But this time, Facebook is finally saving someone’s bacon. Or, oddly enough, his pancakes. As the New York Times says,

The message on Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, posted at 11:49 a.m. on Oct. 17, asked where his pancakes were. The words were typed from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem.

At the time, the sentence, written in street slang, was just another navel-gazing, cryptic Facebook status update — meaningless to anyone besides Mr. Bradford. But when Mr. Bradford, 19, was arrested the next day as a suspect in a robbery at the Farragut Houses in Brooklyn, where he lives, the words took on greater importance. They became his alibi.

One minute after his status update, someone in Brooklyn was mugged. The article isn’t exactly clear on how Bradford was named as a suspect in the mugging, but he was arrested for the crime, even though his father and step-mother both said he was with them in Harlem (and Harlem != Brooklyn, if you’re not familiar with NYC).

When Bradford’s lawyer told the Brooklyn DA about the status update, the DA’s office subpoenaed Facebook’s records to verify that he wasn’t at the scene of the crime. The IP address resolved to Bradford’s father’s home—and the charges against Bradford were dropped.

The ADA realizes that anyone with his username and password could have posted the status update, but, as Bradford’s lawyer says, “This implies a level of criminal genius that you would not expect from a young boy like this; he is not Dr. Evil.”

So it just goes to show: maybe all those pointless status updates aren’t so pointless after all.

What do you think? Can status updates (with IP records) be taken as legal alibis?

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As Facebook begins testing greater and greater publicity, with user controls, the EU begins demanding more and more of social networks’ privacy policies—or, that’s what we think their vague regulations are trying to do, anyway.

There are several specific policies that social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, which both have large European audiences, will have to comply with: automatically setting users’ privacy to the highest level (giving users the option to opt out of that extreme level of privacy), allow users to limit the data shared with third-parties (including advertisers and applications), and limit the use of “sensitive information,” including race, religion and political views, in behavioral targeting.

However, many of the regulations, like most laws, are constructed broadly. While broad language in laws avoids the problem of overspecificity, sometimes it becomes difficult for constituents to follow the law. I mean, do you want to define exactly what “legitimate purposes” a network must have to collect personal information?

On the other hand, how could the EU specifically name all the legitimate purposes for collecting data within its regulation? Is targeting birthday-centered promotions from advertisers a “legitimate purpose”? Is enabling your friends to send you virtual birthday gifts “illegitimate”?

What do you think? How can Facebook balance its users’ (and its own legal) need for privacy with its inherent purpose—friending everyone you’ve ever known since elementary school?

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an anomaly in the RSS feeds a single user had set up to receive news updates from three publishers – Foxnews.com, NYTimes.com, and USAToday.com – caused their estimates to be grossly inflated, and has triggered a deeper probe by clients into the technology and methods Nielsen uses to measure online audiences.

Mm. Robust it was not, eh? Nielsen has revised the audience measures for the affected sites downward (just what news sites need these days), and are gearing up the planned newer system to prevent future errors like this.

As MediaPost points out, few were excited about (or even interested in) Nielsen’s new system, so the news of the failure of their old system may actually bode well for the media measurement company.

The new system will use a sample that’s ten time larger than the current sample. With the larger sample, it will also be able to measure traffic for more sites.

Some sites, such at the New York Times, however, say that Nielsen consistently indicates their numbers are lower than those found by three other independent sites and the Times itself-which just illustrates that unlike with television, Nielsen is far from the only game in town when it comes to audience measurement online.

However, the Nielsen brand still carries a lot of weight. But even if their new measurement system is better, will it be enough to give them real relevance online, and elevate them above the other online measurement options?

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