News sites, such as the BBC, are reporting on the legal case in Italy which has widespread implications for video posting sites on the Internet. An Italian court has convicted 3 Google executives of breaking Italian law by allowing the video to be posted online showing an autistic teenager being bullied.

The convictions (suspended 6 month sentences) were due to privacy violations, but the ruling has come under widespread criticism and Google has also posted a blog article regarding the decision and the implications for Internet freedom and responsibility. If firms can be held liable for every piece of content on their site they would face an impossible job of policing and vetting everything before publication, particularly where there a large sites that encourage social interaction, such as YouTube and Facebook.

Google says it will vigorously appeal the case. The BBC report says that there is no indication that a similar case could or would be brought in any other European country at the moment. However Italy does seem determined to pursue such cases and similar ones are ongoing against other firms, such as eBay, Yahoo and Facebook.

Richard Thomas, the UK's former information commissioner and consultant to privacy law firm Hunton & Williams, said the case was "ridiculous". He is quoted as saying that "It is like prosecuting the post office for hate mail that is sent in the post. I can't imagine anything similar happening in (the UK). The case wasn't brought by the Italian equivalent of the information commissioner but by criminal prosecutors and we don't know their motives".

However, the verdict is likely to have ramifications for content providers around the world. Google said at the trial that pre-screening all YouTube content was impossible and the video at the centre of the case was posted on Google Video in 2006 shortly before the firm acquired YouTube. Italian prosecutors argued that Google broke Italian privacy law by not seeking the consent of all the parties involved before allowing it to go online, yet Google's lawyers said that the video was removed as soon as it was brought to its attention and that the firm also provided information on who posted it. As a result four students were expelled from their school in Turin, northern Italy.

Social networking website Facebook has once again run into a backlash from changes being made to its privacy policy. As reported by the BBC, the new conditions were introduced earlier this week with a pop-up box asking members to review and select their privacy settings. However, like previous changes to privacy and usage conditions, the change is attracting a large amount of negative feedback.

Digital rights groups and bloggers have responded with criticism of Facebook's changing policy, claiming that these are unnecessary and encouraged users to share their updates with the wider online community, as well as making content available to search engines. However, Facebook has responded by saying the changes should help members to manage updates they wanted to share, not trick them into revealing too much.

This is not the first time that Facebook has received such a response to changes, which reflects the extent of membership and usage of the site around the world. However, although it might damage their reputation in the short term, it remains to be seen whether this backlash has a long-term affect on usage of the service.

Facebook began testing the latest privacy changes during 2009 before introducing them site-wide. The changes let users decide who should see their updates, whether all 350 million Facebook members should see them, and if they should be viewable across the web. A spokesman said the changes to privacy made it easier to tune the audience for an update or status change so default settings of openness should have less impact, although users still have the ultimate choice of what to place on their profiles or updates.

Google has announced a new feature for AdWords advertisers that will be launched as part of the third-party content network (AdSense). In addition to matching ads with the topic of a web page through contextual advertising, advertisers will now be able to reach users based on their interests, independent of the content they are currently reading.

With this new interest-based advertising - which is being introduced in beta for selected advertisers initially - companies will be able to advertise to users based on their previous interactions with them, such as visits to their website. A number of interest categories will be offered, such as "sports enthusiasts," so that targeting can be improved to drive brand awareness or increase advert responses.

Google has been looking to add this type of feature for some time, following the user-profile options offered by Microsoft's adCenter PPC tool in the US. This latter system is supported by Microsoft's network of user details from Hotmail or Messenger, whereas Google has been lacking that level of targeting data. However, Google is now developing a base of information on user habits and offers searchers the additional relevancy that interest-based ads can provide. Users can visit the new Ads Preferences Manager to see what interest categories Google thinks they might fall into, or they can add and remove categories themselves. This Ads Preferences Manager can be found by clicking on most "Ads by Google" links on ads throughout the web.

The question will be how many web searchers will provide their details or be comfortable with the privacy issues that drive this new service. Clearly more relevant advertising should be of interest to most people, but the ways of serving that up may not be so acceptable. Google's official blog has also posted an article explaining the new system and outlining how they are making the option transparent to users, in the hope that they will encourage a wider uptake of this service for the benefit of advertisers and web users.

According to ChannelWeb, Microsoft has said that it will further reduce the amount of time that search activity data is retained, as long as their competitors - Google and Yahoo! - do the same.

This relates to demands by the European Commission privacy panel that search engines should not retain information on users' search activity, which are currently held for 18 months. Microsoft has said that they would be prepared to reduce this time period to 6 months to meet the demands for search anonymisation. Google curently holds data for 9 months, and Yahoo! for 13 months. Whether the other search engines will agree to this shorter period remains to be seen.

The main search engines retain information on users' online search behaviour in order to target advertising and, as persoanlised search becomes more active, to retain historical data to help imporve search results. However, privacy critics say that keeping these records raise concerns about identity and activity patterns, which should be protected. Most searchers are probably unaware that their data is being collected in this way and if they choose to use persoanlised search, they are agreeing that their historical data will be kept for a period.

Google AdWords have announced that the conversion tracking code supplied to advertisers now has an option not to be displayed on a website. Unlike Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter, Google's PPC tracking code has always displayed a small line of text on the page that's displayed once an action has been submitted. This has always been there to 'comply with privacy requirements' but also helps to promote Google's involvement on an advertiser's website.

So advertisers who use this code now have the option to hide the 'Google Site Stats' line of text and link to Google's privacy page. Existing advertisers will need to revise their existing code to remove this line, if required. New advertisers, or users of the conversion tracking code, are warned by Google if they choose to hide the link, that they should inform their website users about the tracking methods being used on the site through the site's privacy policy.