Amid a furor over its recent redesign, and with privacy concerns tailing its every move, Facebook has filed paperwork to start its own political action committee.

PAC’s are used to distribute money to individual candidates, and observers see it as a sign that social media companies have an increasing stake in the political landscape,reported The Hill.

“FB PAC will give our employees a way to make their voice heard in the political process by supporting candidates who share our goals of promoting the value of innovation to our economy,” a spokesman said, “while giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”

Legislative debates about patents, monopolies and privacy have been been the main preserve of Microsoft and Google, two large tech companies that both have PACs.

Facebook has four registered lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and spent $550,000 in lobbying fees in fiscal year 2011. This is a big jump from the $350,000 it spent in 2010. In fact, in the second quarter this year, Facebook spent more than it ever has before on lobbying.

According to Open Secrets, the majority of Facebook’s money is directed at copyright, patent and trademark issues and media information and publishing sectors, but it also has a stake in natural resources and trade.

Most recently, it lobbied on the America Invests Act, which enacted the most significant change to U.S. patent law since 1952, changing it from a “first to invent” to a “first to file” system.

Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan group that focuses on privacy issues, told The New York Times that he was not surprised  Facebook is looking to step up its lobbying efforts.

“Facebook is monetizing its platform,” Court said. “This is all about how much it is going to be able to push the envelope with consumers and not have the government require it to change.”

After campaigning over the last month on social media, Rep. Michele Bachmann secured enough votes from followers to be included in TIME magazine’s list of the top 100 most influential people of 2011. Controversial conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh wrote the profile on Bachmann for the magazine, and Bachmann is the only 2012 hopeful to make the list.

Here’s Limbaugh’s review of Bachmann:

I don’t mind telling you that I’m a great admirer of Michele Bachmann’s. Far from being the fringe outlier depicted by the mainstream media — and all too often by some on the right — she is a strong spokeswoman for unapologetic conservatism. She is neither extreme nor unreasonable, which is why her philosophy has resonated with grass-roots conservatives. She is unafraid to speak out against the crushing debt crisis we face. She is energized, rather than deterred, by the caustic criticism she constantly endures.

Michele, 55, had ambition from the get-go. A stay-at-home mom of five children and 23 foster kids, she ultimately became a tax attorney, small-business owner with her husband and political firebrand who runs rings around her opponents. If she were liberal, she’d be celebrated from the mountaintops. But she’s conservative. So because she is smart, talented and accomplished and a natural leader — not to mention attractive — the left brands her as a flame-throwing lightweight. They underestimate her at their own risk.

Bachmann may have pushed for inclusion, but in a statement she said she’s “humbled to learn of my selection and grateful to be named among such a variety of notable people affecting our world.”

“My inclusion on this list is a reflection of the growing voice of everyday Americans who desire to preserve and further the liberty on which our great country was founded,” she added.

In a Facebook message on Thursday morning she was more pointed.

“While Democrats may call us extreme, we know our Tea Party values reflect the best of America — being included on TIME’s list is a welcome affirmation,” Bachmann wrote. “Click ‘like’ if you agree with Rush Limbaugh that the Left underestimates us at their own risk.

Bachmann campaigned hard on Facebook and Twitter to get included on the list. TIME ran a contest among readers who could vote from a list just shy of 200 figures. Over the last few weeks, she send out reminders urging her supporters to vote her up the list.

“Today is the last day to take a stand in the 2011 Time 100 Most Influential Poll,” she wrote earlier this week. “Show liberals & the mainstream media that constitutional conservatives are influential. “Like” this if you’ll consider supporting me.”

And on Twitter her campaign team wrote, “Michele is an American leader. Tell Time’s editors she belongs on their 100 list http://ti.me/gWwngy #TIME100″

Bachmann finished 45th on the list with 12,889 votes.

Currently, 671 Facebook users have agreed to call in (it’s unclear whether the campaign is manning phones, however, as my call went to voicemail), but will it change Coleman’s mind? He has rescinded his Nov. 5 comment that he’d “step back” if behind in the vote, saying “that statement was a mistake.” And he has, rather famously, changed his mind on important issues before — but all indicators say he won’t back down.

Full text of the Facebook campaign after the jump.

Late last week a computer security expert reported that even if Facebook users are not logged in to their account and have not opted in to the Beacon service, third-party vendors are still sending information through the service to Facebook.  While this does not contradict the incremental changes Facebook made last week, it has rankled some in the privacy advocacy community.  According to the researcher, Stefan Berteau, “the bottom line is that Facebook is materially misrepresenting the privacy impact of their Beacon program, and presenting users with the appearance of control over their information when in fact they have almost none.”The San Jose Mercury News editorial board did not react kindly to the news, publishing an editorial entitled “Facebook move doesn’t clear up privacy fears“:

“Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have made personal lives an open book on the Internet, especially for the younger generation. But the blowup over Facebook’s controversial advertising program made it clear that users want to control what goes out there. And for many, their buying habits are off limits.

“Internet sites and online marketers need to ensure that privacy protections aren’t chiseled away in this brave new world. Congress and other policy-makers need to get up to speed on what’s happening and decide if stronger protections are needed for this fundamental right.”
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Social networking sites have brought us into a new era of connectedness. But the basic expectation of privacy must not change.

The hit parade hasn’t stopped for Facebook’s creator and CEO, either.  According to the Times Online (UK), Mark Zuckerberg has failed to prevent the publication of documents from his time at Harvard from being published on a Harvard-based website.  The documents appear to be none too favorable to the young entrepreneur; the original article discusses longstanding claims that Zuckerberg stole ideas for the networking site from other programmers in 2003 and 2004.

In what interest groups are calling a victory for personal privacy, the popular social networking site Facebook.com said Thursday night it would make changes to its new Beacon service.

The service, which collects a wide array of personal data from third-party vendors and delivers it to Facebook for inclusion in users’ news feeds, has come under fire in recent weeks from privacy advocates, led by MoveOn.org.  MoveOn helped drive attention to a group organized on Facebook itself entitled “Facebook, stop invading my privacy!”, which eventually grew to over 50,000 users by Thursday. In a statement, Facebook detailed the way Beacon will now work:

-Stories about actions users take on external websites will continue to be presented to users at the top of their News Feed the next time they return to Facebook. These stories will now always be expanded on their home page so they can see and read them clearly.
- Users must click on “OK” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice.
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As with all its products, Facebook will continue to iterate quickly and listen to feedback from its users.

Facebook also sought to dispel what it called “misinformation in the market about some key aspects of how Beacon works”:

- Participation in Beacon is free for all partner sites.
- Beacon only allows for the sharing of specific actions on the specific sites participating in Beacon
- Beacon only has the potential to display actions to a selection of a user’s friends through News Feed and on a user’s Mini-Feed.
- Facebook is not sharing user information with participating sites and never sells user information.

Adam Green of MoveOn said in an accompanying statement:  “If Facebook changes their policy so that no private purchases made on other websites are displayed publicly on Facebook without a user’s explicit permission, that would be a huge step in the right direction — and would say a lot about the ability of everyday Internet users to band together to make a difference.”

The Beacon snafu has been an exercise in “Opt-in” vs. “Opt-out” services on the Internet.  The difference is subtle:  Opt-in means you, the user, have to explicitly authorize the service to perform an action, while Opt-out means you have to explicitly tell the service not to perform that action.  In the case of Facebook’s Beacon, sites such as Fandango.com were sending movie ticket purchase data to Facebook with only an easily-missed notification in the corner of the screen, and no facility for preventing the transmission of that data.  According to a slideshow produced by MoveOn, Facebook began making incremental changes to the system this week, culminating in Thursday’s announcement.

When you use Facebook, the popular social networking service, do you know where your personal data might end up?

The rapidly expanding site, recently valued at $15 billion, has continually added features that allow users to keep track of  friends and acquaintances in unique ways, such as the News Feed, a series of mini-stories about what one’s connections are up to. When the site implemented News Feed, users complained about the invasion of privacy. Facebook responded by implementing some controls on the service, and it forged ahead.

Now they’re facing another backlash.The dust-up is over Facebook’s Beacon service, which integrates with not just the News Feed but also with several external vendors, such as Fandango, a movie ticket site. As Ari Rabin-Havt explains at Open Left:

On Saturday night I used Fandango to purchase the tickets for the movie Michael Clayton.

Then on Sunday, I looked at my Facebook feed and saw this:

“Ari bought Michael Clayton on Fandango. 5:25PM”

Having your privacy violated is a strange feeling. I don’t really care that people know I went to the movies on Saturday night. I would freely share this information with anyone. But that’s exactly the point. It should be up to me to share this information with others, not up to Facebook or Fandango to make that choice for me.

Protest groups have already sprung up on Facebook, where, by all accounts, the admins are relatively responsive to the community. MoveOn.org is getting into the fight as well, writing a Civic Action Alert calling attention to the  protest groups and the issue at hand:

Facebook says its users can “opt out” of having their private purchases reported to the world. But the link is easy to miss. And even if you do “opt out” for purchases on one site, it doesn’t apply to purchases on another site — you have to keep opting out over and over again. The obvious solution is to switch to an “opt in” policy, like most other applications on Facebook.

Is Facebook going to respond in some way?  Probably.  Again, they’ve been fairly responsive to their user base in the past, and are engaged in a rapidly changing business (online social networking) in which new players are coming online on a regular basis.  But are they required to respond?  Essentially, no.  Their Terms of Use, in saying “We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change, modify, add, or delete portions of these Terms of Use at any time without further notice…” ensure that Facebook Inc. has full control over the rules for the way its site is used, however “open” the platform may feel to a single user.

Then again, perhaps it’s all a moot argument — ideas on how to block the Beacon service are already popping up across the Web.  Long live the immediate gratification of the Web!