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Barnes and Noble CEO: “Borders Sold Us Your Personal Data and We’re Going to Use It”

This interesting little tidbit landed in our inbox just moments ago: Borders sold all of their customer data to Barnes and Noble, including information about your DVD and other video purchases! And, clearly, your associated email address! Or, another way to look at it is that Barnes and Noble purchased your customer data from Borders. And promptly added you to a mailing list without your consent to use your personal data from Borders, which they *also* obtained without your consent. Either way you look at it, neither of them come up smelling like roses.

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Facebook to Allow Sharing Your Address and Telephone Number with Third Parties

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.

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Who’s Watching the Watchers? Google Engineer Spies on Google Users Private Data

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.

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Sunday is Last Chance to Get Unlimited Data Plan for iPad 3G which Goes Away on Monday, June 7th

Say goodbye to our little friend, the unlimited 3G data plan for the iPad 3G + Wifi. Yes, it’s true, less than a month after rolling it out, AT and T has announced that they will be replacing the unlimited 3G data plan for iPad with a new, limited 3G data plan, known as the AT and T DataPro plan, effective Monday, June 7th. And the current $15.00 for 250MB per month plan has been reduced to 200MB per month under the new AT and T DataPlus plan. This means that if you are thinking of buying an iPad 3G, now is the time to do it, so that you can sign up for the unlimited data plan by Sunday.

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AT and T Begs iPhone Customers “Stop Using So Much Data Bandwidth” (or We’ll Penalize You)

AT and T has taken the unusual step of publicly admitting that they can’t handle the amount of data that their smartphone (mostly iPhone) using customers are using, and have indicated that they are going to try to “educate customers about what represents a megabyte of data.” And then they are going to start penalizing “heavy users.” With so many Apple iPhone complaints about lost calls, dropped calls, and poor coverage and other iPhone problems, it’s about time that they did something, although we’re not sure that cajoling, educating, and threatening users is the right ‘something’.

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Tmobile G1 Android Data Network Goes Down

Countless thousands across the country are without service this Labor Day Weekend as the Tmobile 3G and Edge data network which services the G1 Android phone went down, and remains down as of the time of this writing.

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Facebook Sued Over Privacy Concerns

A group of Facebook users has sued Facebook for violation of their privacy, and privacy law in general. The group, which includes two children under the age of thirteen, an actress, and a professional photographer, have sued Facebook in California Superior Court, alleging that Facebook’s practices violate California online privacy laws which make it illegal to reveal users’ private data for commercial gain.