The good news is that libraries can have Facebook pages again. Many used to, and then were evicted when Facebook decided only individuals could apply. (Whether you can run apps that lead people away from Facebook – say, into your catalog – is another matter . . .) The bad news is that Facebook’s new [...]

Scott Carlson has an interesting piece in the Chronicle – “On the Record, All the Time” – about “lifelogging,” making a digital record of your life day-to-day. Carlson thinks back to Vannevar Bush’s famous Memex, a method of indexing information by trails of personal associations. He mulls over the implications for learning and memory. Could [...]

The Wall Street Journal (free) reports that students are “outraged” over two new features in Facebook called News Feed and Mini Feed. The features “track users’ actions on the site and then keep all of their friends apprised of those developments.” Students are angered that information that they thought was private became public overnight. This [...]

The Department of Justice has asked for and received information on the kinds of searches people are doing from Yahoo, Microsoft, and America Online. No, this is not in the name of national security, it’s so the government can do research to make a better case for the failed Child Online Protection Act. (!) Google [...]

Privacy is an inherently complex and challenging topic to get a handle on made even more complicated by the almost daily changes in technology, legislation, and government activity that surround the issue. (It was recently revealed that the government is now opening private mail.) Adding to the confusion is trying to understand the extent to [...]