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Hilarious (and mostly benign) prank/lesson on accurately setting your Facebook privacy controls.

Dropbox explains changes to their Terms of Service and their various policies and approaches to protecting user data

I guess this was inevitable.  Microsoft develops new technique to track where you move your mouse with less than 1KB of JavaScript

Today we are publishing a report of the statistical results from the Panopticlick experiment on web browser fingerprintability. The results show that the overwhelming majority of Internet users could be uniquely fingerprinted and tracked using only the configuration and version information that their browsers make available to websites. These types of system information should be regarded as identifying, in much the same way that cookies, IP addresses, and supercookies are.

Facebook copies Google+'s sharing ideas. .  

"The relevant point here is not Schmidt's thought on behavior and choice but the fact that, no matter what you choose to do or not do, your life exists in the cloud, indexed by Google, in the background of a photo album on Facebook, and across thousands of spammy directories that somehow know where you live and where you went to high school. These little bits of information exist like digital detritus. With software like PittPatt that can glean vast amounts of cloud-based data when prompted with a single photo, your digital life is becoming inseparable from your analog one. You may be able to change your name or scrub your social networking profiles to throw off the trail of digital footprints you've inadvertently scattered across the Internet, but you can't change your face. And the cloud never forgets a face. "

The apps are Color, Shopkick and IntoNow, all of which activate the microphones in users' iPhone or Android devices in order to gather contextual information that provides some benefit to the user.

As some time passes we're getting a better understanding of what's going on with the iphone and android tracking data.  This post summarizes the research done as of 24 April, 2011.