Ephemerality machine and $800 million on-again-off-again moral panic generator Snapchat sees some heavy stuff. The casual pics you send (or receive) might be just the evidence police are looking for—so Snapchat put together this handy manual for requesting your data.

I'm not sure how many of you still have Yahoo accounts that you actually remember the password for, but just in case, the company is on the heels of Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft with law enforcement disclosure figures.

Quickly following alleged PRISM pals Microsoft and Facebook, Apple just won government permission and disclosed a chunk of its data: here's a (very) rough idea of how many of our iPhones are under surveillance.

It's not enough, but it's sure a start: with post-PRISM privacy backlash still flaring, Facebook pressed the US government to allow some limited disclosure of gag order demands. This is our first glimpse at how much of our data is handed over.

PRISM—whatever it is in all exactness—is far from the only way Microsoft tips off the American defense apparatus. Sometimes, Bloomberg says, it's just as simple as telling the feds what's broken.

Path is not a popular app. Outside of privacy crusaders and various geek niches, it's virtually unknown—a sanctimonious social network built to appeal to Facebook's haters, that ended up appealing to few. But for some reason, it's spiking in popularity around the world. Inexplicable, right? No—just shady spam tactics and money at work.

Google says it's not giving the NSA direct access to your life online. Edward Snowden says otherwise. Either way, Google is upfront about one thing: it wants to disclose as much of its government cooperation as possible, if only it were allowed. So why have they never bothered lobbying congress about this, ever?

No one knows what Palantir—named after a magical rock in Lord of The Rings that granted remote vision—exactly does. But we know enough to know it's not just another California startup. The secretive data-mining company works directly with the American government, has a product named "Prism," and some very close ties to Facebook, one of the NSA's top targets.

An interesting choice of words there from Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley. Auto-check-ins aren't here yet, he explains, but they would be a "natural progression" of the location-broadcasting we're already doing now.

Cnet reports Twitter's top counsel, Nicole Wong, will be the White House's new (and first!) Chief Privacy Officer. If Obama wanted to reach into the private sector, this isn't a bad pick: Twitter's privacy record is generally good.

And more importantly, publicly sharing photos of himself doing it, soaking and unclothed. The future is now.

Of all the possible privacy night terrors you can conjure up around Google's fantastically-engineered cosplay device, spotting Glass next to you at a urinal ranks near the top. But for Rackspace employee and professional Guy Who Shows Up at Tech Stuff Robert Scoble, this is totally normal. He's doing it right now.

Randi Zuckerberg, famous for her accomplishments in the field of being related to her own brother, loves the public eye. Except when it's mean. So please, Randi implores, only nice attention from now on.