This Social Media CyberWatch outlines privacy law developments, online service provider relationships with the NSA PRISM program, and Facebook privacy news.

This edition of Social Media CyberWatch looks at new developments in privacy research, legal debates, and online service provider policies and decisions.

A new post written by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan as part of the joint project by Privacy International, Agentura.Ru and the Citizen Lab on Russia’s surveillance state.

This Social Media CyberWatch looks at the rebirth of CISPA, death of bill C-30, EU privacy lobbying, Facebook and Google Play privacy concerns, and various web tracking policy developments such as Do Not Track and third-party cookies implementations.

Professor Deibert spoke about the Canadian company Blackberry and the lack of transparency in Blackberry’s agreements with governments abroad.

This month’s Social Media Watch looks at the privacy concerns around Facebook’s Graph Search, an open letter to Skype detailing concerns about its practices, several noteworthy legislative privacy stories and several other policy, security and privacy stories from the social media community.

This year-end report summarizes several trends and noteworthy happenings of the past 12 months, including an increase in government user data requests, a community governance decision-making debacle, and controversies around various privacy-oriented technical implementations.

The inaugural edition of the Social Media CyberWatch discusses issues related to privacy awareness.

Citizen Lab joined a global coalition of NGOs to call for the withdrawal of censorship plans in Pakistan.

The past two weeks brought several important developments from Google related to online identity. The big story was Google’s revision to its Privacy Policy and Terms of Service which will go into effect March 1 and uniformly govern most of Google’s services. This raises a question. By adopting the various policy changes mentioned, does Google now have an ability to evaluate the veracity of user information associated with accounts?