Whew! It has been quite a week, hasn’t it? In case you were out in the garden, or moving, or in a cave somewhere…

You probably know that the IRS “scandal” is really no scandal at all! But here are things maybe you didn’t know (I didn’t):

IRS Sent Same Letter to Democrats that Fed Tea Party Row

501(c)(4) certification is voluntary!

The IRS doesn’t require so-called 501(c)(4) organizations to apply for tax-exempt status. If anyone wants to start a social welfare group, they can just do it, then submit the corresponding tax return (form 990) at the end of the year. To be sure, the IRS certainly allows groups to apply for tax-exempt status if they want to make their status official. But the application is completely voluntary, making it a strange basis for an alleged witch hunt.

And from the Inspector General’s Report (PDF)

… approximately one-third of the applications identified for processing by the team of specialists included Tea Party, Patriots, or 9/12 in their names, while the remainder did not.

Seems that the National Mortgage Settlement still allows banks to steal homes. David Dayen gives us the details.

The White House released the Benghazi, Benghazi!! BENGHAZI! (h/t Charlie Pierce) emails, and they’re pretty much a nothingburger. And did you know that 39% of voters don’t know where Benghazi is? (PDF)

One interesting thing about the voters who think Benghazi is the biggest political scandal
in American history is that 39% of them don’t actually know where it is. 10% think it’s in
Egypt, 9% in Iran, 6% in Cuba, 5% in Syria, 4% in Iraq, and 1% each in North Korea and
Liberia with 4% not willing to venture a guess.

Smugglers are bringing buckets of KFC chicken through the Gaza tunnels. I’ve always liked KFC chicken, but not THAT much.

Oh, and the debt crisis? Um, never mind.

If the current laws that govern federal taxes and spending do not change, the budget deficit will shrink this year to $642 billion, CBO estimates, the smallest shortfall since 2008.

While all this is happening, we also have tornadoes in north Texas, and wildfires in SoCal and Wisconsin! Never a dull moment!

Late update: Christy Hardin Smith is going to have chemo for her breast cancer.

Here’s a collection of stuff I found on the Internet for your Friday enjoyment (some silly, some not at all silly).

Surprising new find in the Amazon! A caterpillar that looks just like Donald Trump! It’s actually a flannel moth caterpillar, and pretty rare. (Check out some of the other items on that page’s right sidebar, too.)

I am not a researcher, nor a student writing a paper, so Wikipedia is usually just fine for my “look it up” needs. But this bit of backstage insight is amusing. Seems that editing revenge wars go on behind the scenes! Who knew?

Anyone up for a ride in Google’s driverless car?

According to a new poll (PDF), nearly a third of registered voters think armed rebellion might be needed in the next few years “to protect our liberties.”

Eighteen percent of Democrats said an armed revolt “might be necessary,” as compared to 27 percent of independents and 44 percent of Republicans.

This comes on the heels of the “discovery” that the DHS is buying up ammunition to curb Americans’ access to bullets. Just another nutty conspiracy theory, but there’s actually a GAO investigation underway. This topic has lit up all of the right wing news sites. I won’t link to any of them, so use teh Google if you want to follow their version of the story.

On the other hand, buying up bullets to keep them out of the hands of idiots may not be such a bad idea. Why on earth would anyone give a 22-caliber rifle to a 5-year-old kid? The company’s slogan? My First Rifle. The result is sadly predictable; a two year old child is dead. [As of 7:00 a.m. EDT, the Crickett.com website, home of "My First Rifle," now displays a Red Hat Linux Enterprise Test page. I wonder if they've simply taken their entire site down in reaction to the furor over giving a gun to a little kid? Or maybe Anonymous strikes again?]

…the boy received the rifle made for youths last year and is used to shooting it…the gun was kept in a corner and the family didn’t realize a shell was left inside it.

Charlie Pierce weighs in on this one.

A rifle, specially made for children. Think about it. Some sales rep at a gun manufacturer pipes up at a sales meeting, “Hey, maybe there’s a market for kiddie guns! No, I mean real guns. With bullets!” Everybody cheers and the guy gets a raise, and nobody stops for a second and says, “You know, we don’t trust our five-year olds with matches. Maybe guns should wait until, I dunno, middle school.”

Are you one of the 13 million Facebook users who have never adjusted their privacy settings?

Finally, an update on Christy Hardin Smith, a little good news.

That’s enough to chew on for today! Let’s chat! How was your week? Seen anything good on the toobz?

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Is NYC ready for Mayor Anthony Weiner? He’s all over the teevee these days.

The Retirement Gamble is Frontline’s latest program about Wall Street. Yves Smith (Naked Capitalism) says that as harsh as the program is, it understates how bad the risks are.

The latest report, The Retirement Gamble, focuses on the scams in the retirement industry, the retail brokers and asset managers who sell products to 401 (k)s and other tax exempt plans. Anyone who knows this arena will find that the report covers familiar terrain. But the appalling fact remains that ordinary Americans who don’t have the time or interest to be full time investors but want to take prudent steps to prepare for retirement are systematically fleeced by the industry. And due to the time limits and complexity of the terrain, the program can hit only on some important issues.

In The Nation, Jeremy Scahill explains that liberal support allowed Obama to expand Bush’s interrogation program.

A conservative think tank in Pennsylvania is going after public sector unions — just like in Wisconsin. Quelle surprise!

The U.S. is giving a big secret push to Internet surveillance.

Senior Obama administration officials have secretly authorized the interception of communications carried on portions of networks operated by AT&T and other Internet service providers, a practice that might otherwise be illegal under federal wiretapping laws.

Author Stephen King and his wife, author Tabitha King, have made a five-figure donation to a Maine gun control group. King, a gun owner, has an essay in the Bangor Daily News explaining his views on gun control.

In the wake of Sandy Hook, I wrote an essay called “Guns,” and published it as a Kindle Single — an e-book, in other words — because I wanted to be a part of the discussion before the whole subject slipped from the consciousness (and consciences) of the American people. It has a way of doing that, you know; the National Rifle Association counts on it.

What I asked for in that piece — what I almost begged for — was that we Americans find some middle ground on the subject of heavy-duty firearms.

King donated his share of the proceeds from the Kindle Single to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

In Mother Jones, Kevin Drum writes that the real problem with Obamacare is that unlike other big laws, this one’s flaws may not be corrected because of rabid Republican opposition to the law.

But what normally happens is that it gets tweaked over time. Sometimes this is done via agency rules, other times via minor amendments in Congress. It’s routine. But Obamacare has become such a political bomb that it’s not clear that Congress will be willing to fix the minor problems that crop up over time. There’s simply too big a contingent of Republicans who are eager to see Obamacare fail and are actively delighted whenever a problem crops up. This has the potential to be a problem that no other big law has ever had to face.

Finally, Salon has an interesting review of the changing facts in the Boston investigation. A commenter at Charlie Pierce’s Esquire blog, whom I won’t credit by name because I can’t ask his permission, sums it up pretty well.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the Tsarnaev brothers didn’t have any kind of plan for what to do after they put those backpacks down and walked away. They clearly weren’t interested in sticking around and martyring themselves. No urgency to get out of town. No plan or place to lay low. No logistics in place to carry out further attacks. Everything they did after placing those backpacks on the ground and walking away would qualify for a terrorist blooper reel if it weren’t for the very real bloody trail they left in their wake.

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I don’t know about you, but I am ready to put aside, at least for today, the sorrowful, scary, angry events of this week, and focus, however briefly, on things that should make us hopeful. Not necessarily lighthearted, but these at least are more positive and uplifting.

Charlie Pierce’s daughter, who seems to have inherited both of her parents’ talent for writing, has a guest post, We All Run Together, about how she’ll remember the Boston bombings.

These Soldiers Did the Boston Marathon, Wearing 40-Pound Packs. Then They Helped Save Lives.

In 1969, Vietnam veteran Ron Ridenhour wrote a letter to Congress and the Pentagon describing the horrific events at My Lai – the infamous massacre of the Vietnam War – bringing the scandal to the attention of the American public and the world. The annual Ridenhour Prizes recognize those who persevere in acts of truth-telling that protect the public interest, promote social justice or illuminate a more just vision of society.

The annual Ridenhour Prizes — awarded by the Nation Institute and Fertel Foundation — celebrate courageous individuals who spoke out even when the forces arrayed against them were large, powerful or questioned their motives and patriotism. … They’ve spoken out about global warming, illegal immigration, the FBI’s crackdown on student radicals in the 1960s and sexual assault in the military. They follow in the footsteps of earlier recipients who have come forward at great personal risk to expose the lies of government and corporations, to reveal unreported truths, to rally others on behalf of transparency, and to call out corruption.

This year’s winners:

• Courage Prize: Climate Change Scientist James Hansen
• Prize for Truth Telling: Immigration Activist Jose Antonio Vargas
• Book Prize: Author Seth Rosenfeld (“Subversives”)
• Documentary Film Prize: The Invisible War

A woman with a generous heart and a bright idea is behind Random Acts of Pizza to bring food to the Boston Marathon survivors and those assisting.

This French commercial about The Future of Paper in a digital world is hilarious!

Please send thoughts of concern and healing to Christy Hardin Smith, who undergoes breast cancer surgery today…and read her Renewal post. She personifies having a positive outlook, while facing a very uncertain time in her life.

Finally, seen on a friend’s car decal:
Wag more, bark less!
You don’t have to be a dog to live by those words. (I wish my neighbor’s dog could read that decal — and bark less!!)

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The effects of the sequestration agreement that took effect March 1 are now beginning to be felt in many ways.

Sequestration was supposed to be a poison pill — $85 billion in automatic, across-the-board cuts in discretionary federal spending so unpalatable to both Democrats and Republicans that they would be forced to negotiate a “grand bargain” budget agreement. But that didn’t break the political deadlock, and the ax fell when the March 1 deadline passed, leading to deep cuts in military spending and layoffs or temporary furloughs for federal workers. We’re now nearly 6 weeks into sequestration, and they’re still arguing.

For politicians and pundits, and probably most who get their information from the mainstream media, sequestration means reduced military spending, cuts in healthcare, longer wait times at the airport, curtailed National Parks services, even the end of White House tours and the annual Easter egg hunt. Eeek! No more Blue Angels flyovers! But those cuts don’t affect the thousands of Americans living in subsidized housing or on the streets. When the federal government seized part of the funding of numerous important public programs, subsidized housing was one of them.

Sequestration Could Deny Rental Assistance to 140,000 Low-Income Families
Cuts Come at Time of Rising Need for Housing Assistance and Will Exacerbate Homelessness 

Sequestration will cut more than $2 billion in 2013 from housing assistance and community-development programs administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Cuts in housing vouchers and homeless assistance will have the largest impact on low-income families, sequestration will also contribute to further losses of public housing, impede the development of affordable housing for low-income seniors and people with disabilities, cause more low-income children to be exposed to lead-based paint in older rental housing, and cut counseling services for families at risk of foreclosure.

The Housing Choice Voucher program helps 2.2 million low-income households rent housing at an affordable cost. These households have annual incomes of about $12,500 — well below the poverty line of about $18,000 for a family of three. About half of these households are headed by seniors or people with disabilities; most of the rest are families with children. Because of limited funds for the program, only one quarter of the eligible households receives a housing voucher or some other type of federal rental assistance. There are long waiting lists for assistance in nearly every part of the country.

Housing vouchers are essential for preventing homelessness, and for helping families in emergency shelters or other temporary housing move into more permanent stable housing. Often communities prioritize homeless individuals and families for receipt of these vouchers. But many housing agencies now are “shelving” vouchers — not reissuing vouchers to families on the waiting list when other families leave the program. As agencies shelve vouchers because of sequestration’s cuts, the number of vouchers available to families that are homeless or at imminent risk of homelessness will shrink dramatically. This lengthens the amount of time that families remain homeless and causes other homeless families to be turned away from emergency shelters because they are full. Some agencies also are withdrawing vouchers from families that have recently received them but are still searching for a suitable apartment, and thus have not yet begun to use them. (Agencies can shelve or withdraw vouchers without notice to, or permission from, HUD.)

In San Francisco, Bay Area housing subsidies suffer from sequestration. The Santa Clara County Housing Authority, for instance, has lost $21 million in funding and desperately is searching for ways to avoid the worst-case scenario — pulling vouchers from some of the 17,000 households it serves. That would be devastating with the sky-high cost of Bay Area rental housing.

In Los Angeles, HACLA, the city’s housing authority, is poised to notify 24,000 of its 45,000 voucher holders next week that they may have to pay $100-$200 more toward their rent each month. The increase — which is more than 5 percent — will not kick in for everyone at once. Voucher holders will be hit with the new rates when they recertify their eligibility for the program.

The Bowles-Simpson commission and some other major bipartisan groups that have examined the nation’s long-term fiscal challenges have espoused the principle that deficit-reduction efforts should not increase poverty or exacerbate hardship for vulnerable Americans. This year’s sequestration violates this principle, forcing deep and indiscriminate cuts in non-defense discretionary programs. Approximately one-quarter of non-defense discretionary funding supports programs targeted on low-income families and individuals, including housing assistance. Under the tight spending caps established by the Budget Control Act, non-defense discretionary funding will fall by roughly $900 billion from 2012 to 2021 (relative to its 2010 levels, adjusted for inflation), reaching its lowest level on record as a share of GDP.

Sequestration deepens these cuts. If Congress fails to reverse them, low-income families will experience a significant loss of rental assistance. More individuals and families will likely experience lengthy periods of housing instability and homelessness, compromising their children’s chances to develop into healthy and productive adults. Congress should reverse sequestration for 2013 and future years and pursue alternative deficit reduction measures that, among other things, will protect low-income individuals and families. But don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

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This post, edited slightly, is reprinted with permission from “Reflections” by Rev. Dr. Kathy Hurt, Senior Minister of Birmingham Unitarian Church in Bloomfield Hills, MI, where I was a member during much of the 1990s. This essay seems to be an appropriate reflection for the day after Easter, given the recent turmoil at FDL.

Samuel Wells, currently the Dean of the Chapel at Duke Divinity School, argued in a recent article that the single most important theological term is the term “with.” Not heaven or hell, not God or sin, not salvation or eschatology or revelation, not any of the weighty words that have commanded theological attention since the beginning of time. But instead…with.

With is a small, ordinary word that can carry a lot of significance when one considers it from a spiritual perspective. If you can agree with Wells’ argument, then you might conclude that all faiths spend far too much time and energy debating the wrong ideas, and are much too concerned with matters that ultimately have less importance for us.

Who cares what happens after death? What difference does it make what we believe or do not believe about God? Why ask someone if he or she has been born again? If with is the centerpiece of our spirituality—the cornerstone of all we believe and do—then those other fiercely held positions mostly disappear, and the focus shifts to the quality and conduct of our relationships with others.

The word “with” is a relational term. But viewing it as a theological term, Wells makes theology concerned about how we live in community, how we treat one another, how we navigate our interactions, how we understand our connections to all life. A spirituality that is based on with challenges us to consider who or how we love, who and what we care for, what and how we do for others. It does not spend much time calling for us to figure out beliefs and opinions, political views and stances on issues, but instead keeps turning our attention back, again and again, to what we just said to that person, how we just treated a family member, a stranger, a co-worker (or fellow blogger), when we just passed judgment on one person, when we just ignored another.

Can it be that after all the time religious leaders have spent wading through hefty theological tomes, studying all sorts of treatises about heaven and hell, God and sin, salvation and eschatology and revelation, that it all comes down to a little word with a lifetime of meaning, the word with?

The possibility is both liberating and daunting: what might each of us discover about our priorities if we begin to see them through the lens of with, to measure them in terms of their effect on everything and everyone that we are in relationship with?

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I drove to Indianapolis last weekend, a very boring drive through lots of farmland, and enroute became more aware than usual of touching, whimsical, or downright amusing things I saw along the way. So here are a few, and I’d bet that everyone reading this can think of similar item(s) to share for our Friday enjoyment.

I saw a local business with “Logan Nose On” on their sign. Those are all over town this time of year, but I hadn’t dug more deeply into the meaning of “nose on.” The Logan Center, a South Bend organization that provides resources and opportunities for people with disabilities, began an annual event in 1988 selling green foam noses to raise money and awareness. Known as the Logan Nose-on, the fund drive sells these green noses (and other paraphernalia) and also hosts a luncheon and has other related activities. Yard signs that are a big solid green circle with no other lettering, representing a green nose, sprout here like spring flowers in March, and it’s for a very good cause.

Just outside of town is a billboard showing a physician in traditional doctor’s garb, with a swaddled newborn in each arm, but the “face” of the babies is paper currency, and it’s rather startling. I had seen it a couple of times, and this time I paid more attention to it. Turns out that the organization is FeedthePig.org, and their website is full of savings tips, discussions, resources, etc. for saving money.

Driving south along Indiana Rte. 31, I was passed by a semi with “syndicate” in the name on the side of the trailer, which always makes me think of the Mafia. In this case it’s Syndicate Sales, Inc., a manufacturer of floral supplies. The name on the driver’s door of the cab, “Hurryin’ Hoosier Transport” made me smile.

Further down the road, there’s a large billboard advertising “dentures only” in big letters. Half the billboard is a large photo of the smiling, white haired, white bearded dentist offering these dentures. He is a dead ringer for my daughter-in-law’s father, who owns a technology consulting company and is anything BUT a dentist. I chuckle every time I see it. “Why, there’s Phil!”

Continuing south, there are lots of yard signs supporting both sides of a hotly debated local issue — a wind farm in Tipton County, Indiana that could bring $300M in new money to a badly depressed area, but has local residents up in arms. Some signs tout the influx of welcome money, but others warn, “Get the facts” and, “stop the wind farms.” As I can attest from uncounted numbers of trips, the area is mostly wide open farmland that would seem a good place for wind farming, but apparently NIMBY is a strong opinion. I can’t, of course, take sides, since it wouldn’t be In My Back Yard.

Also in Kokomo, a town devastated by the collapse of the auto industry that is beginning to show hopeful signs of life, I spotted a home with a gasoline pump from a service station holding their mail box receptacle. Why do you suppose someone would choose to put a gas pump in front of their house?

Kokomo’s Markland Mall sign featured “Brow Threading” this weekend. Now I’m not exactly sure what “brow threading” is, and I freely admit to my UN-hipness, but it sounds painful and I don’t think I’ll be stopping there any time soon.

As always, off-topic is just fine, but I would be delighted to read about interesting items of local culture that you all see as you travel about your daily business. Maybe, as was true with me, you simply don’t really pay attention until something makes you look more closely. We aren’t likely to see Burma Shave signs these days, but this could be fun!

“If you / Don’t know / Whose signs / These are / You can’t have / Driven very far”

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Author’s note: I won’t be here to host this morning, because as you read this I will be enroute to Indianapolis, where my family is throwing a belated birthday party for me this weekend. Hopefully the topic will provide a jumping off point for our usually lively discussion in my absence! And as always, off-topic is just fine too!
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Did you know that this is Brain Awareness Week? We are all aging, even the younger folks among us — and our brains are becoming less agile and more prone to forgetfulness or confusion. But the human brain is able to continually adapt and rewire itself. Even an old person’s brain can grow new neurons. Most age-related losses in motor skills or memory are a result of inactivity and a lack of mental exercise and stimulation. In other words, with our brains, just as with our bodies, it’s “use it or lose it.”

The term neuroplasticity (brain plasticity) refers to changes in neural pathways and synapses because of changes in behavior, environment or neural processes. Our brains have the ability to change, based on activity-dependent functions, also called activity-dependent plasticity. A simple example is a left-handed person “training” herself to use her right hand equally well, through repeated practice. Speech therapy is another good example where the brain is trained through repetition to make the lips and tongue form sounds differently (correctly). We often read about how individuals who have lost an ability because of a major body injury can regain that ability — because their brains can learn to do the same thing in a different way.

We can do both physical and mental exercises that will help keep us sharp as we age. The Franklin Institute, a science museum in Philadelphia PA, provides a website with both types of exercises to improve our brain functions, as well as links to many studies that have been done about their effectiveness.

• Mental Exercise for a Better Brain
• Physical Exercise for a Better Brain
• There also are studies on the aging brain.

Our local hospital has a program known as Brainworks that offers classes and programs focused on brain health. The Brainworks website offers Games for Your Brain, and a link to Fit Brains, with many brain fitness games and activities. A friend who is a pharmacist and has worked with the hospital says they also recommend brain exercises from Lumosity. You can register there, take a short survey about your needs, and they’ll automatically generate brain exercises based on those needs. You can pay for more in-depth consulting and resources, $6.70 per month if you purchase a yearly plan, but the initial set of brain exercises is free and fun to explore.

They say,

Many people use games like crosswords and Sudoku to sharpen their minds. But the more you repeat these activities, the less challenging they become: doing them only traces over-learned pathways in the brain. To actually get smarter, scientists figured out that your brain needs activities that are both challenging and adaptive. By exposing your brain to constant, fresh stimulation, you’ll create new neural pathways and change existing ones – part of a concept called neuroplasticity.

Everyday Health has 10 tips for keeping your brain active. The most surprising (to me) is this one:

Take a twenty-minute nap every afternoon that you can manage it. A daytime nap will produce nearly as much skill-memory enhancement as a whole night of sleep. So after you have taken a class or engaged in some other learning situation in the morning, consolidate that information by napping for a brief time in the afternoon after lunch when you’re most likely to feel tired and fall asleep easier.

That’s probably enough to get discussion started on what I find to be a fascinating topic: how to keep our brains in good shape as we age. Do you do activities to stimulate your brain? Are you exercising your body and eating foods that are known to help your brain? Have you tried such things as meditation or yoga, and do you see a difference? How about the mental stimulation that results from political activism? Social interaction with friends? Do tell us about what works for you!
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Photo: Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license. Author: John A Beal, PhD Dep’t. of Cellular Biology & Anatomy, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Shreveport. Modified by DavoO.

Before I dive in to this final post on Internet security and privacy, I’d like to point you to a U.S. government website I discovered only this week, OnGuard Online, that contains a lot of useful information about Internet safety. If you’re interested, you might investigate and bookmark it for later exploration.

I want to conclude this series by talking a bit about anonymity and something known as “reidentification.”

Promises of anonymity can be misleading and are anything but absolute guarantees. In a 2000 study, Latanya Sweeney determined that a voter list could be correlated with medical records at a rate of 87 percent, using only three pieces of demographic data: sex, ZIP code and birth date. This enabled anyone with some technical skills to link the “anonymized” medical data to a particular name. The term for this linking is reidentification.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) defines reidentification as

…the process by which anonymized personal data is matched with its true owner. In order to protect the privacy interests of consumers, personal identifiers, such as name and social security number, are often removed from databases containing sensitive information. This anonymized, or de-identified, data safeguards the privacy of consumers while still making useful information available to marketers or datamining companies. Recently, however, computer scientists have revealed that this “anonymized” data can easily be re-identified, such that the sensitive information may be linked back to an individual. The re-identification process implicates privacy rights, because organizations will say that privacy obligations do not apply to information that is anonymized, but if the data is in fact personally identifiable, then privacy obligations should apply.

At Tech.Pinions, Steve Wildstrom writes,

For the past several years, a highly technical but very important debate has raged among privacy experts: How easy is it to identify an individual from a collection of data that supposedly lacks personally identifiable information?

…
A centerpiece of the debate is a 1997 incident in which Latanya Sweeney, then an MIT graduate student and now a computer scientist at Harvard, identified the medical records of Massachusetts Governor William Weld from information publicly available in a state insurance database. The incident led to important changes in privacy rules for medical information, especially under the Health Insurance Portability and Accessibility Act (HIPAA), and 15 years later it is still influencing the debate over data privacy.

By default, browser and mobile software don’t protect against the collection of data. Only a small fraction of Internet users install simple but powerful browser add-ons such as DoNotTrackMe or Ghostery to prevent tracking via cookies on personal computers. Even those can’t prevent the many other forms of tracking, and mobile devices don’t allow their installation in any case.

There is no regulatory infrastructure set up to monitor collection, aggregation and trading of consumer information. Privacy laws are no guarantee of anonymity. For example, despite HIPAA, it isn’t too difficult to determine a lot about an individual’s health and medical history just by looking at his or her routine purchases and activities. If the amount is large enough, collected and aggregated non-confidential information can violate privacy every bit as much as disclosure of confidential information does. Resistance to aggregation of our information has been mostly temporary — and mostly focused on a particular instance du jour that makes headlines.

Back in 2007, Facebook launched Beacon, which allowed them to put an invisible “bug” on websites of its more than 40 “partners” (among them Sony Pictures, eBay, Epicurious, the New York Times, and Travelocity) that allowed Facebook to see everything its users did on the partner sites, and associate that activity with their Facebook accounts, whether or not they were logged in. When someone purchased an item from Overstock.com, for example, that purchase would appear on the person’s Facebook wall, and in the News Feed of that person’s friends. Facebook users were opted-in to Beacon without being asked, and had to manually turn it off. After an outcry from Facebook users, Beacon was shut down in October, 2009, and Facebook subsequently settled a class-action lawsuit in 2012 for $9.5M that alleged Beacon breached federal wiretap and video-rental privacy laws.

But Facebook didn’t abandon Beacon’s goals. Using “like” buttons, requirements for registration to comment at online publications with your Facebook ID, and installing third-party cookies, Facebook still can monitor lots of your online activities that Beacon was supposed to capture. And we consumers still mostly aren’t aware of this monitoring.

Data collection without consumer notification now is the norm in Internet commerce. Facebook also has drastically weakened its privacy policies several times, each time making more user information less private — by default. The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a timeline (unfortunately, current only as of 2010) of Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy. And as of January 2013, Facebook is at it again, launching Graph Search to allow users to search and filter through friends, friends of friends, and even total strangers’ activities, likes, and interests.

On Facebook, things are more available by default than people may think. But even beyond specifically public settings, actions and photos that were once lost in the “sands of Timeline” are now more easily discoverable by strangers with loose ties, forcing us to reassess what we actually think is private and what is not.

There are many more examples, but I think you have the idea, so I won’t belabor it. Reidentification and collection of our personal information happens every time we go online. I urge you to be careful online, to install tracking blockers, and to adjust your Facebook privacy settings and then review them often. A good guide is here. Websites like the Electronic Frontier Foundation provide a wealth of information on staying safe online.

As always, please feel free to discuss this, or any other topic, in the comments. It’s Friday Free for All!

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Last week we focused on how we are observed in our travels across the information superhighway. Everywhere we go, companies gather and use information about us: they watch what we do, collect information about us, aggregate it, and then use it to target us with ads.

A generation ago, web pages were merely formatted text, albeit colorful and occasionally even informative. Today’s web pages are collections of content, ads, and tracking mechanisms that can talk to one another. The web rapidly is becoming an interconnected aggregation of trackers and bugs.

From The Nation article on microtargeting,

If you’re logged in to Facebook, Twitter, Google or Amazon, it’s safe to say these sites are tracking and retaining everything you’re doing on their sites and on any other sites that host their scripts and widgets. It’s how they make recommendations: for friends, products, events. … A newspaper’s website may know all the visitors to its site, but it knows nothing about their activities elsewhere. Its advertisers might, however, and Google Analytics certainly does: it offers a wide array of services to websites, tracking where users are coming from and what they search for before arriving at a page, all behind a slick interface. In exchange, Google gets to see the entire history of a site’s access logs. Google Analytics and similar services … are so ubiquitous that most of your web browsing is likely captured by one or more of these companies. They don’t have your name, but they have your IP address, rough physical location and a good chunk of your activity online.

Far more information has been collected than has been put to use, and the purposes to which it has been put have not always been visible to consumers. There is the danger of your personal information being sold, resold or otherwise distributed so that deleting it becomes practically impossible. If this data is your personal profile, more than simply knowledge of your consumer habits is available for discovery.

An article in Digital Trends, Top 100 websites: How they track your every move online, published in August 2012, highlights the biggest companies that track you, what they do, and how you can (sometimes) avoid the tracking.

In total, about 125 different companies or company products are used to track your online activity through the top 100 sites. Many of these are simple advertising networks — but others are particularly nefarious. To get a better sense of what each of these companies are, I reached out to attorney Sarah Downey, a privacy strategist for Abine, which created Do Not Track Plus [now DoNotTrackMe].

If you’re interested in the topic, do read the whole article; it contains good info, and links to a free download of DoNotTrackMe as well as “delete me” and “mask me” tools.

The value of this collection of data is frequently thought of only in terms of selling us stuff. Fine-grained targeting of online ads is invasive and more than a little creepy, but usually not dangerous. But other uses of that data are equally creepy and can be dangerous, too!

For example, your FICO credit score is calculated by a secret formula that uses your payment history, credit types and use, length of your credit history, and recent searches for your credit rating by third parties. But FICO is silent on what information it uses, or its source. Nothing prevents your Internet browsing activity from figuring into this calculation if credit bureaus are able to obtain it.

Your profile can reveal all sorts of healthy — or unhealthy — habits to insurance companies, like your gym memberships, bar tabs, poor diet, serious illnesses, time spent on dating websites, or interest in recreational drugs or certain social activities. If you “like” the Alzheimer’s Association, or a Gold’s Gym, or a local bar, for example, it won’t just be advertisers who might take notice. And if there are errors in your profile, you won’t know about those either, or have the chance to correct them. You won’t know why your insurance premiums are so high or your credit application was turned down.

Finally, there is the government, as you might expect. The National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security and FBI already collect a huge amount of information on Internet activity. Dana Priest and William Arkin exposed the extent of collecting in Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State. Most of the data was simply a vast stockpile of information on ordinary people, collected with a huge dragnet and permanently filed away because there was no pressing reason to delete it. Once your profile is created and shared among companies, the entities that know your behavioral patterns and day-by-day online and offline activity will only grow, and you’ll be helpless to corral it. You had no say in your profile’s collection or sale, but it is a resource that can be put to use in both benign and dangerous ways. You would not even know that your profile is being turned over to the government, just as you probably didn’t realize it was being created.

Next week, I’ll wrap up with the (mostly worthless) privacy promises companies make about their activities, and how we can deal with what’s in store for the future. As the Nation article suggests,

…few people end up leaving Facebook. All of your friends are there, being watched and anonymized as they “friend” and watch you, all of them doing, in the words of Joseph Turow, “free labor in the interest of corporate profits.”