Maybe at one point you thought you wanted to add your house/apartment to Foursquare, but later wished you had reconsidered. Luckily, Foursquare now allows you to erase that lapse in judgment (assuming that’s how you look at it) [About Foursquare]

Of course, we’ve said it before and I’m sure we’ll say it again – Google can’t seem to go any appreciable period of time without being sued by someone at this point – this time, a Texas resident is suing Google for scanning non-gmail users’ emails to gmail users in order to serve ads to those gmail users (alleging that this violates the Electronic Communications Privacy Act) [InformationWeek]

And speaking of Google in legal settings – it announced last Friday that it will delete all of the data its street view efforts inadvertently collected in the UK… [LA Times]

One last Google link – here’s what Germany looks like on Street View now that 240,000 Germans have requested that their homes be blurred in order to “safeguard their privacy”… [Gizmodo]

Of course, the other company that consistently finds itself in the crosshairs of the privacy debate is Facebook, and given that it makes so much from behavioral advertising, its Messages product/feature seems potentially poised to be the latest privacy battleground for the social network [Reuters]

Last Friday, AT&T “fixed a privacy loophole” that allowed anyone to have any of 92 million AT&T customers’ service shut off, without even any questions being asked [NBC NY]

And finally, the Better Advertising Project recently secured funding to build a self-regulatory program for the online advertising industry, which seems like it will offer a seal of approval on all ads that meet certain “privacy” specifications [All Things D]

Probably the biggest privacy news today is that a federal court preliminarily approved a settlement in the Google Buzz class action suit. The settlement doesn’t reward actual Buzz users, of course, but rather would provide $8.5 million to organizations that focus on online privacy education [Press Release]

And just when it thought it was out of the woods in the UK, the country yesterday ruled that Google Street View did in act violate the UK’s Data Protection Act…so much for dropping the investigation… [paidcontent.org]

This doesn’t really have anything to do with privacy directly, but here’s a preview of Google Street View in Germany, the efforts toward which began on Monday [Google LatLong Blog]

And as or Germans and privacy – the country just rolled out new “e-ID cards,” which store a citizen’s date and place of birth as well as address and photograph, and have many concerned about data theft [Reuters]

Honestly, I’m just including this link because it claims that Firesheep – the Firefox add-on we’ve mentioned like every other day since last Monday – has been downloaded 542,000 times in a little over a week… [NetworkWorld]

Finally, if you want to remove any geotagging associated with your photos on Google’s Picasa photo service, here’s how… [NY Times]

After all of Germany‘s ire over Google Street View, Google finally launched its German efforts yesterday, and was ironically honored with a freshly baked cake to commemorate the occasion [AFP]

Between that and escaping any kind of scrutiny – criminal or otherwise – in the UK, I’d say this week is shaping up to be pretty good for Google and Street View [ZDNet]

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]

Big things are happening on the privacy front overseas – first, the UK seems to be putting in place new legislation that allows British police and security personnel to tap into and review any British user’s web activity or emails (going as far back as a year) [Telegraph]

Second, Germany released the numbers on exactly how many households opted to have their residences left out of Google Street View – 244,237, or a little less than 3% of German households [Mashable]

And finally, Google says it’s done with using its Street View cars to find the locations of wi-fi networks (presumably everywhere across the globe), which was what led to the privacy uproar back in June… [CNET]

The Electronic Privacy Information Center – along with a few similarly-minded friends – isn’t a fan of Google‘s “new” privacy policy, which took effect yesterday. It has asked Google to make some changes, particularly criticizing Google’s new-found liberty of sharing a user’s information between Google services without the user’s consent [MediaPost]

Leave it to a Brit to propose that “good manners” and not laws are the key to stopping people from invading others’ privacy online…I actually happen to agree, but I still think it’s funny [BBC News]

The UK Ministry of Defense has cautioned all of its personnel to turn off Facebook’s Places service (which it recently rolled out in the UK) because of the potential for terrorists (particularly in Northern Ireland) to exploit it [Register]

So, I’m sure you remember the Times Square [electronic] billboard war waging between Google and Consumer Watchdog…well, Consumer Watchdog has a new ad in which it calls Google “chicken” for failing to respond to its challenge to debate “measures to protect consumers’ online privacy” [Press Release]

Android owners, never fear – TaintDroid is here…to show you exactly how much data your Android apps are/were sending off to remote servers. Turns out, 20 of the 30 apps surveyed were “misusing personal data”… [Fast Company]

Yesterday, someone posted a leaked GOP memo to Scribd that expresses concern over industry players like Google and Microsoft’s “conflict of interest” in discussing reformation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act [Forbes]

Well, the UK law firm ACS:Law has been prominently featured in privacy headlines for the past couple of days, now it’s the UK’s turn itself, it seems. The European Commission is suing the UK for “breaking EU rules on safeguarding privacy” [UK Press Association]

The University of Florida announced yesterday that it had a little privacy problem that resulted in 300 former students’ names, addresses (as of 2003 when they were enrolled in a computer science class) and social security numbers being revealed…eek… [Gainesville Sun]

Today in the “world’s most obvious headlines” department – “Wiretapping the Internet Must Be Balanced with Privacy Concerns” [San Jose Mercury News]

The Wall Street Journal talks to the authors of the “Web Analytics Code of Ethics” about privacy, and tracking behaviors in particular, online [WSJ]

Not totally PRIVACY related, but good information to know – “What to Do If Hackers Steal Your Online Accounts” [NY Times]