Hailed as a rapist and stalker’s haven, “Girls Around Me” is not only a creepy app in its concept, it enables iPhone and android users to track nearby women based on their geographic location. The information is aggregated from check-ins through Facebook and Four Square, and perhaps what makes it the creepiest app, and why it is being called the “stalking app,” is because if a user of the app likes what he initially sees about the girl, he can see more information about her as pulled from her Four Square account and Facebook link, including more photos of her.

#Boycottinstagram is trending on Twitter and with good reason. Now that Facebook officially owns Instagram, they can use your pictures to sell and use however they want, royalty-free, and short of deleting your Instagram account, you have waived your rights and can’t opt out. Facebook has proven time and time again that they care little about user privacy, but now they are blatantly stating that they can use your own content for revenue, and they don’t care a lick about paying royalties.

15-year-old Texas teen Andrea Hernandez has launched a fight against the Northside Independent School District to avoid wearing the electronic tracking RFID chips embedded in her high school ID. Hernandez, from a deeply evangelical religion, believes that the ID is “the mark of the beast,” as talked about in the Book of Revelation. But even without the religious aspect, this is an important issue, and the religious nature of her objection helps to provide a more solid basis over which to object to the microchipped school I.D.

The Wickr self-destructing message app (pronounced “Wicker”) gives you complete messaging security. This is because you can set your messages to self-destruct after a certain time, assuring that your privacy is protected. Wickr works with both email and text messages, and the intention is that the self-destructing Wickr message app will also be able to be used with services like Twitter and Facebook, one day.

It’s happened to most of us at one time or another. You leave your laptop open and a family member accidentally sees an email that you’d rather they didn’t (perhaps you are planning a surprise party for them), or a friend sees an embarrassing chat in your instant messenger program, or a colleague finds that website you were looking at during your lunch hour. If only there were a way to password protect individual software programs and applications (increasingly known as simply ‘apps’ ) on your Mac or Windows PC. Well, there is!

A Facebook hoax has, yet again, monopolized Facebook status updates, as panicked users have been advised, by the hoax, to declare copyright in response to Facebook privacy changes. Of course, if simply declaring something on your Facebook status made it so, then the color of your bra strap would have cured breast cancer, Casey Anthony would have been found guilty, and a simple relationship status change from “married” to “divorced” would save thousands in lawyer fees.

Update: We have just learned that Senator Leahy has withdrawn his support for the amendments to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). He received resounding criticism from many groups and private citizens who felt that the revisions are unconstitutional and a gross invasion of privacy. In a series of tweets, below, Senator Leahy said that he did not support the bill amendments, and seems to deny that he ever did.

If you ever wanted to match the face to a name you just learned, or if you find yourself kicking yourself over missing a fabulous photo opportunity, then the tiny little Memoto clip-on camera may be just the device for you. Still in its concept phase, the device is promising to hold pubic interest, having already raised $245,000 on Kickstarter, far surpassing their goal of $50,000.

Google is going beyond Google Street View and rolling out the backpack cam operated Google Street View Trekker, a wilderness cam that offers a wilderness view of all the corners of the world that Google Street View has previously left untouched, namely woods views and forest views. The backpack cams can be carried by hikers and campers who are on foot and already headed to spots where cars and planes cannot easily go and Google is starting with the Grand Canyon.

Perhaps iOS 6’s Mapplegate was simply meant to be a great distraction from the fact that Apple is now covertly tracking users through IFA (or IDFA) tracking technology with the iOS 6 update. While Apple had disabled the tracking of iPhone users by advertisers by disallowing app developers from using the data from Apple devices through the unique serial number permanently assigned to each device, it seems that iOS 6 has brought tracking back.

Google is again blaming technical glitches for violating privacy policies and collecting personal data, this time from those using Apple’s Safari web browser. Google has agreed to pay the Federal Trade Commission $22.5 million – the largest amount that the FTC has ever fined – because they sneakily undermined the privacy settings of millions of Safari users by using computer code to trick Safari into granting Google access to user activity through cookies.

California Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a bill on Sunday that would have required a search warrant in order to obtain location-based personal information obtained through cell towers from mobile devices such as cell phones and tablets, and also GPS systems. The veto came with the message that Brown felt that information based on a user’s location is important to the processes needed by law enforcement.

On Tuesday California Governor Jerry Brown passed Senate Bill 1298, legalizing robot-controlled cars, or self-driving cars (also known as ‘self-driven cars’, ‘robotic cars’ or ‘robot cars’), with high praise from Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who says that driverless cars will be a reality within 5 years.

It appears that rumors saying that Facebook has made private messages of millions of users’ public is just that – a rumor. The alleged privacy issue began with reports from the French newspaper Metro, and it spread like wildfire from there, and it wasn’t long before Facebook and the Twitter-sphere were abuzz with the rumor.

Twitter has been ordered to turn over the deleted tweets of Occupy Wall Street protestor, Malcolm Harris, after he was charged with disorderly conduct during an Occupy protest. In a controversial move, presiding Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. demanded that Twitter turn over Harris’ records for the period of time during the incident because, Sciarrino believes, there are tweets that could be relevant to the case.