Keeping true to his word, Obama is making sure that Lobbyists who want time with administration members submit requests in writing which will be posted online. Right on.

There's been a lot of this kind of news recently.

AIG is going to do something hugely unpopular by paying out all that bailout money in executive bonuses, but sadly, it's the only option. The circle of despicable theft must be complete!

But seriously, I'm far less surprised by this news than I would be if someone in a regulatory agency had the balls to actually stop them. Really, is there anything more vile than the people who profit from other people's misery?

Bonus:Scott Adams saw this coming a mile away.

Here's another example of how someone's Facebook profile was used against them (First example here).

"If you are alleging that, as a result of an accident, you have not been able to enjoy life the same way and there is a photo taken after the accident showing you skiing or exercising … that could be relevant," the civil litigation and intellectual property lawyer said in an interview yesterday.

Well duh. If there are cases where people's personal diaries have been subpoenaed, I guarantee you an online record like Facebook is fair game.

I swear, sometimes I think Google is suffering from a serious Jeckel and Hyde complex. In the previous post I was lamenting Google's very lame privacy policies, but then this comes along.

Google apparently has a new service that lets you broadcast to your friends where you are at any time (at which point Google will plot them on a map for you). The downsides to this technology is of course that people could theoretically monitor you or get the records to use against you.

But Google is promising that the information in their Latitude service is ephemeral and will disappear after use.

What Loopt — and now Google — are asserting is this: when you tell your friends where you are, you are using a public conveyance to communicate privately. And, just as it would if it wanted to record your phone call or read your e-mail, the government needs to get a wiretap order. That's even tougher to get than a search warrant.

They've always been good about not giving up their search records without a fight, but it would be nice if they didn't store them so long in the first place.

I only just learned about Google Voice and the staggeringly awesome features it offers for free. Though I'm not a huge fan of all the gimmicks companies attach to cell phones and phone services, this one has me interested.

The only problem is that with Google's historically abysmal privacy policies, will it be safe to use? Time will tell.

Researchers have managed to make batteries that use magnetic fields to charge and discharge power without using any chemicals at all. So far, they're not very powerful, but the possibilities are endless.

For example, what if they combined RFID with this? Scary

I have no idea how I missed this, but it's great news regardless!

If you signed up with Lifelock and are unhappy with their service or guarantee or just want further info on the class action you can contact David Paris at Marks & Klein, (732)-747-7100.

I almost wish I had signed up for Lifelock so I could get involved.

Whether or not the officer in question really did use excessive force, the main point here is that the things you write about online can come back to haunt you in the most unexpected ways.

Officer Ettienne said he is now being careful to mask his identity on the Web and that he has curbed his tongue because of the acquittal. “I feel it’s partially my fault,?? he said. “It paints a picture of a person who could be overly aggressive. You put that together, it’s reasonable doubt in anybody’s mind.??

Even your "private" Facebook or Myspace account isn't so private under the force of a subpeona.

Not every service out there is as hard to get rid of as AOL, but many are close. Here's a great guide to canceling your account at many major websites such as classmates.com, facebook.com, etc.

In a direct slap across the face to the barely legal Freecreditreport.com, the FTC has released a spoof video of the pirate restaurant ad to highlight that there's only ONE place to get free credit reports and the rest are all pay services in disguise.

The original ad

The FTC version

Beware of the others,

There's always a catch,

They claim to be free,

But there are strings attached,

Brilliant!

It's so very rare that regulatory agencies actually get it right! Send this link to everyone you know and make sure they see it too.

What better way to get all your data than to offer you a job that doesn't exist?

The practice of scoping out current and potential employees online has become pervasive enough that many people (myself included) have recommended that people be far more selective about what they post online.

Well, at least one person is calling out the real issue here: that employers are looking in the first place. Her advice is for everyone to tell their employers to "butt out".

we job seekers and defenders of civil liberties should tell employers to stop snooping and stop judging our behavior outside of work. What we do, say and believe in our personal lives in most cases has no bearing on our ability to do a job, barring criminal behavior, of course.

And I agree with this. We should all stand up for the fact that many of the things we express online have little bearing on our ability to do a job, though I think we need to be realistic and still control the information we post to the best of our ability.

This was done sometime last year, but I just found it on Pop-sci.com today. It's an experiment by one of their writers to see if they could live anonymously for a week. It's an interesting read and contains some good data like this:

Data-broker Web sites sell lists of information you never thought would be for sale—records of 750,000 people who signed up for medical alert services, for example, or a list of 11,418 people, mostly men over the age of 55, who bought a particular herbal sexual-potency product in September or October. Private investigators buy phone records from pizza-delivery places, and a few years ago, data aggregator LexisNexis advertised that it, too, used pizza-delivery records to get hard-to-find phone numbers. If you want to invalidate some of the information on the lists, you could move, but you’d have to carry your own boxes—moving companies sell lists of new addresses to marketers.

And…

These companies are only minimally regulated, in part because the government itself is one of their largest clients. Contracting data-collection projects to outside companies allows the government to purchase data that would be illegal for it to collect itself.

And…

Starting in 2009, OnStar will be able to remotely deactivate a car’s accelerator, forcing it to drive at a top speed of five miles an hour—which is great if your car is stolen but not so good if someone were to hack into OnStar’s computers. Plus, systems like these include a two-way microphone and speakers that the company can activate remotely, which means they can be used for eavesdropping.

The neat thing about the article is how much they got right (most of it) and some extra information that even I didn't know (like rental car companies using secretly installed GPS to monitor if you speed or go out of your area).

As you all know, http://www.annualcreditreport.com is the ONLY legit site to order free credit reports (one per year per credit reporting company). Generally it's smart to spread out your reports so you get a year-long look at them, but for reasons I won't go into, I needed all three now.

The interesting twist is that since I have a credit freeze on my reports, I can't order them online (actually Transunion still lets you). There are several problems here. First, Transunion didn't ask for my freeze PIN before giving me access to my report and second, the other companies won't let me do a web order at ALL (they are making me mail them documentation).

Hopefully, they'll get their act together soon.

Though I tried to fill this page with useful information to help people protect themselves against fraud, abuse, etc, the most popular pages on here have so far been the ones related to the Wordpress blog software modifications I've made to allow people to search on multiple categories and such.

Well, I made an advanced version that also allows searching for tags, categories, and search terms all at the same time with controls over whether to include only some or all of the selected options. The problem is that it was big and ugly. People have been asking for a while about widgetizing the search and I hadn't planned on doing that any time soon, but things change.

Therefore, I spent the last 3 days straight doing just that and once I finish testing, you'll see a widget compatible advanced tag, term, and category search function for Wordpress!

More details pending.