As Google prepares to launch Street View in the U.K., and has already launched it in France, concerns over privacy have been raised by the group Privacy International, which says it feels Street View violates privacy laws.

On June 3rd a group of privacy advocates, including California-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the World Privacy Forum, Consumer Action, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumer Federation of California, and ACLU of Northern California - among others - sent a detailed letter to Google CEO CEO Eric Schmidt, charging that the lack of a privacy link on Google's home page was not just "alarming," but violated the California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003.

This past Tuesday, a United States federal judge ordered the popular video sharing website YouTube to hand over a record of every video that users have watched, including registered accounts and IPs.

The whereabouts of more than 100,000 cell phone users have been tracked in an attempt to build a comprehensive picture of human movements. The study concludes that humans are creatures of habit, mostly visiting the same few spots time and time again. Most people also move less than 10km on a regular basis, according to the study published in the journal Nature. The results could be used to help prevent outbreaks of disease or forecast traffic, the scientists said.

A study detailed in Nature exposes the local nature of humans: we like to hang around our homes. But that's not what caught my eye. It's the way the study was conducted.

On Friday, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), based at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law, filed a privacy complaint against Facebook. I earlier wrote about CIPPIC's report which indicated that DRM violated Canadian privacy law.

With public concern over online fraud, new research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, has revealed that internet users will reveal more personal information online if they believe they can trust the organisation that requests the information.

Jessica Cutler, who is a the blogger of the Washingtonienne - a sex-scandal blog - today filed for bankruptcy in New York Court.