Earlier this week, Google released Buzz, a social networking extension to its Gmail and Gchat services. But the biggest buzz about this new service concerned its privacy problems. Fortunately, Google showed once again that when you Demand Your dotRights and tell companies to respect your privacy, they will respond. Keep up the pressure and tell Google that Buzz still has some problems to fix!

On January 28, the Federal Trade Commission held its second "Exploring Privacy" roundtable to discuss privacy concerns raised by technology. In anticipation, we blogged about it generally, and explored two of the panel topics in detail (cloud computing and social networking).

Google and the NSA. It is hard to imagine a more potent–or frightening–combination when it comes to the collection and safety of Americans' private information.

But just such an alliance is underway. As reported by the Washington Post, Google–the world's largest search engine company with access to intimate details of our lives–is negotiating an electronic surveillance deal with the National Security Agency (NSA)–the world's largest spying network.

Reposted from ACLU National

Votes on re-authorizing key parts of the Patriot Act will happen in Congress any day now. And, once again, fear-mongering and scare tactics are being used to block genuine Patriot Act reforms.

This time, opponents of reform are seizing on the attempted Christmas Day airplane bombing to insist that we don't need to bring the Patriot Act in line with the Constitution. Some are even calling for toughening up the Patriot Act with still more freedom-stealing provisions.

Facebook is once again rolling out changes to its user interface, including new Applications and Games Dashboards that it says will "mak[e] it easier for you to find and interact with applications." And, once again, these changes affect your privacy: now other users can easily find out which applications you use, whether that's a popular game, a dating app, or

Recently I wrote about the allegedly Chinese cyber attack on Google and how it highlighted a point that the ACLU and security experts have been making for years – that creating government backdoors into our communications network for the purpose of surveillance creates security problems.

We've already blogged generally about the Federal Trade Commission's "Exploring Privacy" roundtable, and asked you to sign onto the ACLU of Northern California's petition demanding more transparency about when and why companies share our information with the government and others.