WEHCO Media, which owns 15 newspapers including the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Chattanooga Times Free Press, reportedly has become the second client of copyright enforcement outfit Righthaven.

In February, the Federal Trade Commission warned a host of businesses, local governments and schools that sensitive data about their employees and customers had ended up on on file-sharing networks. At the same time, the FTC said it was investigating individual companies to determine whether they exposed private data online, a potential violation of various federal laws like the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

The Federal Trade Commission said this week that it had settled charges with marketing company Reverb Communications, which allegedly posted shill iTunes reviews of a client who develops gaming apps.

The digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation said this week that it's seeking to help bloggers and other defendants who are being sued by the copyright enforcement outfit Righthaven.

For the first time ever, cord-cutters outnumbered new subscribers to paid television in the second quarter of this year, according to SNL Kagan. Overall, the number of paid-TV subscribers plunged by 216,000 in the quarter, down from a gain of 378,000 last year at this time. Cable saw the biggest drops, with 711,000 defecting subscribers.

In what appears to be an effort to tackle online harassment, the California legislature has passed a bill that makes it illegal to impersonate someone else on the Web. The problem is, the measure also could ensnare people who create parodies or otherwise mock corporations online.

Facebook's launch of location-based services, Places, has set off a new round of criticisms that the company is too cavalier about its members' privacy. But, unlike prior product launches by Facebook, the potential violations don't appear to be as blatant as in the past.

Facebook's share-everything-with-everyone default settings appear to have blindsided ex-teacher June Talvitie-Siple, who lost her job after making unflattering comments about her students and their parents.

Internet service providers advertised broadband connections at an average download speed of 7 Mbps last year, but subscribers tended to actually download at speeds of only around 3-4 Mbps, the Federal Communications Commission says in a new report.

Many Internet industry insiders and observers are attempting to seriously address the implications of technology on privacy. Google's CEO Eric Schmidt doesn't seem to be among them. When asked about privacy by editors of The Wall Street Journal, Schmidt predicted that in the future teens will have the option of changing their names when they become adults in order to distance themselves from material posted by their friends. The Journal says this prediction was "apparently serious."