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Some US senators are not happy about the new privacy changes and have sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg about it.

Facebook now obligates users to make publicly available certain parts of their profile that were previously private. If the user does not want to connect to a page with other users from their current town or university, the user will have that information deleted altogether from their profile.

If you read the entire letter, you can clearly see that they actually know what they're talking about. Surprising really.

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Looks like they're doing it again. This time, they've made a change where even information you've set to private will be fully visible to strangers.

Today, Facebook removed its users' ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users' profiles, "including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests" will now be transformed into "connections," meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don't want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them.

Of course, this doesn't affect me since my REAL friends already know all that stuff so I saw no reason to enter it into Facebook in the first place, but if you or someone you know has it, tell them to pull it down or put in fake data instead. Why broadcast information to strangers hoping that none of them will use it against you?

Update

It looks like Lifehacker posted an article on how to restore your privacy after the change. Check it out

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There have been stories in the past of how difficult and how impossible it is sometimes to remove information from Facebook. But if you get sick of it, you can just delete the account entirely using this technique. Tags: Facebook

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

The Library of Congress is planning to create a lasting record of all Tweets. In case you hadn't figured this out already, you have to be extra careful about what you post BEFORE it gets to the 'net.

Great summary of privacy from Bruce Schneier:

You've got a whole lot of tech CEOs proclaiming the death of privacy–especially when it comes to young people.

They're not technically sophisticated about privacy and make mistakes all the time, but that's mostly the fault of companies and Web sites that try to manipulate them for financial gain.

Hear, hear! Click here for the rest of the article.

Robotic arm giving a hi-five

The creator of the Segway has been commissioned by DARPA to create a prosthetic arm that amputee soldiers can use to eat or perform daily tasks. Of particular use to double amputees, the arm is controlled (somehow) by synapses. In other words, by your thoughts.

Personally, I think the idea of being able to replace defective or damaged body parts is awesome. Restoring sight to the blind, sound to the deaf, etc. This kind of technology goes a long way towards great things… as long as they can't start controlling our minds… that would be bad.

Be sure to check out the article and video here.