankly, if you were worried about this type of thing, the smart move would have been to either not friend your boss on Facebook, or at least only give him or her limited profile access if you do. But not everyone thinks like that, and indeed, especially with younger employees, sharing way too much on Facebook and Twitter has kind of become commonplace. Plus, even if you did so, it seems SocialSentry could break through that limited profile wall and see the things you have shared so long as your actual Facebook account itself is public.

Twitter is somewhat of a different animal, since you can indeed make your profile private and SocialSentry can’t penetrate that privacy wall. But while it can’t bust through the walls that protect a private account, how many people really have private accounts? Out of the 300 some individual accounts I follow on Twitter, I’d say maybe 10% of them are private, and I think that’s being generous.

What really strikes me about SocialSentry, though, is that Teneros doesn’t really even try and frame its product description diplomatically. While it does only bullet out product uses that implicate sensitive company interests, it’s really just saying hey, you can now spy on your employees easily. Perhaps this is just a taste of what’s to come for those of us in the work force, but honestly, I think this is a little intrusive. Personally, my Facebook account is basically un-discoverable, and my Twitter account is private. But just knowing that companies may be trying to monitor my personal communications (after all, we’re not talking about company email – provided by the company and expected to be used for company-specific communication) on the two biggest social networks is enough to make me cringe. Certainly they have a right to know if their employees are leaking confidential information, but when it comes to other types of communications, where do we draw the line between work-relevant and work-irrelevant?

So I guess the message is – if you weren’t already, be that much more careful about what you say and do on Facebook and Twitter. You may think there’s no way your boss will see it, but as I think this post demonstrates, you may be wrong.