Here’s a radio interview BoomTown did earlier this week on San Francisco’s KQED “Forum” show, hosted by Michael Krasny.

The topic was a report in the The Wall Street Journal that certain third-party apps on Facebook were grabbing information about users in ways that violated the social networking site’s privacy guidelines.

Privacy advocates cried foul, while others thought it was more a tempest in a teapot– which I, NPR reporter Laura Sydell and Marc Rotenberg, executive director for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, discussed.

One conclusion, which you will understand after listening: Facebook definitely does not cause cancer.

Here’s the audio:

With its admission last week that its Street View cars unwittingly captured data sent over unsecured wireless Wi-Fi networks, Google (GOOG) appears to have run afoul of regulators on both sides of the Atlantic.

Sources familiar with the matter tell the Financial Times that the Federal Trade Commission is considering an inquiry into the matter, and the panel of European privacy regulators that advises the European Commission is calling for a full investigation to determine exactly what information was collected and whether the manner of its collection was a violation of privacy law.

The Europeans seem particularly miffed over the cock-up and Google’s explanation for it, which they find a bit suspect. Over the weekend, Peter Schaar, Germany’s federal commissioner for data protection and freedom of information, fired off a caustic blog post questioning the credibility of the company’s claim that personal data were collected accidentally.

“So everything was a simple oversight, a software error!” Schaar wrote. “The data was collected and stored against the will of the project’s managers and other managers at Google. If we follow this logic further, this means: The software was installed and used without being properly tested beforehand. Billions of bits of data were mistakenly collected, without anyone in Google noticing it, including Google’s own internal data protection managers, who two weeks ago were defending to us the company’s internal data protection practices.”

Have to admit, he does have a point. How does a company with Google’s smarts and technological acumen collect and store Wi-Fi network payload data in more than 30 countries for three years without being aware of it?

Mistakes are made, I suppose. But the breadth of this one is pretty incredible. As Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the Financial Times, “This may be one of the most massive surveillance incidents by a private corporation that has ever occurred. It is unprecedented vacuuming of WiFi data by a private company. Can you imagine what would happen if a German corporation was sending cars through Washington sucking up all this information?”

Yes, but to err is human…

“We understand you may not want everyone in the world to have the information you share on Facebook; that is why we give you control of your information. Our default privacy settings limit the information displayed in your profile to your school, your specified local area, and other reasonable community limitations that we tell you about.”

–Facebook Privacy Policy, 2006

“When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting….The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.”…Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.”

– Facebook Privacy Policy, 2010

Perfect.

Facebook has enlisted a former senior Bush administration regulator to defend its privacy practices in Washington. Tim Muris, an attorney at law firm O’Melveny & Myers who served as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission from 2001 to 2004, is advising the company, whose privacy disclosures and fast and loose handling of user data are increasingly drawing scrutiny on Capitol Hill.

Indeed, on May 5, the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the FTC alleging that Facebook has engaged in unfair and deceptive trade practices in violation of consumer protection law.

“[The site] continues to manipulate the privacy settings of users and its own privacy policy so that it can take personal information provided by users and make it widely available for commercial purposes,” the Washington-based advocacy group said. “The company has done this repeatedly and users are becoming increasingly frustrated and angry.”

Clearly, the Facebook privacy backlash, which has been building for years now, has begun in earnest.

What better time, then, to seek the help of someone like Muris, who created the popular U.S. Do Not Call Registry and just last week received the Miles W. Kirkpatrick Award “for his significant and lasting contributions to the FTC, antitrust law, and the cause of consumer protection.”

Reached for comment, Facebook said Muris is not an official employee. “There have been some reports that Tim Muris has joined Facebook,” the company told me. “Muris has not joined Facebook.”

But he is serving as a consultant, something sources close to the company have told me, though Facebook declined to comment on.

Little more than a month after the bungled launch of Buzz and the company has already accumulated quite a pile of complaints over breaches in consumer privacy that went along with it.

In February, the Electronic Privacy Information Center asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Buzz, claiming it violates federal consumer protection law.

A few weeks later, outgoing FTC commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour publicly decried Buzz’s rollout as “irresponsible” and accused Google of attempting to “stretch the privacy envelope.”

Now, a group of eleven U.S. lawmakers from the House Energy and Commerce Committee is calling upon the FTC to investigate Buzz as well.

“We are writing to express our concern over claims that Google’s ‘Google Buzz’ social networking tool breaches online consumer privacy and trust,” the group said in a letter to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. “Due to the high number of individuals whose online privacy is affected by tools like this–either directly or indirectly–we feel that these claims warrant the commission’s review of Google’s public disclosure of personal information of consumers through Google Buzz.”

The letter continues by suggesting the FTC ask the following four questions to Google:

1. How will Google revise the Gmail privacy policy, notify consumers, and obtain consent for this change in the company’s privacy practices?
2. Since Google Buzz was launched on Feb. 9, 2010, how many consumers are deactivated or opted out of the Google Buzz services?
3. To what extent does Google use the consumer information collected through Buzz and other Google services for the purposes of delivering online advertising?
4. If the Commission approves Google’s acquisition of AdMob, to what extent will the combined entity use the consumer information collected through other Google products and services for the purposes of delivering advertising?

The answers to these questions would, I’m sure, be quite telling. Not that Google (GOOG) is particularly interested in answering them. Why would the company when it seems so confident that it has already resolved the issues in question?

Said a Google spokesperson: “User choice and transparency are top of mind for us. When we realized that we had unintentionally made users unhappy, we worked quickly to make immediate changes.”

[Image credit: Asaf Hanuka, Tropical Toxic]

“EPIC urges the Commission to investigate Google, determine the extent of the harm to consumer privacy and safety,” EPIC said in its complaint. “[And it asks that the Commission] require Google to provide Gmail users with opt-in consent to the Google Buzz service, require Google to give Gmail users meaningful control over personal information, require Google to provide notice to and request consent from Gmail users before making material changes to their privacy policy in the future, and seek appropriate injunctive and compensatory relief.”

Another embarrassing blow for Google (GOOG), which has spent the better part of a week being pilloried for its unfortunate misstep. Responding to EPIC’s complaint, Google again stressed its efforts to improve Buzz and, somewhat ironically, thanked the group for airing its concerns.

“We designed Buzz to make it easy for users to connect with other people and have conversations about the things that interest them,” the company said. “Buzz was launched only a week ago. We’ve already made a few changes based on user feedback, and we have more improvements in the works. We look forward to hearing more suggestions and will continue to improve the Buzz experience with user transparency and control top of mind. We also welcome dialogue with EPIC and appreciate hearing directly from them about their concerns. Our door is always open to organizations with suggestions about our products and services.”

Evidently, Buzz is a work in progress to which all are free to contribute–even if they do so in the form of an FTC complaint.

And that means? Hard to say.

In a letter (pdf) to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, David Vladeck, the FTC’s director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, says his agency would be happy to talk to EPIC about its concerns. But that’s about all he’s promising for now.

Just as important, Vladeck points out that he can’t and won’t say whether the FTC is formally investigating EPIC’s complaint: “Please be advised, however, that any Commission investigation is non-public until the Commission decides to issue a formal complaint or investigation. As a result, we can neither confirm nor deny that we are conducting an investigation of the issues raised by your complaint.”

So there you go. Either the Feds are taking this very seriously or they’re not.

As I’ve said before, Facebook may face some regulatory blowback for its privacy overhaul–otherwise known as the “please share as much of yourself as you can” campaign–in the U.S., and more likely, in Europe. But unless the social networking service starts hearing from  advertisers, I’m not sure how much farther this goes.

It is an extraordinary market play. And an unsettling one. For it seeks to place Google (GOOG), which already collects vast amounts of data about our Internet use, at the very center of our information experience.

The privacy implications are, of course, horrendous. And while Google will inevitably dismiss such concerns as paranoid and argue that any data the company might collect at the OS level will be used only to improve its services and benefit users, it should still give us all pause. Because when it is finally launched, Chrome OS will be yet one more deep well of consumer data to which Google will have access.

There are already quite a few such wells, including Google Search and Chrome, that profile user interests and surfing habits: Gmail, which gives the company access to our email conversations, and Google Voice, which gives the company access to our spoken ones. Add to this Google Street View and Latitude, a service that tracks the physical location of its users, and mobile and desktop operating systems and, well…that kind of consolidation of Internet-based services around a single dominant company should give us all pause.

Lest we forget, Google is in the behavioral targeting business. Why would people ever use an OS developed by a company whose business is based on meticulously recording and analyzing their online behavior? Because they enjoy using its other services, I suppose. But there is a privacy-vs-ease-of-use tradeoff here. And with Chrome OS, it is unprecedented. Further, while Google might tout its “don’t be evil” motto as reason enough to trust the company with our data, there are other entities that don’t always share that sensibility. Remember, it wasn’t so long ago that the federal government tried to force Google to turn over user search data to the Justice Department…

“Competition in the OS market should always be welcome, but Google is the special case,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Digital Daily. “It has become dominant across many essential Internet services–search, mail, video, online apps, and advertising. Coupled with Google’s growing profiles of American consumers and reluctance to adopt meaningful privacy safeguards, we expect that antitrust authorities in the US and Europe will view Google’s entry into the OS market with enormous skepticism.”

Jeff Chester, executive director of The Center for Digital Democracy, echoed Rotenberg’s concerns. “Google’s new OS has to be placed under the data collection X-Ray by US and EU privacy regulators and advocates,” he said. “Any expansion into the marketplace by either Google or Microsoft should generate intense scrutiny, especially for the privacy implications. These two are engaged in a global data collections digital arms race, which has far-reaching implications for consumers and their information.”

Yesterday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy filed a petition with the FTC demanding that Majoras recuse herself from voting on the Google-DoubleClick deal because her husband is a equity partner at Jones Day, the law firm representing DoubleClick in the merger. Moreover, Majoras herself was once a partner at Jones Day as well. “A reasonable person with knowledge of the relevant facts would question the chairman’s impartiality in this matter,” the two consumer advocacy groups said in the filing (PDF). “The direct and predictable financial interest is on the spouse of the chairman, whose firm does not simply represent a party before the commission but who himself is directly responsible for the firm’s business development in Washington, D.C.” (In a statement issued by the FTC today, Majoras corrects what she calls “key factual errors” in the petition and lays out her case for fulfulling “the duties entrusted to me when I was appointed and confirmed.”)

Now, the FTC claims that Jones Day is advising DoubleClick only on the European Commission’s review of the merger. “We learned only yesterday that Jones Day is representing DoubleClick before the European Commission, not the (U.S.) Federal Trade Commission,” FTC spokeswoman Claudia Bourne Farrell told News.com. “Jones Day has not appeared before the FTC on this matter.”

But a page on Jones Day’s Web site seemed to say otherwise–at least until it was deleted. But while it may have disappeared from jonesday.com, it did not disappear from Google’s cache.

Jones Day is advising DoubleClick Inc., the digital marketing technology provider, on the international and U.S. antitrust and competition law aspects of its planned $3.1 billion acquisition by Google Inc. The proposed acquisition will combine DoubleClick’s expertise in ad management technology with Google’s Internet search and content platform. The transaction is currently under review by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and European Commission.”

Now why would Jones Day pull that page (and beyond that, why would it be so ignorant of the dangers of Google’s cache)? It was “confusing,” the firm says. “The language in the posting apparently was confusing, since EPIC cites it as evidence JD is representing DC at the FTC, and we never have,” Jones Day partner Joe Sims told News.com. “So we took it down and will rewrite it to eliminate the confusion.”

The FTC is currently reviewing the matter with its ethics officer.