The Wall Street Journal has another story about how publishing personal info online at social-networking sites, such as Twitter or Facebook, can affect your employment or career at a small company.

These days, bad employee behavior is no longer confined to cubicle walls. Some workers are now sharing disparaging opinions and even proprietary information about their employers on social media – Web forums that in many cases can accessed by anyone, including a company’s clients, investors and competitors. Business experts say that kind of exposure could be particularly troublesome for small enterprises, though there are ways owners can cope and even turn the tables to their advantage.

“It’s much easier for a large company to distance themselves from the actions of one employee than it is for a small firm,” says Robby Slaughter, owner of Slaughter Development LLC, an Indianapolis consulting firm that specializes in workplace productivity. Read more »

The Federal Trade Commission will hold the last of its three roundtables on privacy on March 17 in Washington, D.C. The agency has released its agenda. Panels include:

Panel 1: Internet Architecture and Privacy
Moderators: Loretta Garrison and Naomi Lefkovitz, Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, FTC
Panelists:
John Henry Clippinger, Co-Director, The Law Lab, Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Jules Cohen, Director, Trustworthy Computing Group, Microsoft
Peter Eckersley, Staff Technologist, Electronic Freedom Foundation
Lucy Lynch, Director, Trust and Identity Initiatives, Internet Society
Ari Schwartz, Vice President & Chief Operating Officer, Center for Democracy and Technology
Edward W. Felten, Director, Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University
Drummond Reed, Executive Director, Information Card Foundation

Panel 2: Health Information
Moderators: Loretta Garrison and Manas Mohapatra, Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, FTC
Panelists:
Linda Avey, Founder & President, Brainstorm Research Foundation
Stanley W. Crosley, Co-Director, Indiana University Center for Strategic Health Information Provisioning
Kimberly S. Gray, Chief Privacy Officer, Americas Regions, IMS Health
Deven McGraw, Director, Health Privacy Project, Center for Democracy and Technology
Marc M. Boutin, Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer, National Health Council
Jodi Daniel, Director, Office of Policy and Planning, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Department of Health and Human Services
James Heywood, Co-founder & Chairman, PatientsLikeMe
Deborah Peel, Founder, Patient Privacy Rights

Panel 3: Addressing Sensitive Information
Moderators: Catherine Harrington-McBride and Michelle Rosenthal, Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, FTC Read more »

Business Insider questions if Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerbeg’s alleged actions in college violated privacy laws:

Mark Zuckerberg’s hacking of email accounts and user profiles in 2004 could be felonies under Federal and state law, according to privacy lawyers.

As we described last week, Mark used login data of early Facebook members to break in to the private email accounts of two Harvard Crimson editors. He also broke into the systems of competitor ConnectU and changed user profiles, also according to IMs.

Mark now oversees private data of 400 million people as the CEO of Facebook.  Questions have been raised about whether this 2004 behavior violated laws and whether users can trust the company to keep their information from being misused. [...]

Since first reporting these hacks last week, we asked Electronic Frontier Foundation’s top privacy lawyer, Kevin Bankston, about the legality of such behavior.  Bankston says it could have violated laws: Read more »

The Associated Press reports on a new security breach affecting the privacy of Swiss bank account holders.

Information on 24,000 HSBC customers with Swiss accounts has been stolen, the British bank said Thursday, potentially exposing large numbers of international clients to prosecution by tax authorities in their home countries.

A former IT employee of Swiss subsidiary HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) identified by French authorities as Herve Falciani, stole the information between late 2006 and early 2007, the bank said. The accounts, held by individuals worldwide, were all opened before October 2006 and some 9,000 have since been closed. [..]

In recent cases of data theft from banks in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, the information was offered to foreign governments seeking to track down nationals who avoided paying their taxes by hiding money in Swiss accounts.

Boston’s WBZ38 News has a story about copy machines and privacy:

“Copy machines today are just like computers,” explained Boston security expert Robert Siciliano. “They have hard drives and can store data that can be extracted.” [...]

There are massive warehouses across the country filled with hundreds if not thousands of used copiers that are up for sale. Companies are supposed to wipe the hard drives clean, but that does not always happen.

Security expert John Juntunen demonstrated how easy it is to access that information. Like any other buyer can do, Juntunen easily connected his laptop to a copy machine. Almost instantly, he is able to download or print whatever is on the hard drive. Read more »

There will be two privacy panels at SXSWWeek 2010 in Austin, Texas.

Core Conversation: Big Brother on the Big Screen: Fact/Fiction?
Saturday, March 13 at 5:00 PM / Location: 8A
Can the NSA really do that? Um, yes. Join Nicole Ozer and Kevin Bankston at the movies to take a close look at how government surveillance has caught up with the fables dreamed up for Hollywood flicks like Enemy of the State, Minority Report, The Bourne Ultimatum, and The Dark Knight
Presenters: Nicole Ozer, ACLU of Northern California; Kevin Bankston, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Panel: My Life, Take Two: The Right to Delete
Sunday, March 14 at 11:00 AM / Location: Hilton K
Most of us have incidents in our past that we’d rather leave there–but that’s getting harder to do in a world teeming with tools and devices that capture our actions and record them forever. Do we have a “right to delete” records and data about ourselves? Can we? Should we?
Panelists: Chris Conley, ACLU of Northern California; Annalee Newitz (moderator), tech journalist/blogger and editor of io9.com; Marc Davis, Chief Scientist and co-founder of Invention Arts; Andrew McLaughlin, Deputy US Chief Technology Officer at Executive Office of the President and former Head of Global Public Policy for Google; Elly Jonez, Drupal developer and lifeblogger