Blogger Ben Casnocha's friend told him, "There is nowhere we are more honest than the search box. We don't lie to Google." That seems to be true, judging from the blunt queries offered up by Google's autocomplete suggestions, which are generated based on other similar and popular searches. In other words, people have asked these actual questions, niftily compiled by Slate:

The suggestions get classier if you rephrase your query to sound more edum'cated. But still disturbing:

Disturbing though they may be, these suggestions are at least anonymous. Anonymous, that is, until Google "suggests" a search to a federal agent that makes him wonder, "Who the hell asked that?" Until that inevitable day, have fun.

Google said in a blog post that it has been inundated with requests to add a "history" function to its Google Latitude, a mobile phone app that shows where your (authorized) friends on the service are located at any given moment. This would be the exact "feature" that Google intentionally disabled at launch to allay concerns about privacy, to much praise from civil libertarians. Google will add logs to your Latitude service now if you flip a switch, and it can also send you "Location Alerts" if you're especially enthusiastic about Orwellian internet services.

Why do we need this? Google's Chris Lambert explained:

I stopped at an awesome BBQ place on my way back from Lake Tahoe this summer, but I couldn't remember the name when my friend was asking about it a few months later. I pulled up my location history for that weekend, found where I was stationary on the drive home, and the restaurant name showed up in Google Maps.

I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who once said, "They who would trade liberty for BBQ soon have none, deserve neither, and end up eating Prison Loaf thanks to small-town CSI wannabes with subpeona power."

[via Gizmodo]

(Top pic by gerlos on Flickr)

You might know Google owns YouTube, GMail, GChat, Google News, Google Docs and Google Reader, but the full privacy impact probably hasn't hit you until you look at the information from all those services condensed into one place, on this dashboard thing. Oh look, it's the last person you chatted with, the last person you emailed, the last video you watched, the last news search you ran, the last Google search, the last image search, the last video search, the last document you authored and maybe what you're buying your wife for Christmas.

Here are some of my recent searches, for example, and keep in mind this is just one small part of the dashboard, which in turn is one small part of what Google knows:

Insane. And yet, nothing I didn't know about, on some logical unemotional level. There's a Google video explaining everything above, and you can find your dossier here, but be warned: looking at it could change your life.

Here's the rest of mine, not including my main Google Apps email and Docs accounts, and heavily redacted (sorry) (click to enlarge):

Matthew Tannin may have shut down his account, but Google keeps backups, and the company provided government prosecutors with "a CD-ROM disk... of Mr. Tannin's emails from November 20, 2006 through August 12, 2007," according to the New York Times. The prosecutors are trying to prove fraud in the collapse of two hedge funds, managed in part by Tannin, and have been helped along by his personal emails, one of which reads "a wave of fear set over me that the fund couldn't be run the way that I was ‘hoping'... And that it was going to subject investors to ‘blow up risk'."

Meanwhile, online tricksters reportedly protested Google's outing of the once-anonymous "Skankblogger," Rosemary Port. Lawyers have called Google "cowardly" for not fighting harder to protect Port's anonymity in a case brought by a woman targeted by Port's anonymous blog on Google's Blogger.com.

Google takes pride in its ability to retain data; Sergey Brin has an op-ed in the New York Times today holding Google servers up as more durable than the ancient Library at Alexandria. Meanwhile, every police department and district attorney's office in the country knows they can extract valuable data from the company. Google has little motive to fight much against these authorities. Not when it could be solving sexier geek problems like indexing books or launching real-time collaboration systems — and when it could potentially be minting billions on its next tech hit.

(Image via)

It turns out the guy in charge of fighting online crime was nearly conned by online criminals: Mueller told a San Francisco audience today that he once began entering his personal information into a scammer's Web form in response to what appeared a "perfectly legitimate" email from his bank, The Register reports. Then, after being asked for his password, Mueller realized he'd made a huge mistake and changed all his passwords and eventually turned to his wife, and was like, ha ha, "teachable moment."

But she replied: "It is not my teachable moment. However, it is our money. No more internet banking for you!"

The point is, stop trying to use the internet for any sort of important business, people, because if Robert Mueller can't figure this crazy thing out, who can? Other than hackers, terrorists, children, and most humans outside of U.S. banks, credit card companies and the federal government?

These heroes, known as the Facebook Five, made offensive comments about the prison boss for the Austalian state of New South Wales in a closed Facebook group, according to the AP. It's not clear how prison authorities came across the postings, but Facebook groups, even closed ones, can easily have hundreds of members. The workers, three men and two women, face possible dismissal over the messages for "unauthorized public comment" and "comment to the media without permission."

The employees argue their conduct was outside the workplace — i.e., on Facebook — and "intended" to be private. That standard would allow you to complain about your boss virtually anywhere on Facebook, save for his personal profile page. That sort of raw commentary might be hard for a supervisor to read, but that's the kind of unfiltered stuff she signed up for when she "friended" you, right?

(Image via)

"Being the big man on campus no longer means being the life of the party," the New York Times reports, citing the case of poor Florida quarterback Tim Tebow (pictured), who has had "four or five" women try to strip off their tops while posing for digital photos with him. Tebow runs, but can he hide?

Apparently not, as cellphones are now collected even at college parties, according to the Times, as a precautionary step to protect athletes against embarrassing pictures on Twitter, Facebook or even our own Deadspin, which is given a shout out in the article. In a country that's increasingly inept at manufacturing anything other than narcissistic, "reality" based media products, it's probably for the best that college students are learning the skills they'll need to eventually sell out their boss or idol online. As for the "victims," the athletes, it's good training for them too. Unless their ultimate goal is to play football for modest wages in lifetime obscurity? Didn't think so.

The Obama administration just announced a new cloud-computing initiative. It claims it merely wants to streamline $75 billion in federal IT spending. So what's with the "mind mapping" component of the plan? And why so cozy with Google?

The "mind mapping" software is listed under "productivity apps" on the cloud computing initiative's website. Glenn Beck, call your office! To paint the president as a socialist big brother, a monster computer "cloud" that centralizes sensitive government information and is deeply interested in your brain is a boon.

Especially when it is tied, however loosely, to that all-seeing corporate eye in Mountain View, California, Google Inc. Google is the leading proponent of cloud computing, in which shrink-wrapped PC software (like, say, Outlook) is replaced with Web applications (like, say, GMail). In fact, NASA Ames CIO Chris Kemp, who is in charge of NASA's cloud computing program, has quoted Google's CEO as an inspiration for it. NASA Ames is where today's federal announcement is being made, so presumably Kemp's work is now spreading.

It seems likely Google will be on hand for the announcement: NASA has announced that "top Silicon Valley information technology leaders are scheduled to attend," and, besides, adjoining Moffett Federal Airfield is where top Googlers park their private jets, per arrangement with NASA. Google cronies at private zeppelin company Airship Ventures are also allowed use of the field. Kemp, in turn, has apparently used a Google jet for NASA "meteor hunting," and heralded the release of high-resolution NASA imagery for use on moon.google.com (see 9/17 entry here). He has also hosted "VIP guests," including from the Silicon Valley tech scene, at a space shuttle launch.

This must all seem, no doubt, perfectly innocent to Kemp, who is steeped in the startup world. The 31-year-old worked as chief architect at Classmates.com before being "pushed aside" as co-founder of vacation rental broker Escapia and detouring into the public sector. But amid the increasingly paranoid partisan rancor of Washington, DC, the Obama Administration's "mind mapping" cloud computing plans and ties to Google will inevitably be re-marketed on the distinctly irrational market that is national politics.

(Top image via, second pic via)

According to the Associated Press,

The U.S. company has hired two young cyclists to ride through gardens, historical sites and other pedestrian-only areas on the device to take thousands of digital photos.

AFP reports the bikes even have lasers attached to their (pole-) heads, to assist with some sort of future 3D system; excerpt from the wire service's video is attached. Google will blur faces on request, in Europe at least, but the policy is to do so by default only for people on the street; those in the privacy of their own homes get no such consideration. Google certainly wouldn't want to admit to a zone of privacy anywhere near your computer, after all.

[via Buzznewsroom]

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)

Vancouver Sun managing editor Kirk LaPointe showed how you can't run from Twitter.

Former Engadget editor Ryan Block failed to alter people's assumptions about him.

All-caps boremonger John Byrne, the editor of BusinessWeek.com, made sure people wouldn't listen to his podcast by accident.

Salon.com editor Joan Walsh witnessed teabaggers in action.

eBay founder Pierre Omidyar got punked by Larry and Sergey.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

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?

Villagers in Buckinghamshire formed a "human chain" to stop one of Google's vans from taking pictures for the Street View feature of Google Maps and Google Earth. One particularly irked villager stopped the van before rousing his neighbors to join him in the street.

His beef? Thieving poors should not be allowed to ogle his valuables! Here's how he put it to the Times of London:

Mr Jacobs said: "This is an affluent area. We've already had three burglaries locally in the past six weeks. If our houses are plastered all over Google it's an invitation for more criminals to strike. I was determined to make a stand, so I called the police."

The van made a peaceful U-turn and left.

The story illuminates an important truth about privacy in the modern era: It's not so much an illusion as a precious commodity, bought above all with the time and energy the rich have (or hire) in abundance.

Unfortunately, most people can't afford nearly so much privacy as the citizens of Buckinghamshire. (One wonders how the police and driver would have responded if a similar mob had formed in a poor inner city neighborhood.) But don't let that stop you from setting up a neighborhood Google Watch group if you have the time and inclination.

In her haste to get the scoop, AllThingsD blogger Kara Swisher posted a version of Zuckerberg's memo which had a repeated paragraph. She's since eliminated the repeat, but we captured it:

Catch the differences? One says "will report," the other says "will be reporting." One uses treasurer Cipora Herman's last name, the other omits it. One says "we are fortunate," while the other uses the contracted form "we're." And one says Peter Currie will be "an advisor," while the other says only "advisor."

That's not the only oddity about the email. "Several versions I got of this memo had different punctuation in various places," Swisher notes in an update.

Why bother sending employees individual copies of a mass email with subtle changes throughout? There's only one reason to bother: Using the changes as tell-tale clues to identify whose copy got forwarded. That's what Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk did recently in an attempt to find leakers. Each of those changes can, in theory, serve as an identifier; assemble a series of unique identifiers, and it's possible to trace a particular version of an email to a particular employee.

If Zuckerberg is really wasting time on games like this, it means that he has completely failed as a leader. It's a humbling admission that he no longer enjoys his employees' trust and confidence. And it's an insult, too — that he thinks his employees aren't smart enough to figure out what he's doing. Of course they are. It's just one more reason for him to resign immediately, before he does more damage to the company he started.

It's a story so tidy, one almost doesn't want the British tabloid to bother fact-checking it. The paper's initial (and thus far only) source is a "top media lawyer" named Mark Stephens. Presumably, then, the anecdote will be confirmed as the case winds its way through the British courts.

It's worth noting that the Sun doesn't yet know so much as the name of the husband, much less posess the "Street View" image in question.

But there have been enough examples of unexpected and embarrassing Street View pictures that he point of the story stands regardless of whether it's fact or fiction: Google is happy to provide you with enough privacy — say, via GMail and GChat — to get yourself involved in some illicit scandal. Then it will happily bust you as that scandal unfolds in the real world.

(Pic: Amsterdam's red-light district on Google Street View, via The Next Corner)

UPDATE: Stephens mentioned this divorce case in a sly piece he wrote for the Times of London poking (it would seem) a bit of fun at the hubub over privacy as it related to Google Street View. After tracking the media lawyer down (via email, alas, not Google Street View) for a chat, we're confident the Sun is relaying his story correctly (in broad terms at least). We're confused, though, as to why a random blogger, "Idiot Forever," is claiming to have "duped" the Sun when he or she is clearly not the source of the paper's story. Maybe "Idiot Forever" was trying to put one over — on us. Shrug.

At a disciplinary hearing, Singh protested that he was only guilty of indiscriminate Facebook friending:

Sometimes when I logged on to my Facebook site there would be 20-odd friend requests and I just accepted them. Sometimes I didn't even check them. I realise now it might have been naïve in the job I do.

Nice try, officials said: They found photos on Facebook showing him hanging out with Tyrone Leadett, a drug-dealer Facebook friend (above, right). Their investigation also found that he'd phoned 7 of the 13 Facebook-friend criminals.

Poor Singh! If only this had happened after Facebook rolled out its latest redesign, which makes it totally impossible to find photos and friend updates and such.

Page, whose home address was accidentally revealed by a pro-privacy group last year, lives in Old Palo Alto. With homes more than a century old, it's what passes for historic in Silicon Valley, at any rate.

The new, 6,000-sq. ft. house observes all the green shibboleths: organic building materials, low-volatility paint, and so forth. (Never mind that lighting and heating such a large house will inevitably have more environmental impact than a more modest dwelling.)

Records for Santa Clara County show that 111 Waverley Oaks, a property adjoining Page's current residence at 111 Waverley Oaks, was transferred in September 2008. It was most recently assessed at a value of $3.3 million.

But the real environmental impact is on the neighbors, Palo Alto Weekly reports:

Ralph Britton, a retired electronic engineer and board member of Palo Alto Stanford Heritage, was walking the neighborhood when he noticed demolitions on four separate properties in Page's block.

"I noticed a house coming down, walked and saw another, and realized they were contiguous," Britton said. He described one house as elegant with a lot of land around it, a swimming pool in back and nice landscaping — much of which is still there. Another former home around the corner he called "imposing."

Britton's description of the property matches a satellite photo of the property available on Page's own Google Maps. Britton goes on to describe heavy construction on the block:

... neighbors are also concerned with the mess of construction, as well as possible damage to streets from heavy trucks.

"There's constant noise and confusion; when one finishes, the other starts," Britton said.

But fences are already up on the Page property, including mesh around protected trees, in preparation for construction. The work cannot begin until the city approves a permit.

A spokesman for Page told the Weekly that Page would seek a permit this week. Seems a bit late, with construction already underway. But since when have billionaires had to obey the law?

Roubini, a doomsaying economist who's as well-known for his Tribeca loft parties as his increasingly grandiose predictions of worldwide economic collapse, took a break from wooing young women on Facebook to post a few photos of a copter ride in Brazil. (He simply had to spring for a helicopter "as Sao Paulo car traffic is THE worst in the world.) Check out who he hung out with: New York Times loan shark Carlos Slim Helù, disaster-exploiting hedge fund manager John Paulson, and demise-of-empire chronicler Niall Ferguson. They know all about meltdowns, too!