Facebook is being sued over its using its ability to track Facebook users’ Internet browsing history even while they are logged out of Facebook. The Facebook lawsuit, filed in Federal court in Mississippi on October 12th against Facebook, Brooke Rutledge claims that, among other things Facebook is in direct violation of U.S. Wiretapping laws. But perhaps more to the point, it is in violation of treating its users with common decency, following them with Facebook super cookies and the like. The complaint also seeks to turn the lawsuit into a class action, so others can join the law suit.

Facebook seems to fear commitment even more than George Clooney. They have changed their look again, this time shunting all the rest of your friends’ status updates over to the right-hand margin, and featuring front and center “top stories” (status updates). Perhaps what is ‘newest’ is the “blue corners”. Facebook explains that the blue corner “marks a story we think will be interesting to you.” But more interesting is that you can, apparently, train the Facebook blue corners.

WARNING: The following article contains profanity. Using social engineering, this scam spam tries to trick you into thinking that someone is very upset with you for leaving a rude message on their wall, and demanding that you “Delete your comments from my wall.” Of course, the link to “their wall” is really a disguised link to a fake Facebook login page, designed to steal your Facebook password. That fake Facebook page is hosted at la-criniere-napierville.com/ACCEUIL-HOME/facebook.html

“Your account protection status: low” screams the alert on Facebook. “Increase protection” it offers. Is it a scam? A virus? Or is it really Facebook giving you a warning? It turns out that the warning really is from Facebook, but it’s not nearly as urgent as they would lead you to believe.

Arab spring, flash mobs, and last week’s riots in England. What two things do these have in common? Well, first, they have a people ready to be incited to action – be it for the cause of democracy, for a flash mob, or for chaos, mayhem, and lining their own pockets with ill-gotten goods. And second, social media has contributed to the lightning speed with which each of the groups coordinated and coalesced.

The Hacktivist group ‘Anonymous’, most recently best known for its role in attacking sites that withdrew services from Wikileaks after the infamous Wikileaks leak of the U.S. State Department documents, has announced that they intend to hack Facebook and take Facebook down – apparently permanently – on November 5th. (November 5th is Guy Fawkes Night (or Guy Fawkes Day, depending on your bent) in the U.K., honoring the day that, back in 1605, Guy Fawkes was caught beneath the House of Lords, guarding a cache of explosives intended to be used to assassinate King James I.)

With all the hoopla over Google+ – what with some calling it the Facebook killer, and all – it is interesting to us to note that nobody has yet stopped to question what sort of advantage Google has over Facebook by being able to data-mine all of that email that flows from Facebook to its users, via…Gmail.

Last month Social Intelligence Corp. received official approval from the Feds to monitor and search your social network status updates and other information that is publicly searchable online. So just what is Social Intelligence doing with the results of their social network search? They are providing them to the people who pay Social Intelligence Corp. for those results: prospective employers. Anything you say or post online in a public forum can and will be used against you, including remarks that can be construed as racist, photos that can be considered explicit, or anything that can be taken as evidence of illegal activity such as drug use, to name a few. Suddenly the drunk posting of a status update on Facebook from years ago can come back to haunt you and cost you that job that you really want.

Facebook announced today that it has integrated Skype into the Facebook framework, to allow users to make video calls right from Facebook. The announcement took place days after Google soft-launched the new Google social network, Google+, which also includes a video chat feature in the form of G+ Hangouts.

Earlier this year we mentioned that Google was rolling out face recognition technology that would allow someone to pull up your personal information just by taking your picture. Now Facebook has launched their own facial recognition privacy nightmare, which “uses a comparison of photos you’re tagged in to suggest that friends tag you in new photos.” In other words, when one of your Facebook friends uploads a photo, and Facebook’s software recognizes you in that image, Facebook automatically suggests that your friend tag you in the photograph. The “feature” goes by “Suggest photos of me to friends”, and is also known as “Photos: Suggest Tags”. And the kicker is, Facebook has quietly enabled this for you – it is running now! So here’s how to turn it off!

Many of you received an email from Amazon this week which invited you to enter the “Win an Kindle 3G from Amazon.com” contest in honor of Amazon Prime, and, of course, and as you should, you were suspicious and are wondering whether it’s a scam. in fact, the “Win a Free Kindle 3G Sweepstakes” is legitimate! No purchase necessary, and here is how to enter (even if you didn’t get that email). You’ll need a Facebook account, as it involves the Amazon Facebook page, and that’s where the catch comes in.

“OMG! Its unbeliveable now you can get to know who views your facebook.”. Did someone post that on your Facebook wall? If so, whatever you do, don’t click the link that says “CLICK 2 SEE YOUR STALKERS”!! Yes, it’s just another in a round of Facebook virus spams.

With the rash of Facebook spam and viruses going around (such as the “Vote for Nicole Santos” spam, and the “Please do your part in PREVENTING SPAM by VERIFYING YOUR ACCOUNT. Click VERIFY MY ACCOUNT right next to comment below to begin the verification process…” spam), it’s important that you know how to remove something that has been posted to your wall (never click on the “Remove this app” or “==VERIFY MY ACCOUNT==” links, those are links intended to trick you into infecting your machine!) Removing a post or comment from your wall is actually very easy. Here’s how to do it:

Nicole Santos is getting quite a name for herself, and deservedly so. Her name has been spammed all across Facebook, in wall posts that are full of profanities, and also almost always exhort the spammed to “Vote for Nicole Santos”. The trick, of course, is that at the bottom of the post, next to the “Comment” and “See Friendship” links, is a link to “Remove this app”. Because the language in the wall posts is so foul, one’s first instinct is to hit that link as quickly as possible – but don’t click that link because that is how the virus infects your machine. (There is also a similar virus spam going around Facebook right now that exhorts you to “Please do your part in PREVENTING SPAM by VERIFYING YOUR ACCOUNT. Click VERIFY MY ACCOUNT right next to comment below to begin the verification process”.)

Here are two things that you should never do to your Facebook friends: create a Facebook group and add them to it without asking, or tag them in one of your photos unless you have a really good reason to. Why should you never do these two things? Because it can cause your Facebook friends to have their inboxes overridden with completely irrelevant Facebook notifications that they don’t want. What sort of friend would do that to their friends?