In response to the howls of outrage over the news that iOS4 is tracking and storing every location you visit with an iPhone or iPad, Apple has finally, more than week later, issued a statement on the matter,. In essence, they say that a bug made them do it, and they are going to fix it. Sort of.

Google has announced a controversial face recognition software to run on mobile phones. The Google face detection application will access your personal information – including your personal contact information – when someone takes your picture using the Google face recognition app.

A few months ago we wrote about the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed “Do Not Track” list and legislation. One of the biggest invaders of your privacy is cookies that track you, and that respawn after you (think you) have deleted them, or, as they are known, “Zombie Cookies” (so-called because they come back from the dead). As defined in Wikipedia, “a zombie cookie is any HTTP cookie that is recreated after deletion from backups stored outside the web browser’s dedicated cookie storage.” Variations on this theme include the Adobe Local Shared Object (LSO) cookie, and the Evercookie. There was a Zombie cookie law suit last summer, levelled against such industry giants as ABC, NBC, MTV, ESPN, MySpace, and Hulu, alleging that they were using Zombie cookies that respawned after being deleted because their backups were being stored in Flash. That technology was provided by Quantcast, who was the lead defendant in the Zombie cookie lawsuit. Not long after, the FTC announced their “Do Not Track” legislation proposal, and now Consumer Reports is asking their members to contact their Congressmen in support of the proposal.

As any jilted lover would, Sprint has rebounded, and has gotten into bed with Google voice. And, frankly, we think they make a better couple anyways. The sweet sound made by a direct connection between your Google Voice account and your cel phone is music to the ears. As mentioned earlier today, Sprint and T-Mobile USA’s courting didn’t stand a chance once AT&T cut in and swept T-Mobile off the dance floor. But Sprint had a friend with benefits up their sleeve, and it was announced today that Sprint has integrated Google Voice into their offerings.

As if it isn’t bad enough that Facebook is sharing your private phone number with all of your Facebook friends, there has been quite a stir this week over the news that Facebook is moving forward with their plans to allow third parties to access your contact information, including your address and telephone number. While Facebook denies this in the press, Facebook themselves confirmed it in a formal letter to the U.S. legislature, signed by Facebook’s VP of Global Public Policy, Marne Levine.

We’ve talked in the past about Jigsaw.com, the site that encourages people to sell them your personal contact information (you give someone your business card, they log into www.jigsaw.com and literally get paid to rat you out by selling Jigsaw your contact info). Now it turns out that they will not remove your contact information, even if you request that they do so.

Remarketing is a term you are likely to start hearing more of, with the buzz about the possiblity of a Do Not Track registry. This is both because remarketing is one of the leading uses for online tracking of consumers’ movements on the Internet and across the web, and because remarketing is one of the big reasons that Internet advertisers, Internet marketers, and their lobbying organizations oppose a Do Not Track list. Remarketing, you see, is online advertising that follows you around the web or, as we call it, stalkvertising.

Yesterday the Feds, through the Federal Trade Commission, came out in support of a request by several NGOs to create a “Do Not Track” registry, similar to the current “Do Not Call” and “Do Not Send Junk Mail” registries, only in this case the tracking referred to in “Do Not Track” is the online tracking of Internet users across the web, tracking the websites they visit with cookies and other tracking technologies, in much the way that Facebook and their partners are currently tracking people. Among other things, this tracking allows them to have their ads follow you around the web in a practice known as ‘remarketing’ or ‘re-marketing’.

In case you have been missing having to tear your hair out over Facebook’s privacy settings and policies, fear not, because with Facebook’s new “Instant Personalization” setting, you can tear away. Six months ago we reported on Facebook’s then-new ‘open graph’ with “social plugins”, or ‘social graph’, that followed you around to sites like Pandora and Yelp. This appears to have evolved into, or spawned, Facebook’s “Instant Personalization” where, explains Facebook, the goal is “to give you a great social and personalized experience with every application and website you use.”

Did you know that Facebook is taking your telephone number, and publishing your phone number to all of your friends in a handy dandy online Facebook phonebook? And, we don’t mean that they are ‘going to’ do this – we mean that they are doing it right now. That’s right, as we speak, Facebook is publishing your telephone number in a Facebook online phone directory for all of your Facebook friends, in a Facebook phone book available in their account (with your phone number).

If you think that because your Facebook or Twitter profile is set to “private” that it means that you can control who will see what you post, think again. In fact, even if you delete what you have posted – in your private account – you can still be forced to let others see it, even after you’ve deleted it. That’s the Court ruling in a recent case involving plaintiff Kathleen Romano, who may have deleted postings, made to her private Facebook and MySpace accounts, which would be beneficial to the defendant, the Steelcase chair company.

More information is coming to light about the situation with Google and David Barksdale, a Google engineer who used his access to the massive stores of data that Google has gathered about its own users to spy on the private lives (and data) of several Google users, who also happened to be minors. That’s right – Google employee David Barksdale was spying on children, even cyberbullying them, using the access that his position with Google afforded him to look at the private information of children. What’s more, it was going on for months.

There is a meme going around this week, concerning Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and how he supposedly said that concerns over Facebook privacy were “overblown”. In fact, nearly 1,000 sites, including the Telegraph, the Latest Business Report, and SFGate, are reporting that, and we quote, “Facebook privacy concerns overblown, suggests Mark Zuckerberg.” However, in the actual interview on which these sites are reporting – an interview that Zuckerberg did with the New Yorker’s Jose Antonio Vargas – Zuckerberg never actually says that the concerns are overblown – in fact he doesn’t use the term “overblown” at all. Good thing too, because we just discovered that with a single click, Facebook is now revealing all of the applications that you use to your friends, and vice versa. (See screen shot below.)

When you’re going through the security gates at an airport, you’re most likely resigned to the fact that your bag will be searched, regardless of whether there is a reason to do so.   But what about your computer, laptop, or cell phone, with the overwhelming amount of personal information it contains – do you expect that to be searched?  You should, as Lisa Wayne found out the hard way when her laptop was whisked away and subjected to a half-hour search.  It turns out this is fairly routine.  Now a law suit has been filed by Wayne and others to out a halt to this practice (some would say ‘abuse’) by the TSA and Department of Homeland Security (DHS). 

The announcement is imminent: Facebook is about to launch its new Facebook Places service. Positioned as a competitor to the increasingly popular FourSquare, and the slightly less popular Loopt and others, Facebook Places is another of the location based social media services, also known as geosocial networking. Put briefly, it is a service that allows you to “check in” when you arrive somewhere, letting everyone who follows you know where you are (and, often, what you think of where you are). Other services that offer some variation of geosocial networking include BrightKite, Google Latitude, Gowalla, Socialight, Hotlist, Scvngr, Fire Eagle, and Gbanga.