USA Today’s CyberSpeak columnist Kim Komando focuses on the issue of privacy and location-tracking services in an article. She explains the problems and she also gives tips on how to protect your privacy.

Geotagging adds GPS coordinates to your online posts or photos. You may be exposing this information without even knowing it. Geotagging is particularly popular with photos; many smartphones automatically geotag photos. [...]

Unless you have a stalker, these [location-based social-networking] services aren’t particularly dangerous on their own. You need to think about the layers of information you leave online. As you use more services, it’s easier for criminals to track you.

Let’s say you post a photo of your new house to a photo site. The photo is geotagged. You’ve linked your photo account to Facebook. And you use Foursquare or Twitter on the go; updates are sent to your Facebook account. Read more »

Earlier this week, there were reports that Germany was considering drafting a law concerning the privacy rights of employees in the workplace, as well as the rights of job applicants. Now, the Associated Press reports:

The draft law on employee data security presented by Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere on Wednesday is the government’s latest attempt to address privacy concerns about online services including social networks and Google “Street View”.

It is also a reaction to corporations checking on employee e-mails and filming sales clerks during coffee breaks — which has triggered public outrage in Germany.

De Maiziere acknowledged that some of the new regulations — which have yet to be discussed and passed by parliament — might be complicated to enact. Read more »

Der Spiegel reports on a proposed law in Germany concerning social-networking sites and job applicants — the legislation also considers the privacy rights of employees in the workplace. We’ve discussed before how data from social-networking sites (such as MySpace, Facebook or Bebo) are being used in the United States to gather evidence in criminal trials, against employees and applicants to jobs, and high school students as well as applicants to colleges and graduate schools.

Der Spiegel reports, “According to a 2009 survey commissioned by the website CareerBuilder, some 45 percent of employers use social networking sites to research job candidates. And some 35 percent of those employers had rejected candidates based on what they found there, such as inappropriate photos, insulting comments about previous employers or boasts about their drug use.” However, there is good news for social-networking site users in Germany:

According to reports in the Monday editions of the Die Welt and Süddeutsche Zeitung newspapers, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière has drafted a new law on data privacy for employees which will radically restrict the information bosses can legally collect. The draft law, which is the result of months of negotiations between the different parties in Germany’s coalition government, is set to be approved by the German cabinet on Wednesday, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Read more »

To recap: In February, the Robbins family filed a lawsuit — Robbins v. Lower Merion School District (pdf) — alleging that the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania misused the 2,300 Webcam-enabled laptops it issued to students in order to remotely peep into the students’ homes, take photographs and violate their privacy. The school district said it used the webcams only to track school-issued laptops that it thought were lost, stolen or inadvertently taken without permission.

In May, lawyers and computer experts hired by the district to investigate the case released a report (pdf) that said there was “overzealous and questionable use of technology by [Information Services] personnel without any apparent regard for privacy considerations or sufficient consultation with administrators.” Later that month, a federal judge “permanently banned the Lower Merion School District from using webcams or other intrusive technology to secretly monitor students through their school-issued laptops.” Recently, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the Lower Merion School District’s school board unanimously passed new policies “to govern the use and tracking of student laptops and other technology” to avoid a repeat of the recent controversy, which has cost the district “nearly $1 million in legal fees and expenses.”

Now, the FBI has announced that it has completed its investigation into the webcam  incident and federal officials would not be filing criminal charges. In a press release, United States Attorney Zane David Memeger said, “After a thorough review of the evidence in this matter by my office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office, the Montgomery County Detectives, and the Lower Merion Police Department, I have concluded that bringing criminal charges is not warranted in this matter.” Read more »

CBS News takes a look at the American public’s views on surveillance camera systems. I’ve discussed the privacy issues connected with such systems before, and my questions about the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of camera surveillance systems remain.  Constant surveillance treats all individuals as if they are already considered suspicious or guilty. Ubiquitous surveillance occurs in certain situations, such as prisons. Do we want people driving or walking in public to become as watched and tracked as prisoners?

CBS reports:

From the operations center of the Office of Emergency Communications in Chicago “48 Hours” correspondent Erin Moriarty reports officials keep watch over the 232 square mile urban area with a massive network of cameras, creating a virtual eye in the sky. Officials refuse to give actual figures, but some estimate the number of publicly and privately owned cameras targeting Chicago to be around 15,000. Read more »

The Wall Street Journal reports on privacy questions in Germany surrounding online services giant Google:

As companies such as Google and Facebook Inc. expand their reach, many Germans, scarred by a history of authoritarianism, say they are increasingly fearful of losing control of their personal information. With polls showing a majority of Germans opposed to having images of their homes included in Street View, which provides Internet users street-level views of public buildings and private residences, politicians have been scrambling to act, with some even calling for new legislation to curb the service.

Google has taken pains to assuage German concerns, allowing people to opt out of the service before it goes live. So far, however, such overtures seem to have failed to quell many Germans’ fears. [...]

Germany has been the flashpoint in the debate over U.S. technology companies’ handling of online data privacy. Google created a stir in May when it said it had inadvertently been collecting snippets of private data sent by consumers over wireless networks for years while compiling photos for its Street View service. Read more »