In today’s Quick Hits, thoughts on Facebook’s power, teen online privacy, and why taking steps to protect yourself from junk e-mail can end up causing you to miss out on important privacy notices.

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Phone Thief Accidentally Uploads Picture of Himself to Victim’s Facebook Page

A thief may have unwittingly outed himself when he snapped a picture using a stolen mobile phone. According to ABC News, “police in Henry County, Ga., said they now believe the thief grabbed [the victim's] cellphone, took a picture of himself and unwittingly uploaded it to her Facebook page, which automatically synced with her phone.” In this case, the woman’s predilection for sharing all of her cell phone photos online (something that we might usually recommend against) may have actually helped her.

Op-Ed: Facebook’s Power Should Worry Us All

In an op-ed for the National Times, Julian Lee writes that Facebook’s power is “unsettling,” saying “if Facebook was a government agency, its power would be as undisputed as it would be frightening.” Lee’s incisive commentary points out that legal protections lag far behind technology and that Web companies like Facebook have a practically unchecked ability to enact new privacy-invasive features with little fear of punishment. At the end of his piece, Lee touches on the idea that “free” Internet service aren’t really free saying, “it’s the price we pay for such free services, the Faustian pact into which we have entered in order to survive in an age of constant connectivity where the tentacles of Facebook — with its ambition to be the “identity platform” — are extending to every corner of the internet.”

How News Outlets Rank in Privacy Protection for “Frictionless Sharing”

With its new “Frictionless Sharing” feature, Facebook has teamed up with third-party websites to stream a user’s Web habits directly to his or her profile. This feature, which is unnerving to many privacy advocates, is already in place with many news websites. But not all news organizations give users the same level of privacy protection. This article from Inside Facebook discusses all of the third-party news organizations using frictionless sharing and rates them according to how much control they offer users over sharing.

How Privacy Measures Can Impact E-Mail Disclosures About Personal Privacy

In its bid to buy a massive list of e-mail addresses from bankrupt book chain Borders, Barnes & Noble was forced to send an e-mail to Borders’ customers giving them 15 days to opt out of sharing information with the new company. Ironically, as Forbes’ Kashmir Hill explains, this disclosure e-mail might not make it to all customers if they’ve taken certain steps to protect their privacy. Hill writes that “most folks who signed up for Borders accounts, or any company account, usually hand over their ‘junk e-mail address.’”

Because these aren’t the accounts people usually check (in order to keep them from massive amounts of spam), they might miss the notice. Similarly, Hill notes that because she had unsubscribed from Borders e-mail list long ago: “I was unsubscribed from a future email that would tell me that my data would be sold to another company.” In both of these cases, the company isn’t legally in the wrong, but the user still doesn’t get the disclosure, demonstrating the complexity of online privacy protections.

Survey Reveals Kids Have Awareness of Online Privacy

In this video interview with CBS News, Yahoo! Web Life Editor Heather Cabot talks about a new survey that shows kids are much savvier about online privacy than parents give them credit for, while also offering advice about “how parents can drive home the message home about the importance of online privacy.”