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.)

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.

In a unanimous decision today, the United States Supreme Court has held that a government worker had no right to an expectation of privacy when it came to whether or not his employer might review the content of his text messages that were sent and received on employer-provided equipment, even those messages sent while he was off-duty. In the case of City of Ontario v. Quon, the Ontario California Police Department reviewed text messages sent and received by their employee, Officer Jeff Quon, on the text pager which was provided to Quon by the Ontario PD, including messages sent while Officer Quon was off-duty. Quon objected, but the Supreme Court held that Quon had no legitimate expectation of privacy.

At last, someone has come up with a viable alternative to Facebook.  Diaspora, the love brainchild of four self-described nerds, promises to be Facebook without the privacy issues.  The four NYU students, Dan Grippi, Max Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, were as upset as anyone about the privacy pillaging juggernaut that Facebook has become and, in the time-honored tradition of student nerds, have said ‘Hell no, we’re not going to take it,” and, taking keyboards in hand, are doing something about it.

In an Internet law ruling that is not only the first of its kind, but that may have wide implications – indeed worldwide implications – for Internet law, privacy law, and Google and any other sites that host images, three Google executives have been sentenced to 6 months in prison by an Italian court, over the public posting of a video of a disabled boy with Downs syndrome being subjected to bullying by four bullies, in Turin, Italy. The three convicted Google executives are Google Privacy Director Peter Fleischer, Senior VP David Carl Drummond (formerly director of Google Italy), and George De Los Reyes, a retired Google financial executive.

It’s no secret that Facebook has an.. interesting … view of user privacy. In fact, Facebook CEO Mark Zucker recently suggested that Facebook users (should) have no expectation of privacy. Now to add insult to the complete-lack-of-privacy injury, starting a few days ago, Facebook applications now have permission to grab your email address – that is to require that you divulge your email address before you can use their application.

It’s no secret that Facebook regularly has its share of privacy issues, many of which are their own doing. Now Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has given a talk in which he says, in effect, “Our users don’t want privacy.”

We’ve received rafts of concerns about the newest Facebook Privacy Announcement and the new Facebook privacy policies – and even about Facebook’s privacy policies policies (like the policy of forcing you to revisit their privacy policies repeatedly, and requiring you to confirm what appear to be new settings or keep your “old settings” without giving you a chance to see or understand what your “old settings” were to start with).

Now this is new! If you have a Facebook account, searching for your name in Google will turn up not only a link to your Facebook page, but includes a list of your friends, as well! And that’s even if your privacy settings on Facebook are set to disallow public access, such as the “only My Networks and Friends can see my profile and personal info” settings.

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.

Holy privacy and security issue! A Palm Pre user who is also a securitygeekstud has discovered that Palm Pres (or should that be Palm Pri? Palm Prie? What is the plural of “Pre”?) are spying on Palm Pre users and on how they are using their Palm Pre, and reporting back to Palm!

A German court has ruled that an IP address is not afforded the same privacy protections that Internet users enjoy for their names and other personally identifying information, even though a user may have a static IP address which is directly linked to the user alone.