Facebook just bought the rights to nearly everything you do online. And it cost them only $47.5 million. Facebook’s purchase of FriendFeed, an obscure social-media platform, is potentially momentous. To understand why, we must understand FriendFeed, a start-up that is ubiquitous among techies and unknown to everybody else. It’s a sleek application that acts as…
Category: Business
More seek privacy from Google book search settlement
Concerns about Google Book Search and its potential effects on reader privacy are spreading widely in the wake of the joint action alert issued by EFF and the ACLU of Northern California. Copyright scholar Pam Samuelson recently investigated the scope of the settlement in an editorial titled “The Audacity of the Google Book Search Settlement,”…
WA private eyes get 6 months in ID theft
A Belfair couple who ran a private investigation firm have been sentenced to six months in prison and two years supervised release for using illegal methods to dig up dirt on people who were involved in court cases or litigation. Emilio and Brandy Torrella ran BNT Investigations, where workers posed as the people they were…
How to stop businesses storing SSNs indefinitely?
Over on Slashdot, The Angry Mick describes his experiences trying to get businesses to delete his SSN from their databases and to replace it with an alternative identifier. Then there was DirectTV. This company not only flatly refused to consider the suggestion, but also informed me that even if I were to discontinue service with…