The Electronic Frontier Foundation, ACLU of Northern California and eight other advocacy organizations are asking Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to improve the site's privacy settings.

Four senators, including former presidential candidate John Kerry (D-Mass.) are urging colleagues on the appropriations committee to reject an attempt to thwart the Federal Communications Commission from going ahead with neutrality rules.

Blogger Zachery Kouwe, ousted from The New York Times for plagiarizing from other publications, has now been booted from financial site Dealbreaker for allegedly emailing "anonymous" commenters.

Google says that collecting personal data from unsecured wireless networks was a mistake, but not illegal. "We believe it does not violate U.S. law to collect payload data from networks that are configured to be openly accessible (i.e., not secured by encryption and thus accessible by any user's device)," Pablo Chavez, Google's director of public policy, says in a letter to Congress. "We emphasize that being lawful and being the right thing to do are two different things, and that collecting payload data was a mistake for which we are profoundly sorry."

Five years ago, former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre set off a debate about net neutrality by complaining that Google was getting a "free ride" on the telecom's pipes. Ever since, content companies like Google have largely been at odds with Internet service providers over whether neutrality laws would be a plus or minus. Today, however, Google and Microsoft have joined with a host of technology and broadband companies -- including Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon -- to form an industry coalition that will draw on experts to "develop consensus on broadband network management practices or other related technical issues that …

NetChoice, an industry coalition that includes AOL, eBay, News Corp and Yahoo, has weighed in against the draft privacy bill floated last month by Rep. Rick Boucher.

The nonprofit group Center for Democracy & Technology says that a privacy bill floated recently by Rep. Rick Boucher should be revised to include a broad set of so-called "fair information practices."

In the last seven days, two people sued Facebook for allegedly sharing users' names with advertisers in violation of its privacy policy. A third recently sued the company for disclosing his name to companies who participate in instant personalization. Yet, while these lawsuits undoubtedly pose a public relations problem for Facebook, they might not pose much of a legal one.

A blogger who reposts a newspaper article is similar to a passerby on a street who admires a stranger's car and decides to take it for a spin. So says Sherman Frederick, publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. In his recent column "Copyright theft: We're not taking it anymore," Frederick attempts to explain why he tapped the copyright enforcement outfit Righthaven to file 22 and counting lawsuits against nonprofits like the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, sports-related sites and individuals like a local real estate agent.

Does the federal Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act limit marketers' ability to send behaviorally targeted ads to users under 13? Some advocates want the Federal Trade Commission to say the answer is yes.