Jury Selection Turns to Facebook, Blogs, Data

They vet candidates based on their likes and dislikes online

(NEWSER) - Here's the latest way Facebook is changing life as we know it: Lawyers snooping for extra information on potential jurors have been looking them up on the site, the Wall Street Journal reports. "It's a waterfall of information, compared to the pinhole view you used to get," says one lawyer, who, while defending a priest on sex abuse charges, rooted around candidates' pages to get a sense of how devout they were. More»

Twitter-esque feed makes site jumbled, members complain

(NEWSER) - The latest changes to Facebook are barely a week old and are already prompting the ire of users, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Updates from friends now appear on the homepage in a real-time, Twitter-esque feed, which users complain crowds out more important messages, like friend requests. A user group, "One million against the new Facebook look," already has 254,512 members. More»

Maryland may ban practice

(NEWSER) - Some employers and colleges have found an ingenious way around Facebook's pesky privacy settings: Simply demand that applicants or students friend you, give you a tour of their account, or even divulge their usernames and passwords. MSNBC reports on a number of places instituting the troubling practices:

• At Maryland's Department of Corrections, job applicants are asked to log in to their account and allow an interviewer to watch as they click through their photos and posts. The Department of Corrections used to ask for username and password outright, but stopped after an ACLU complaint last year.
• Colleges are requiring student athletes to "friend" a coach or school official so that their Facebook posts can be monitored. If they refuse, they don't play. "Each team must identify at least one coach or administrator who is responsible for having access to and regularly monitoring the content of team members’ social networking sites and postings," reads the University of North Carolina handbook.
• Though social media monitoring seems to take place mostly with student athletes, non-athlete college applicants have reported to one lawyer that they were asked for their login information during interviews.

Collusion plug-in enables writer to spot her Internet trackers

(NEWSER) - Facebook and Google are tracking you. Your cell phone is tracking you. Your cell phone images are being uploaded without your knowledge. And that's not all, Veronique Greenwood writes in Discover : Many sites you visit are amassing information about you and selling it to advertisers. Inspired by an article in the Atlantic this week, Greenwood downloaded a Mozilla plug-in called Collusion that allowed her to track everyone who was tracking her. "The feeling of navel-gazing fascination ... morphed into a pretty deep frustration," she writes. More»

Security experts applaud opt-in requirement

(NEWSER) - Google has quietly launched a facial recognition service for Google+, but unlike Facebook's more intrusive photo ID feature , Google is earning praise from privacy experts for keeping Find My Face an opt-in feature, reports eWeek . Like Facebook's Tag Suggestions, which launched about a year ago, Find My Face examines photos on Google+ and tries to identify the people in them. "Google is not interested in making the same mistakes Facebook made," says an analyst. More»