If you're a Google-horny fanperson with enthusiastic regard towards the way your existence will be cataloged on the internet, this one's for you. Google Wave is, in the words of Gizmodo:

What could best be described as a genetically modified inter-species lovespawn between Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter and AIM.

But really, is so ridiculously confusing, there's now a website devoted to voting on how confusing it actually is. Naturally, people are gonna put their lives on this thing, which Google will hold in their severs to one day hand over to the government when they ask for it. This is mildly unsettling.

Even moreso: people are now paying for the privilege to do it. Google Wave Invites, the community devoted to people sharing their invites, is now raffling off four invites. You can buy a ticket at a $1 a piece to enter in the drawing. Interestingly, the site's been down since they sent out the announcement, which you can view below. Yes, I wanted one (and still do!) to see what all this talk is about, and also, because I'm pretty sure our privacy's long doomed, anyway. Someone, somewhere, might be getting kneecapped by a man dressed in primary colors.

The funny upshot, however: some guy's making money from Wave invites, or at least trying. Wonder what Google has to say.

Whoever is seeding the restaurant gossip is being fairly specific. A source tells us that a loose-lipped Twitter staffer recently dished at a lunch that the company has allowed a federal agency to set up a tap to monitor a "firehose" of its data, including private details on users, presumably including private "direct messages," IP addresses and account information. The Feds — the NSA would seem the most logical agency —then analyze the data to mine for information they deem of interest.

Twitter, it is said, is one of only a handful of internet companies large enough for the Feds to bother setting up such monitoring.

We called and emailed Twitter's PR department and the company's director of operations, and have not yet heard back. (Update: See below.) But it's hard to imagine the microblogging company would be happy about such an arrangement. The San Francisco company's top two executives, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, live in SF and Berkeley, respectively, and show every sign of having absorbed the Bay Area's left-field, anti-establishment culture.

Of course, the men are also capitalists with a startup to get rich off. But federal monitoring looks no better from that vantage: Twitter has trouble enough running its servers without worrying about maintaining some kind of firehose tap; the company's techno-elite and Hollywood users, meanwhile, would surely lash back hard at cooperation with the NSA, a risky proposition for a young company that has yet to turn a profit.

Whether the Valley lunch chatter is accurate or not, Twitter is bound to interact more and more with law enforcement as the volume of direct messages goes up and as public Twitter streams are woven deeper into people's sometimes tumultuous lives.

The takeaway for users is even more straightforward: If the NSA or your local police department might get the wrong idea about you message, don't put it anywhere on Twitter. The only truly direct message goes from one person's mouth to another's ear. And even that can end up on the internet. (Speaking of which: If you've heard anything about this, we'd love to hear from you.)

UPDATE: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone writes:

There is absolutely no element of truth to this allegation whatsoever.

(Pic: EFF via hughelectronic)

Moreno, who grew up in Coalinga, Calif., a town of 19,000 best known as a highway stop midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, published an "Ode to Coalinga" on MySpace which described her hatred for the place in some detail. "The older I get...The more I realize how much I despise Coalinga," the 700-word blog post began. Moreno, then a student at the University of California-Berkeley, deleted it eight days after she published it.

Too late. Roger Campbell, the principal of Coalinga High School, saw the post and forwarded it to a friend, Pamela Pond, the editor of the Coalinga Record, who ran it as a letter to the editor. Moreno's family got death threats, someone shot at the family home, her father closed his business, and the Morenos moved out of town. Pond was fired for publishing the letter, according to a report by a local TV station.

Moreno sued Campbell, the Coalinga school district, and the newspaper's publisher for invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress. The court has dismissed her privacy claim — but the emotional distress case lives on. We have to ask: Shouldn't the Morenos, Campbell, Pond and the disturbed individuals who threatened the Moreno family band together to file a class-action suit against their hometown for the emotional distress they incurred from living there?

Susan Wojcicki, the Google vice president who's also the sister-in-law of cofounder Sergey Brin, announced that Google would start tracking the websites people visit, wherever Google serves ads — which is something like 90 percent of the Internet worldwide. Google will then assign "interests" to those users based on their online browsing, and serve up ads accordingly.

As Google product manager Shuman Ghosemajumder explains in the clip above, Google is making it easy to modify the interest information Google stores. You can opt out, but then the "ads will be less relevant to you." (The horror!) What Ghosemajumder, Wojcicki and the rest of the Googlers are really hoping you'll do is add or subtract interests to the list rather than opt out — and thereby give Google even more information about you.

If anyone bothers, that is. In a survey of Internet users from March 2008, 91 percent of respondents said they would make use of privacy tools if better ones were available. But they are — Google's hardly a pioneer. Yahoo announced a similar opt-out scheme last year, and less than 1 percent of users bothered to visit the ad-preferences page.

The truth is that privacy is a problem everyone likes to talk about in public, and no one actually bothers with in private. It's a handy bugaboo for activist groups, a reliable topic for pundits and journalists. A trendy thing, perhaps, to whine about in online message boards.

But is it relevant to our online lives today? In an age of oversharing, when we update Facebook with every emotion and Twitter every Web page we come across, when we blog, blog, blog it all, is Google really the biggest threat — or is it us?

And if it's us, where's the preference setting to turn it off?

The site, as described by BusinessWeek, appears to operate as a defacto blackmail racket: Your "friends" submit "hilarious" pictures of you, often filched from Facebook. If you are in a picture and want it removed, you have to become a member of the site, which costs $20 per month or $50 per year.

Best part: Your "friend" earns a kickback of $10 or $20 if his picture causes you to pay the membership fee.

It's not really worth fighting in court. A violation-of-privacy lawsuit would be prohibitively expensive. And if you're in the picture, you probably didn't take the picture, so you can't make a copyright claim (without lying, which will bring you major fines if caught).

Better to accept the inevitable: Celebrity has been so devalued and democratized that we all have to learn to play the PR games of famous people. That means flooding the market with flattering pictures and blog posts (the equivalent of magazine puff pieces); bullying hostile bloggers and scandal websites (as celebrity flacks do with tabloids and other disfavored publications); and paying the occasional bribe, in the form of anything from flirting to a free lunch to cold, hard cash (like when Michael Phelps reportedly tried to buy those bong pictures).

In August 2002, Quon and another officer exceeded a department limit of 25,000 characters per month for texting. The police chief ordered a subordinate to obtain transcripts of the officers' text messages to determine whether the pagers were being used purely for work purposes.

The provider, Arch Wireless, sent the department transcripts of the messages. The city determined that many of Quon's messages were personal, and several were sexually explicit.

The court found that Arch Wireless violated the federal Stored Communications Act, which prohibits providers from divulging the contents of any communication that is maintained on the service without a warrant.

So check to make sure your work uses and outside email contractor; then, spend all day texting dirty things to your girlfriend and sending us spiteful leaks via email. America! Freedom!

[LAT]

Specifically, they said Google's engineers would create cookies that "crumble," or self-delete. But then, after the deal went through, Google CEO Eric Schmidt publicly backtracked on this pledge. Bharat's patent is just further proof of Google's institutional, tech-obsessed indifference to privacy.

[G]ive us the ability to preempt that illegal activity where it comes through a choke point as opposed to the point where it is diffuse on the Internet.

The problem is, the iPhone is only available through AT&T, in my opinion one of the most unscrupulous telecoms around. AT&T's tactics combine Microsoft-style anti-competitive maneuvers and anti-privacy efforts á la RIAA for a chilling effect. I avoid giving AT&T any of my money; it's a personal boycott. I'd like to call for a more wide- ranging one, but that brings up an interesting question: Does a hyped gadget you really want trump any moral misgivings you might have about where it's coming from?

First, let me break down why I think AT&T isn't worthy of your hard-earned money. Back in the 1980s, the original telecom giant was broken up for being a monopoly only to cobble itself back together again years later to nearly the same form as before. (Of course, it now has competition in some businesses, but in many regions of the US it still reigns frighteningly supreme.)

Last year, it was discovered that AT&T has been secretly spying on Americans for the government. Maybe it still is. Then, just recently, it announced that it planned to spy on Internet surfers yet again, looking for pirated media files, presumably to the delight of the RIAA and MPAA. If you don't want to get spied on and want to switch ISPs, guess what? Depending on where you live, you might not have any other options. And if AT&T snoops on all data passing through its network, most US Internet users will be affected, not just AT&T customers. It runs a significant amount of the backbone infrastructure of the Internet, leaving little traffic outside its grasp.

So what we have is a company that doesn't have privacy at the top of its priority list, not to mention the anti-trust laws of this country. It's setting terrible precedents left and right, and its vast power that comes from its huge size makes it all the more unlikely to change for the better. We, as contentious, tech-savvy individuals, should go out of our way to deprive this company of money, power and influence.

However, there are thousands, maybe millions, of people out there just dying to get their hands on an iPhone, and AT&T has a lock on the device for five years.

So, Apple and iPhone fans, what's more important to you? Having the hottest device, or knowing that you are standing up to a company, that in my opinion, has no regard for the privacy and consumer choice of Americans? Is it up to us, the customers, to stand up to these practices, or should we just keep shopping and hope the regulators do their jobs?

I, for one, will be continuing my AT&T boycott for the foreseeable future. –Adam Frucci

Imagine you could have that same exact Google-like search for your e-mail or your company's documents, Word, e-mail, or Excel files.

The cheap shot would be "We call that Google Desktop," right? Except Larry E mentions "private data," a jab at Google's "all your info will be safe on our servers, honest!" technique.

Oh, grand. The man who said "Your privacy is an illusion" is now the industry's privacy hero. Am I the only one who feels like a Republican welfare mom?

Ellison Says Oracle To Fill Google Gap [Forbes]
Photo: AP

Ah, good, he gave the public the go-ahead in 2001: "The privacy you're concerned about is largely an illusion."

A bold statement for such a public figure to make, surely, and a strong temptation to pull out the Valleywag camcorder and head to Ellison's Broadway home. But he's not alone in destroying the privacy illusion. Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy has said for years, "You have no privacy. Get over it."

Eric Schmidt, take note.

Don't Make Privacy the Next Victim of Terror [BusinessWeek]
McNealy's cold feet and other tales of Sun [CNet on Builder.au]
CNET: We've been blackballed by Google [CNN Money]

San Francisco dance lounge Shine is so clued in that it boasts about its address: 1337 Mission Street. Shine leetly rigged its photobooth to post directly to Flickr. (Parent company Yahoo must be proud.) The hipster hangout runs the photos across its home page.

Not satisfied with the embarrassment of drunk dialing? Try making out with a stranger and seeing it on the Internet the next day. Go ahead, stumble into that booth. Who cares about privacy? It's 1 a.m. and you're wasted.

Photos from Shinesf [Flickr]