So at least this whole privacy scandal hasn't been for naught.

As a result of it, Mark Zuckerberg has gone from sharing very little of his personal Facebook content with the public to sharing a whole lot, True/Slant's Kashmir Hill has noticed. Where the public could see just one photo of the Facebook co-founder in October, strangers now have access to a cache of 290 shots, including snaps uploaded by Zuckerberg and those uploaded by people who have tagged him in their pics.

This opening may be a result of Facebook's new default settings; or could be a result of Zuckerberg trying to reverse the PR debacle of the new privacy system by opening up the content himself; or could be a combination of both. In any case, it springs one way or another from the privacy controversy. And as dogged but often frustrated chroniclers of Zuckerberg's personal side, we're thrilled. We just knew this new system would be a boon to gossips like ourselves.

We've looked at all 290 pics of Zuckerberg, here are our favorites:

With girlfriend Priscilla Chan, from her album "moments." Have you seen a sweeter thing, today? Probably not.

Aww, it's a pic Zuckerberg took of Chan from his mobile phone, around the Facebook office. He gave this one the caption, "testing mobile photo uploads on [']cilla..." Hopeless romantic, that one.

And here's Zuckerberg testing his "light saber" on 'cilla, if you know what we mean, and we think you do. (We mean an actual toy light saber, for kinky role playing. Priscilla has just informed Zuckerberg that he must "do" Han Solo, while she does Leia.) Pic by Jocelyne Takatsuno.

In fairness, this is the bear that gave Zuckerberg the chutzpah to turn down Yahoo's $1.4 billion offer. Clutch it tight, Mark. From a trip to Lake Tahoe, photographed by Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook software engineer.

Zuckerberg (right circle) with his brothers in Havard's Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity, including spurned Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (left circle). Photo by Sam Gross

"Hmmm, so if we triple the hypothetical revenues in this spreadsheet cell, our valuation goes to....:" Photo by Aaron Sittig, Facebook Design Strategy Lead.

Ain't no party like a Facebook party 'cause a Facebook party don't stop... until that guy licks the chip bowl. Photo by Skip Bronkie

Now we're not saying Zuckerberg is necessarily wasted in this "Lake Tahoe - Opening Night" vacation picture by Facebook engineering/product manager Scott Marlette. But there are an awful lot of "Lake Tahoe - Opening Night" vacation pictures in which one might reach that conclusion, is all we're saying.

Like, for example, this one, another picture that might give the naive observer the impression that Mark Zuckerberg got hammered on this "Opening Night," at Lake Tahoe, with his staff. Also by Scott Marlette. Thanks Scott!

This one also might lead the confused and bewildered to conclude that Mark Zuckerberg got drunk in Lake Tahoe on "Opening Night," pounded the beer in front of him and taunted a co-worker. Picture yet again by Scott Marlette, de-facto Valleywag staff photographer for the greater Lake Tahoe area.

Little known fact: In 2006, when it looked like Facebook's valuation might never reach eleven figures, Zuckerberg briefly considered a career in folk music. From Kevin Colleran's "random pics from my new camera, Aug. 2006."

At sister Randi's wedding last year. Now there's the nice Jewish boy you can bring home to your mother. By Kevin Colleran.

The early days: From the kitchen table at "the first Palo Alto Facebook house." Again by Sittig. Dig the preppy, Anthony Michael Hall look.

Hey hey easy there, it's called Facebook for a reason,photographer and Facebook "Engineer / Manager / Old far" Bob Trahan. OSHA does not recommend that monitors emit this level of radiation.

"And if elected student body president, I promise to restore proper security to the high school yearbook archives... the precious, precious yearbook archives... You're not recording this as video, are you Randi?"

That's because the social network has codified this new state of affairs right there into its written "Privacy Policy." A comparison of the new and old policies reveals this addition:

Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can, however, limit the ability of others to find this information through search using your search privacy settings.

Facebook users have just begun to realize this is happening. Reuters' aggressive financial columnist Felix Salmon took note of this exciting new "privacy" feature when his critics on an investor website published a list of his Facebook friends, presumably for hate-mailing. Former Gawker editor Doree Shafrir blogged this morning about how her once-hidden friends, network and fan-page subscriptions have suddenly been published.

I've now set my privacy settings so that only friends can search me [and find out you're a fan of Howard Kurtz! Oy! -Ed.]…which seems sort of counterproductive to the whole enterprise, doesn't it?

Indeed it does, and it's scant protection: Shafrir's friends are still listed to strangers on her profile page, if you can find it. There's a way to turn this off, too, according to Salmon (see update to his column), but anyone who shares a friend with you will still be able to see all your friends (I'm looking at Salmon's now, and we're not friends).

Really, as gossip bloggers, we at Gawker should be happy about all this; it certainly makes it easier to hunt down people willing to confirm gossip about their acquaintances. And it's satisfying to have our conspiracy theories confirmed — and quoted by civil libertarians at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who, along with the ACLU, have raised serious objections these "privacy" changes.

But there's something maddening about watching Facebook bumble its way into another privacy debacle, one approaching in its disastrousness the launch of the Beacon advertising/stalking system a few years back. If only Facebook's investors agreed. But then they're not exactly a pack of civil liberties advocates, now are they?

(Top pic: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, by Simon Doggett)

Facebook's 350 million+ users are being greeted by the dialog below, an "Important... Privacy Announcement" that "simplifies" and "adds" privacy controls:

But like Mark Zuckerberg's "Open Letter" last week, this is just the smiley pro-"privacy" wrapper around the real agenda, which, as Peter Kafka at All Things D wrote, is quite plainly to get you to abandon your privacy. Rival startup Twitter has taught Facebook that there's big growth in public internet sharing.

Thus — Ta Da! — these new default settings, which suggest users share their posts and information with the whole world. From Kafka (click to enlarge):

Inside Facebook's Eric Eldon got similarly liberal suggestions:

To make this scheme a bit more defensible, Facebook will now allow users to set their privacy level — i.e. to reverse the default choices — on a post-by-post basis, a feature long requested by users. Thus, Facebook will become an endless series of privacy decisions and dilemmas. It's enough to make you rush into the open arms of Twitter. Because while microblogging about your lunch might be narcissistic and pointless, it's definitely less narcissistic and pointless than deciding who should get to see the post about what you had for lunch.

Facebook: Asking you questions you don't want to have to answer about content no one cares about. Isn't social networking a joy ride?

Mayers' three-day nuptials at the San Francisco Four Seasons, where she lives, were announced via an elborate invitation, a heavy red box covered in a velvety material, as we've reported previously. That sounded about right for the fashion-conscious overachiever.

The Google VP's obsessiveness apparently extends to security, as well: The invitations indicate guests are to keep some sort of ID card on them at all times during the weekend, we're now told.

And said guests aren't sure what this means: Are these "smart" cards implanted with radio "RFID" tags? If so, guests could theoretically be tracked across a 135-foot radius with a stationary receiver. Or maybe they'll be simple credit-card-style tokens with a magnetic stripe, swiped on demand. Or maybe former cheerleader Mayer has something more festive and creative in mind. If you've got a clue, do share it with us.

Requiring that guests basically wear a tracking tag will certainly further the image of Google as Big Brother. The search giant tracks a staggering amount of personal data, and company executives have lately been clumsy in answering mounting media questions about the info-hoard. Then again, some of Mayers' guests will be fellow Google executives; perhaps having a taste of their own medicine will have a moderating effect on the data Google collects.

Speaking of which: Though Mayer is employee number 20 at Google and has great power within the company, it's not at all clear that co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be in attendance at her wedding. Mayer was not invited to Page's private-island wedding to Lucy Southworth, a source close to the event tells us, so she could hardly be expected to invite Page to her bash.

In any case, a tracking scheme will certainly help Mayer keep out the likes of Valleywag as her wedding party makes its way around the Four Seasons, even as it reinforces her rep as something of a data-hungry cyborg. No worries Marissa; we'll try not to take it out on your gift.

(Pic: Mayer, by Esther Dyson)

The generous explanation for Schmidt's statement is that he's revolutionized his thinking since 2005, when he blacklisted CNET for publishing info about him gleaned from Google searches, including salary, neighborhood, hobbies and political donations. In that case, the married CEO must not mind all the coverage of his various reputed girlfriends; it's odd he doesn't clarify what's going on with the widely-rumored extramarital dalliances, though.

Schmidt's philosophy is clear with Bartiromo in the clip below: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." The philosophy that secrets are useful mainly to indecent people is awfully convenient for Schmidt as the CEO of a company whose value proposition revolves around info-hoarding. Convenient, that is, as long as people are smart enough not to apply the "secrets suck" philosophy to their Google passwords , credit card numbers and various other secrets they need to put money in Google's pockets.

It's enough to make one pine for the more innocent Google bursting forth in the c. 1999 group picture at the top of this post, also gleaned from CNBC's special. The hair might have been sillier — dig co-founder Sergey Brin and VP Marissa Mayers' cuts, top center — but no one was yet audacious enough to argue against the very idea of a secret.

As part of his 2010 AG bid, Kelly emailed prospective supporters (see below), touting legislation that makes sex offenders register their social network identities. A similar law in New York recently revealed 2,782 sex offenders were using Facebook, some under multiple screen names. Democrat Kelly wants to uncover similar Facebook users out West, and asks people to email their legislators a message stating, "I urge you to pass e-STOP here in California to keep people safe from online predators."

Which is all well and good, but kind of begs the question: Since California already has a public sex offenders database, couldn't Facebook simply collect enough information from users to cross-reference that list? And if it doesn't do so, for privacy reasons, wouldn't executives like, say, the chief privacy officer be answerable for that apparently regrettable trade off between safety and revenue growth? Just asking!

Email from Kelly (click to enlarge):

Email Kelly suggests his supporters send (excerpt):

(Top pic: Kelly, by Esther Dyson)

That, we admit, is just our shameless, cynical speculation. Facebook wants people to share their content with everyone, like on rival hot-startup Twitter, but most people are content just sharing with their regional networks. So why not kill the regionals and push users to share with the world by default?

Paranoid? Maybe. But this conspiracy theory happens to fit snugly with what facts are known:

• Many users now restrict their content to regional networks like the city in which they live.
  
• Facebook recently introduced a feature allowing people to share their content even more widely, with everyone, Twitter style. But, frustratingly for Facebook, most people don't use this, as TechCrunch points out.
• When it kills the regional networks, Facebook will introduce new privacy "controls that we think will be better for you." Read: "We'll be making decisions of various sorts on your behalf."
  
• Zuckerberg encourages everyone to "read through all your [privacy] options and customize them for yourself." This implies you don't have to do that, if you're comfortable with Facebook's new privacy scheme and whatever default decisions the company has made.
  
• Even if you do customize your privacy settings, Facebook will "suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy." Read: If you're sharing with your regional network, we'll probably suggest you share with the world.

This wouldn't be the first time Facebook ham-fistedly pushed users into oversharing; the social network is still infamous for Beacon, the spammy advertising scheme that automatically sucked up data from outside websites, ruining engagement proposals and holiday gift surprises and eventually prompting a lawsuit. Facebook finally shut the thing off in September.

Unlike Beacon, which users could not opt out of at launch, this new "privacy" scheme will immediately be customizable by users. Zuckerberg has thus avoided a major mistake this time around. What's more, his "open letter" shows a newfound appreciation for the power of PR gestures, even softball PR gestures painfully short on actual details (those will come in the "next couple of weeks," says Zuckerberg).

But, smiley-face posturing aside, users should never forget that Facebook remains, at heart, not a community but a Silicon Valley startup, always hungry for exponential growth and new revenue streams. So be sure to review those new privacy "options," and take Facebook's recommendations with a huge grain of salt.

(Pic: Zuckerberg, by Silverisdead on Flickr)

Blogger Ben Casnocha's friend told him, "There is nowhere we are more honest than the search box. We don't lie to Google." That seems to be true, judging from the blunt queries offered up by Google's autocomplete suggestions, which are generated based on other similar and popular searches. In other words, people have asked these actual questions, niftily compiled by Slate:

The suggestions get classier if you rephrase your query to sound more edum'cated. But still disturbing:

Disturbing though they may be, these suggestions are at least anonymous. Anonymous, that is, until Google "suggests" a search to a federal agent that makes him wonder, "Who the hell asked that?" Until that inevitable day, have fun.

Google said in a blog post that it has been inundated with requests to add a "history" function to its Google Latitude, a mobile phone app that shows where your (authorized) friends on the service are located at any given moment. This would be the exact "feature" that Google intentionally disabled at launch to allay concerns about privacy, to much praise from civil libertarians. Google will add logs to your Latitude service now if you flip a switch, and it can also send you "Location Alerts" if you're especially enthusiastic about Orwellian internet services.

Why do we need this? Google's Chris Lambert explained:

I stopped at an awesome BBQ place on my way back from Lake Tahoe this summer, but I couldn't remember the name when my friend was asking about it a few months later. I pulled up my location history for that weekend, found where I was stationary on the drive home, and the restaurant name showed up in Google Maps.

I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who once said, "They who would trade liberty for BBQ soon have none, deserve neither, and end up eating Prison Loaf thanks to small-town CSI wannabes with subpeona power."

[via Gizmodo]

(Top pic by gerlos on Flickr)

You might know Google owns YouTube, GMail, GChat, Google News, Google Docs and Google Reader, but the full privacy impact probably hasn't hit you until you look at the information from all those services condensed into one place, on this dashboard thing. Oh look, it's the last person you chatted with, the last person you emailed, the last video you watched, the last news search you ran, the last Google search, the last image search, the last video search, the last document you authored and maybe what you're buying your wife for Christmas.

Here are some of my recent searches, for example, and keep in mind this is just one small part of the dashboard, which in turn is one small part of what Google knows:

Insane. And yet, nothing I didn't know about, on some logical unemotional level. There's a Google video explaining everything above, and you can find your dossier here, but be warned: looking at it could change your life.

Here's the rest of mine, not including my main Google Apps email and Docs accounts, and heavily redacted (sorry) (click to enlarge):

Matthew Tannin may have shut down his account, but Google keeps backups, and the company provided government prosecutors with "a CD-ROM disk... of Mr. Tannin's emails from November 20, 2006 through August 12, 2007," according to the New York Times. The prosecutors are trying to prove fraud in the collapse of two hedge funds, managed in part by Tannin, and have been helped along by his personal emails, one of which reads "a wave of fear set over me that the fund couldn't be run the way that I was ‘hoping'... And that it was going to subject investors to ‘blow up risk'."

Meanwhile, online tricksters reportedly protested Google's outing of the once-anonymous "Skankblogger," Rosemary Port. Lawyers have called Google "cowardly" for not fighting harder to protect Port's anonymity in a case brought by a woman targeted by Port's anonymous blog on Google's Blogger.com.

Google takes pride in its ability to retain data; Sergey Brin has an op-ed in the New York Times today holding Google servers up as more durable than the ancient Library at Alexandria. Meanwhile, every police department and district attorney's office in the country knows they can extract valuable data from the company. Google has little motive to fight much against these authorities. Not when it could be solving sexier geek problems like indexing books or launching real-time collaboration systems — and when it could potentially be minting billions on its next tech hit.

(Image via)

It turns out the guy in charge of fighting online crime was nearly conned by online criminals: Mueller told a San Francisco audience today that he once began entering his personal information into a scammer's Web form in response to what appeared a "perfectly legitimate" email from his bank, The Register reports. Then, after being asked for his password, Mueller realized he'd made a huge mistake and changed all his passwords and eventually turned to his wife, and was like, ha ha, "teachable moment."

But she replied: "It is not my teachable moment. However, it is our money. No more internet banking for you!"

The point is, stop trying to use the internet for any sort of important business, people, because if Robert Mueller can't figure this crazy thing out, who can? Other than hackers, terrorists, children, and most humans outside of U.S. banks, credit card companies and the federal government?

These heroes, known as the Facebook Five, made offensive comments about the prison boss for the Austalian state of New South Wales in a closed Facebook group, according to the AP. It's not clear how prison authorities came across the postings, but Facebook groups, even closed ones, can easily have hundreds of members. The workers, three men and two women, face possible dismissal over the messages for "unauthorized public comment" and "comment to the media without permission."

The employees argue their conduct was outside the workplace — i.e., on Facebook — and "intended" to be private. That standard would allow you to complain about your boss virtually anywhere on Facebook, save for his personal profile page. That sort of raw commentary might be hard for a supervisor to read, but that's the kind of unfiltered stuff she signed up for when she "friended" you, right?

(Image via)

"Being the big man on campus no longer means being the life of the party," the New York Times reports, citing the case of poor Florida quarterback Tim Tebow (pictured), who has had "four or five" women try to strip off their tops while posing for digital photos with him. Tebow runs, but can he hide?

Apparently not, as cellphones are now collected even at college parties, according to the Times, as a precautionary step to protect athletes against embarrassing pictures on Twitter, Facebook or even our own Deadspin, which is given a shout out in the article. In a country that's increasingly inept at manufacturing anything other than narcissistic, "reality" based media products, it's probably for the best that college students are learning the skills they'll need to eventually sell out their boss or idol online. As for the "victims," the athletes, it's good training for them too. Unless their ultimate goal is to play football for modest wages in lifetime obscurity? Didn't think so.

The Obama administration just announced a new cloud-computing initiative. It claims it merely wants to streamline $75 billion in federal IT spending. So what's with the "mind mapping" component of the plan? And why so cozy with Google?

The "mind mapping" software is listed under "productivity apps" on the cloud computing initiative's website. Glenn Beck, call your office! To paint the president as a socialist big brother, a monster computer "cloud" that centralizes sensitive government information and is deeply interested in your brain is a boon.

Especially when it is tied, however loosely, to that all-seeing corporate eye in Mountain View, California, Google Inc. Google is the leading proponent of cloud computing, in which shrink-wrapped PC software (like, say, Outlook) is replaced with Web applications (like, say, GMail). In fact, NASA Ames CIO Chris Kemp, who is in charge of NASA's cloud computing program, has quoted Google's CEO as an inspiration for it. NASA Ames is where today's federal announcement is being made, so presumably Kemp's work is now spreading.

It seems likely Google will be on hand for the announcement: NASA has announced that "top Silicon Valley information technology leaders are scheduled to attend," and, besides, adjoining Moffett Federal Airfield is where top Googlers park their private jets, per arrangement with NASA. Google cronies at private zeppelin company Airship Ventures are also allowed use of the field. Kemp, in turn, has apparently used a Google jet for NASA "meteor hunting," and heralded the release of high-resolution NASA imagery for use on moon.google.com (see 9/17 entry here). He has also hosted "VIP guests," including from the Silicon Valley tech scene, at a space shuttle launch.

This must all seem, no doubt, perfectly innocent to Kemp, who is steeped in the startup world. The 31-year-old worked as chief architect at Classmates.com before being "pushed aside" as co-founder of vacation rental broker Escapia and detouring into the public sector. But amid the increasingly paranoid partisan rancor of Washington, DC, the Obama Administration's "mind mapping" cloud computing plans and ties to Google will inevitably be re-marketed on the distinctly irrational market that is national politics.

(Top image via, second pic via)

According to the Associated Press,

The U.S. company has hired two young cyclists to ride through gardens, historical sites and other pedestrian-only areas on the device to take thousands of digital photos.

AFP reports the bikes even have lasers attached to their (pole-) heads, to assist with some sort of future 3D system; excerpt from the wire service's video is attached. Google will blur faces on request, in Europe at least, but the policy is to do so by default only for people on the street; those in the privacy of their own homes get no such consideration. Google certainly wouldn't want to admit to a zone of privacy anywhere near your computer, after all.

[via Buzznewsroom]

Whoever is seeding the restaurant gossip is being fairly specific. A source tells us that a loose-lipped Twitter staffer recently dished at a lunch that the company has allowed a federal agency to set up a tap to monitor a "firehose" of its data, including private details on users, presumably including private "direct messages," IP addresses and account information. The Feds — the NSA would seem the most logical agency —then analyze the data to mine for information they deem of interest.

Twitter, it is said, is one of only a handful of internet companies large enough for the Feds to bother setting up such monitoring.

We called and emailed Twitter's PR department and the company's director of operations, and have not yet heard back. (Update: See below.) But it's hard to imagine the microblogging company would be happy about such an arrangement. The San Francisco company's top two executives, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, live in SF and Berkeley, respectively, and show every sign of having absorbed the Bay Area's left-field, anti-establishment culture.

Of course, the men are also capitalists with a startup to get rich off. But federal monitoring looks no better from that vantage: Twitter has trouble enough running its servers without worrying about maintaining some kind of firehose tap; the company's techno-elite and Hollywood users, meanwhile, would surely lash back hard at cooperation with the NSA, a risky proposition for a young company that has yet to turn a profit.

Whether the Valley lunch chatter is accurate or not, Twitter is bound to interact more and more with law enforcement as the volume of direct messages goes up and as public Twitter streams are woven deeper into people's sometimes tumultuous lives.

The takeaway for users is even more straightforward: If the NSA or your local police department might get the wrong idea about you message, don't put it anywhere on Twitter. The only truly direct message goes from one person's mouth to another's ear. And even that can end up on the internet. (Speaking of which: If you've heard anything about this, we'd love to hear from you.)

UPDATE: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone writes:

There is absolutely no element of truth to this allegation whatsoever.

(Pic: EFF via hughelectronic)

Allison, an internet protocelebrity whose haters watch her as closely as her fans, has written publicly about sharing an apartment building with O'Donnell before, including this tweet about Rosie leaving her door open, which we picked up. The bit of trivia has also popped up in the comments sections of various blogs and newspapers.

And Allison is notoriously chatty about her neighbors' business. In one instance she posted to the Web a complaint about the sex moans coming from next door.

Still, she seems to regret Wednesday's Twitter post about the fight, which she has since deleted:

Then again, with Allison it's hard to know where sincerity ends and the posing begins. After recently losing hold of both a Bravo reality show and one of two partners at her NonSociety "lifestreaming" startup, Allison publicly stroked the thighs of Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler before leaving a nightclub with him. After someone leaked word of the encounter to Page Six, Allison's Google fame shot through the roof.

So Allison's decision to call out O'Donnell by her full name could well have been more strategic than impulsive. Another round in the tabloids, more attention for Allison and NonSociety.

Or it could, of course, be the simple reflex of a compulsive Twitterer with a famous neighbor across the hall (If it was our neighbor, in all honesty, there probably would have been way more than one post.)

Vancouver Sun managing editor Kirk LaPointe showed how you can't run from Twitter.

Former Engadget editor Ryan Block failed to alter people's assumptions about him.

All-caps boremonger John Byrne, the editor of BusinessWeek.com, made sure people wouldn't listen to his podcast by accident.

Salon.com editor Joan Walsh witnessed teabaggers in action.

eBay founder Pierre Omidyar got punked by Larry and Sergey.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.