Bassett, a New York City statistician, had just finished answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to her computer to search for his Facebook page. But she couldn’t see his private profile. She turned back and asked him to hand over his login information.

Bassett refused and withdrew his application, saying he didn’t want to work for a company that would seek such personal information. But as the job market steadily improves, other job candidates are confronting the same question from prospective employers, and some of them cannot afford to say no.

Only a matter of time, really. I think services will soon emerge that parse peoples' Facebook profiles and report yes or no to employers, providing a layer of privacy abstraction to employees but still offering the filtering peace of mind to the employer. Probably a good idea for a startup, actually.

A must see. It only runs like 30 minutes; the rest is Q&A.

The widgets, which were created to make it easy to share content with friends and to help websites attract visitors, are a potentially powerful way to track Internet users. They could link users' browsing habits to their social-networking profile, which often contains their name.

For example, Facebook or Twitter know when one of their members reads an article about filing for bankruptcy on MSNBC.com or goes to a blog about depression called Fighting the Darkness, even if the user doesn't click the "Like" or "Tweet" buttons on those sites.

For this to work, a person only needs to have logged into Facebook or Twitter once in the past month. The sites will continue to collect browsing data, even if the person closes their browser or turns off their computers, until that person explicitly logs out of their Facebook or Twitter accounts, the study found.

It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena, they have an interface they have developed for US Intelligence to use. Now, is the case that Facebook is run by US Intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that US Intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure to them.

I've been saying this for years now. The Google/Facebook NSA conspiracy is ridiculous because the government can simply walk in the door, flash some paperwork, and make use of anything Google or Facebook has.

Them being involved at a creation phase or being in charge of these things would be exceedingly stupid.

The government absolutely has eyes into everything, but not because of some conspiracy; it's because the government can claim national security and gain access to anything they want.

I've long considered everything I do online--even on private sites--to be fully transparent to the government. It doesn't bother me too much because I know I'm not doing anything wrong, and I've not yet perfectly formed my security/privacy argument with regard to government.

It's a hard conversation. I know the government should have the ability to see this data, and I'm ok with that when it's done properly. The issue is that the tendency is toward misuse, and the repercussions of that moral entropy can be disastrous.