According to Reuters, Barack Obama is the most popular politician on Facebook.

The Democratic Presidential Nominee has over 850,000 fans and is leveraging social networking to connect with young voters.

The news outlet also sites Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao as a popular political face on Facebook

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao hugely popular at home for his visits to quake-hit Sichuan, has emerged as the 10th most popular politician on the Facebook social networking site.

Wen’s response to the Chinese earthquake is said to have fuelled his internet popularity, garnering him over 20,000 online fans.

In response to the suicide death of 13-year-old Meghan Meier, state lawmakers in Missouri have given final approval to a bill making cyber bullying illegal. Meier is at the center of a pending case that transpired when the mother of one of her friends wanted to know if Meghan was saying negative things about her daughter and allegedly created a false profile on MySpace in the name of a non-existent 16-year-old boy. Eventually this fictitious boy, “Josh Evans,” ended his online relationship with Meghan, which is believed to have been the catalyst that led to the young girl taking her life.

The bill, which was recently signed by the Governor, updates existing state laws against harassment to be more relevant with current technological developments. Specifically, the new bill removes the requirement that the communication considered to be harassment be written or over the telephone. Supporters of the move say the updated bill will now cover harassment from electronic devices like computers and text messages.

Many of the provisions contained in the bill arose from a special gubernatorial task force that studied Internet harassment after the details of Megan Meier’s suicide were made public.

The mother who allegedly created the profile, Lori Drew, has been indicted in California on federal counts of conspiracy and accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the teen. As we reported earlier, an attorney for Drew is preparing a legal challenge to the prosecution’s claims.

Police in Missouri did not initially file any charges against Drew largely because there was no applicable state law to prosecute her actions under. While the outcome of the current case is uncertain, Sen. Scott Rupp has stated that the proposed amendments would have allowed prosecutors to continue investigating without having to ship the case to a different state.

“Without a good, quality cyber stalking and harassment law, which we don’t currently have, we have to go to federal courts in other states to make a stretching leap argument,” said Rupp, R-Wentzville.

Other senators have seen the proverbial handwriting on the wall, and our coming out with their own interpretations. State Sen. Harry Kennedy, D-St. Louis, said the law is “definitely a warning shot for those folks who want to use the Internet for harassment.”

This is another example of how 20th century case law is unfit to deal with the realities of the digital age. Anti Bullying advocates, parents and concerned netizens, while saddened at this event, can be pleased with the outcome and new state law.

Both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times recently reported that a federal judge has ordered internet search giant Google to turn over the viewing records of YouTube as part of a billion dollar lawsuit alleging copyright infringement. The records will reveal the usernames and IP addresses of every YouTube viewer since 2005 and while Viacom has stated that it will not use the data to go after individuals for copyright infringement, the ruling has privacy advocates concerned. Quoting from the New York Times:

“Users should have the right to challenge and contest the production of this deeply private information,” said Kurt Opsahl, senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group.

[SNIP]

Mr. Opsahl also said that even records that did not include a user’s login name and I.P. address might be able to be associated with specific people.

The EFF responds in the LA Times, as well:

The group said the ruling would “allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube,” and it urged Viacom “to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users.”

Viacom, which owns Comedy Central, MTV, Paramount and other media channels, is concerned about losing revenue when clips from South Park or the Colbert Report are posted on video sharing sites. Both Viacom and Google say they are open to a compromise that does not reveal user IP addresses, but instead displays viewing trends through randomly assigned numbers.

It is clear that people are concerned about keeping their browsing habits anonymous.

Reputation.com is committing to keeping private information off of the internet. MyPrivacy helps prevent your sensitive data from being revealed online.

There has been quite a bit of press about Online Reputation Management and how people are increasingly forming opinions based on what they find online.

The New York Post has a nice write up of Reputation.com and the Online Reputation Management industry as a whole. Quoting from the piece:

“Whether you like it or not, your resume isn’t a piece of paper anymore. It’s your top 10 Google search results,” says Michael Fertik, CEO and founder of one such company, Reputation.com.

[SNIP]

For fees ranging from 10 bucks for a credit-check-like comprehensive Web search to a $2,000 monthly charge for a full-frontal assault on demeaning content, reputation managers generally use two strategies: they either try to eliminate content altogether or conceal it in the bowels of a search engine’s results.

[Michael] Fertik’s firm will attempt to persuade owners of Web pages to remove humiliating posts or pictures for $30 per item. They use a process that tracks down Web hosts and contacts them in a “non-threatening” manner. The system works “nicely,” he says.

Reputation.com was also recently highlighted on AOL:

Now you can employ the services, for a fee, of course, of businesses that will keep an eye on your online reputation and help you keep it clean. One of the pioneers in this field, Reputation.com, goes on a search-and-destroy mission. This organization scours the Internet to dig up every bit of information on you and then sets out to destroy (at your request) any negative information by getting it corrected or removed, whenever possible.

Sautter and Crompton encourage people — whether they’re job searching or not — to remember that everything they do online leaves a digital footprint. It’s up to each individual to determine whether those footprints take a step in the right — or wrong — direction in cyberspace.

And finally, Boston.com recently ran a piece that looked at the potential pitfalls that doctors face online. The article points out that while there are many safeguards in place to protect patient data, many doctors are exposed on the web.

“There may be slanderous information about a physician on the Web, published in a blog or on a Web page, by a vengeful patient, colleague, or ex-lover,” Dr. Tristan Gorrindo and Dr. James E. Groves write in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “Equally vexing, there may be slanderous information published about someone with the same name as an unlucky physician.”

Medical professionals as well as other executives are urged to be proactive in claiming their webutation and controlling what people find when they are searched.

Reputation.com is the recognized market leader in Online Identity Management and offers a variety of services to give you an edge and defend your online reputation.

Facebook, already one of the world’s largest and most successful social networks, is constantly seeking ways to improve on itself. Hats off to you, boys (and girls); that’s admirable. Improving user interaction and satisfaction is something a lot of sites ignore once they go “big time.”

Part of their push to improve things is through the use of applications on your Facebook profile. These applications look fairly benign and offer a variety of little gadgets. Wanna sip virtual cocktails with someone? They’ve got an ap for that. Wanna play Oregon Trail (er, Northwestern Trail) like you’re in 3rd grade again? They’ve got that available, and many more, all available at the click of your mouse.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Giving people more, for free. However, there is no such thing as a free lunch in sunny Silicon Valley, and in this instance that fact remains especially true. The thing about those Facebook applications that many people don’t realize is that when you add it to your profile you are giving the developers of those applications access to all the information in your profile.

MSNBC has recently written about this and we’ve grabbed some of the more poignant bits for you below:

In February, MySpace also opened up to developers. It has more than 1,000 applications. The company, along with other social networks such as Hi5 and AOL’s Bebo, allows applications under OpenSocial, a Google-led initiative that lets developers distribute games and other programs across multiple social networks.

Each site has come up with its own policies on the data that developers are allowed to see. MySpace, the largest social network, with 110 million members, said developers can see users’ public details — name, profile picture and friend lists — when they download a program. When a user installs one on Facebook, which has 70 million members, the developer can see everything in a profile except contact information, as well as friends’ profiles. Members can limit what is seen by changing privacy controls, and both companies say developers are allowed to keep those data for only 24 hours.

Developers can collect other data from members once they’ve download the applications.

{SNIP}

About 90 percent of the applications have unnecessary access to private data.

And, as the woman who compiled all this data is quick to point out, once the data has been transferred to a 3rd party server Facebook can do nothing to control the information.

If that’s not enough to scare the scrabble out of you, there’s a security risk as well, as the article notes:

But revealing information on quizzes or maps of places visited, for instance, may also make it easier for strangers to piece together tidbits to create larger security threats,

Some online activities ask users to list pets’ names or to display their high school’s mascot, answers to common security questions asked by financial companies.

In the modern world where Internet privacy is paramount you have to educate yourself about every move you make online.