The New York Times’ Gadgetwise blog has a post about privacy and social networking site Facebook. (You can read more about Facebook and privacy in the archives.)

Ads on Facebook that inappropriately used members’ profile pictures set off a mini-firestorm online this week –- and got lots of people talking about how to avoid unwittingly becoming a shill for products on Facebook.

Attention on the issue was brought about with an outraged post on AOL’s Download Squad blog about a man who, while using a third-party app, saw an ad for a dating site that, to his surprise, was dressed up with his wife’s picture. No, she wasn’t looking for a lover. Her picture had been usurped by an ad network in the employ of a third-party application developer, which she believes was a quiz app. [...] Read more »

Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, has an interesting op-ed on ABC News, “Do Device-Tracking Devices Really Enhance Our Lives?” (Here’s a previous op-ed by Harris about searches conducted by Customs and Border Protection. Read more about location privacy before.)

Today, millions of Americans willingly carry location devices with them everywhere. Everyday devices like cell phones and global positioning systems (GPS) make it easy for the government — as well as technology providers and advertisers — to track your real-time location or put together a full record of your whereabouts over time.

Location-aware devices provide many benefits to your safety, security and overall convenience. Location-enabled phones improve response time to 911 emergencies and built-in vehicle navigation systems, such as those from OnStar, can send the car’s GPS coordinates to emergency personnel. [...]

But for all its benefits, there is growing concern about just what is happening to the increasing amount of location information being collected by a variety of entities. Read more »

At Slate, Farhad Manjoo explains how to strengthen your passwords and better protect your privacy. Why would want to take the time to create difficult-to-guess passwords?

Do you use the same or similar passwords for several different important sites? If you don’t, pat yourself on the back; if you do, you’re not alone — one recent survey found that half of people online use the same password for all the sites they visit. Do you change your passwords often? Probably not; more than 90 percent don’t. If one of your accounts falls to a hacker, will he find enough to get into your other accounts? For a scare, try this: Search your e-mail for some of your own passwords. You’ll probably find a lot of them, either because you’ve e-mailed them to yourself or because some Web sites send along your password when you register or when you tell them you’ve forgotten it.

Now that you’re wary of easy-to-guess passwords, how do you create strong ones? Read more »

Conservative Member of Parliament for Haltemprice and Howden David Davis has written an op-ed in the Times about privacy and health data.

When I read in the pages of this newspaper this month that the Conservative Party was planning to transfer people’s health data to Google, my heart sank. The policy described was so naive I could only hope that it was an unapproved kite-flying exercise by a young researcher in Conservative HQ. If not, what was proposed was both dangerous in its own right, and hazardous to the public acceptability of necessary reforms to the state’s handling of our private information.

There are powerful arguments for people owning their own information and having rights to control it. There are massive weaknesses in the NHS’s bloated central database and there are benefits from using the private sector. But there are also enormous risks, so we are still a long step from being able to give personal data to any company, let alone Google. [...] Read more »

CNet reports on a letter from (pdf) the ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Samuelson Law Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley Law to Google concerning privacy in its Book Search service. The groups said:

Under its current design, Google Book Search keeps track of what books readers search for and browse, what books they read, and even what they “write” down in the margins. Given the long and troubling history of government and third party efforts to compel libraries and booksellers to turn over records about readers, it is essential that Google Books incorporate strong privacy protections in both the architecture and policies of Google Book Search. Without these, Google Books could become a one-stop shop for government and civil litigant fishing expeditions into the private lives of Americans. Read more »

The Washington Post’s Brian Krebs reports on a new company that sells the service of retrieving individuals’ stolen data.

A former cyber cop in the United Kingdom is heading up a new online portal that claims to offer a searchable database of about 120 million consumer records that have been phished, hacked or otherwise stolen by computer crooks. Visitors who search for their information and find a match can verify which data were stolen — for a £10 ($16.50) fee.

Colin Holder, a retired detective sergeant with the Metropolitan Police, said the idea for lucidintelligence.com became obvious shortly after he resigned from the U.K. fraud squad in 2004. [...] Read more »