This column is already dated. Why? Because privacy – or the lack thereof – is daily news. Facebook just announced their privacy policy would be called a “data use policy”. Before that it was Google’s announcement that they would be combining all the data collected by their individual web properties (YouTube, Gmail, Blogger, Google, etc.) about you into one single place, covered by one single “privacy” policy. Security has always been in opposition with ease of use. The conflict between wanting the convenience and interaction of the free web and trading privacy for the privilege is difficult to resolve.

So, what does this all mean for lawyers? Well, Jim Calloway sums it up like this:

While I still do not believe this information will be shared with advertisers in ways that compromises client confidentiality, any benefit I might get is not worth the history being saved. A lawyer who does an arraignment for a high profile client that has media coverage may not want any record outside of his office that he did a dozen searches on the Twinkie defense that week. You can come up with your own examples.

It isn’t just advertisers to keep in mind. Google’s One-Policy-To-Rule-Them-All states they will “never sell or share your information without your permission (other than rare circumstances like valid legal requests)”. And Lori Andrews, a law professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, writes in an opinion piece for the New York Times that outlines uses of aggregate information including stereotyping to determine credit worthiness, weblining to deny health insurance, or even influencing population segments based on the ads they receive.

So, what to do while we wait for all browsers to tighten up their “Do Not Track” options and the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights to work its way into law? Start with the simple things first. Don’t put personally identifiable information in your online profiles, including your address, family names, birthdate and other things that could help identify you individually. Use a form filler/password manager like Roboform or LastPass to fill in forms and passwords instead of your browser. Set your browser to delete cookies and web history when you close it. Log out of Google, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Bloglines, etc. when you leave the sites. Pay attention to what permissions you give downloaded apps. Don’t use your Google, Facebook, or Twitter accounts to login to other accounts – no matter how convenient it is.

Google actually provides a lot of ways to be aware of what you are sharing, and turn it off or manipulate it. For one stop shopping try www.google.com/dashboard, which shows you every account you have with Google from your Android device to your Picassa Album. The site provides links to each Google property’s editing and privacy options. Google also posted a master list of privacy tools they provide, from the aforementioned dashboard to the ads preference manager, a Chrome Opt-Out extension, how to encrypt your searches, off the record Google chats and more. See, they aren’t so bad are they?

While Google may be helpful about leading you to privacy fixes, not all sites are so forthcoming. In fact, it can be confounding to even find privacy settings in some sites. Mypermissions.org takes you straight to the settings for app permissions in Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, and more. Drop by and make sure you recognize and want the listed apps to have their claws in your social sites. Curious to see who might be mining data on sites you visit? One browser plugin, Ghostery, works with all the major browsers, as well as providing a mobile browser version for iOS. It detects, displays, and blocks tracking from over 800 data collection services. Users can see what is blocked and allow certain functions, for instance ShareThis, to remain active on specific sites.

Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer 9, and Safari all offer a “safe” browsing mode. InPrivate(IE9), Icognito (Chrome), Private Browsing (Firefox, Safari) do not store history, cookies, temporary internet files, or downloaded files and disables autocomplete/password filling. While this might be useful for getting unbiased search results from Google or for logging into a different Gmail account without having to log out in your main browser window, it isn’t truly incognito.

Enter the Tor Browser for the serious privacy proponent. Tor readily admits that some things won’t work the way they used to. After all, they block browser plugins like Flash, RealPlayer, or QuickTime. They encourage users to encrypt all traffic to and from the browser with HTTPS Everywhere, and use the Tor bridge relay to mask the fact that you are even using the Tor browser. If you are in need of true cloak and dagger activity, this might provide it. More user friendly, and if you just need truly private searching try the Startpage.com search engine from IxQuick. Startpage provides search results from Google, but does not record your IP address or anything else about your search. It has settings like always on SSL, remove search suggestions, and lets you save these settings without cookies.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, often at the forefront of assisting webizens with privacy issues, offers some of the tips above and then some in the “Six Tips to Protect Your Search Privacy”. Some of the suggestions would take a good bit of extra effort. However, the trick is finding a balance between security and ease of use. At least with some of these tools you can finally get some privacy.

Social Media – networking and sharing of breaking news, gossip, pictures, videos, music, and just about everything else – has become a part of daily life for many people. Social media sites house this information about you, your firm, your clients and their businesses. Even if you don’t actively participate in social media, the information can be vital in fact gathering and monitoring. Let’s look at some of the available tools to make that happen.

Social Media Search

For researching what people are doing, saying, and revealing about themselves, searching social media sites is imperative. Blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, MySpace, Plaxo, and most other popular social media sites offer built in search tools. Lawyers should not forget these as valuable places to search, though they must be careful to avoid “pretexting” or using means to coerce or deceive someone into giving access to a private social media profile. Google’s primary search engine will pick up some social media content, primarily blogs and public LinkedIn information, as do Bing and other search engines. Google’s new Search Plus Your World adds content from your Google+ streams, if you are logged into Google. However, there are other ways to search multiple social sites en masse which may offer different and possibly better results.

While aggregate social media search engines are in their infancy, there are a few out there to explore. One is Whos Talkin, which aggregates search from many popular social networking sites. Another is Social Mention, offering a similar search function, and is significantly speedier and more effective than Who’s Talking.

For more focused social media searching sites like YourOpenBook (note: quote including profanity from Marc Zuckerburg on this page) that searches Facebook information that is not marked private, gives a deeper dive into Facebook. Similarly Twazzup and Topsy search Twitter, and Blinkx searches video content in Hulu, YouTube, as well as news and media outlets (note: adult filter is on by default).

Other sites offer people searches, and focus on finding people results in white pages, public records, business records and social media sites. These search sites include ZoomInfo, PiPL, YoName, Folowen, Snitch.name and Spokeo. Keep in mind that you will need to do additional research, as these directories match against name only, which is an inexact science. Additionally, similar “reality checks” need to be followed if you choose to use any of the public records searches available with some of these tools.

Social Media Monitoring

Social media management tools like Hootsuite, Social Oomph, and TweetDeck will help you monitor activity by keywords and account names in multiple social media channels. However, if your monitoring needs are infrequent or changeable, there are a number of social media search tools that offer alerts via email or RSS. In Addictomatic you can do a keyword search, and results are displayed in boxes for each of the social media outlets. You can even rearrange the boxes to put the sites you are most interested in at the top. Then simply bookmark the page in your browser and visit it again to see updated results. Kurrently searches only Facebook and Twitter, and offers an RSS feed for your saved searches. Social Mention offers alerts, and Whos Talkin has an iGoogle gadget.

Backing Up Social Media

While there are many ways to get back into social media content, the information is vast and fleeting. You may have a need to capture and keep social media content, either for your firm, or your client, as backup, as a record of interactions, or to ensure compliance with a social media policy. You may have heard of the “Wayback Machine” aka The Internet Archive, which records pages of certain webpages and archives them. The problem with this site is that it is inconsistent as to which sites it archives, and for how long. For lawyers who want to take control of monitoring and storing webpage content, enter Iterasi. This tool bills itself as a corporate compliance, litigation protection, compliance, and brand heritage tool. It is not free, but for lawyers and companies who need this type of service, it can be invaluable. It is a web archiving tool that will “scrape” the screens of even complex websites, as well as capturing RSS feeds, topics discussed in social networks, and any website the user happens to visit. The company provides several discrete products, one web archiving tool, a social media monitoring application, and a “notary” tool to archive individual pages on the fly. Similar to Iterasi, NextPoint’s Preservation Cloud crawls and archives specific web properties – blogs, social media sites, webpages. You can tag, export, and search the data collected. Like Iterasi, this is a “cloud” tool, so the data is stored on external servers, which does introduce some risk in using the service, while making it easy to sign up and get going as there is no installation or configuration.

Conclusion

Whether or not you are using social media as marketing or networking tool, lawyers can’t ignore the vast amount of information stored in these portals. Whether your needs are fact gathering, monitoring, or current awareness there are plenty of tools in the social media ecosystem to help you stay on top of the game.