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Facebook is letting users play with their Timelines for seven days before taking them live. At some point in history, a brilliant   person invented the concept of “spring cleaning,” to force people to give their home a thorough scrubbing at least once a year. As Facebook rolls out its new profile page design called  Timeline , it’s hoping to force its 800 million users to do something similar: a “privacy cleanse” of their digital homes. Facebook spokesperson Meredith Chin took me on a tour of her own Facebook Timeline page yesterday. Facebook employees and developers already have access to the new design, as do those eager to try it out who took advantage of  a hack-around . Chin tells me that one million people have already activated Timeline. As for the rest of us, Facebook says it’s coming “soon,” and indicated that it’ll likely be available within a month. Timeline is intended to shift your Facebook profile page from the current “snapshot of you” to someth...

Criminals and cyber bullies to be banned from the web Criminals who commit offences online and cyber bullies will be banned from the internet as part of the Government’s new cyber security strategy, announced today. It calls for police and courts to make more use of existing “cyber sanctions” to restrict access to the social networks and instant messaging services in cases of hacking, fraud and online bullying. Sex offenders and those convicted of harrassment or anti-social behaviour also face more internet restrictions under the new strategy. Similar orders have been imposed on those charged with involvement in a series of cyber attacks by the Anonymous and LulzSec groups earlier this year, while they await trial. Cyber sanctions were also used following the riots this summer. Two teenagers in Dundee were banned from the web for inciting riots via Facebook. Officials are now looking into whether "cyber tag" technology could be used to monitor offenders and r...

Google didn't help catch Breivik and that means we need less internet privacy We all know that Google engages in massive invasions of privacy on a daily basis through their tracking of every search along with their ability to track a single user to almost every site they visit. What do we have to show for it? Simply put: nothing. Anders Breivik, the confessed killer behind the Oslo and Utoya attacks, allegedly spent a whopping 200 hours on Google searching bomb related terms like the painfully obvious “how to make a bomb.” How does one of the world’s largest corporations and unarguably the most powerful search engine company on earth manage to miss this?