Privacy

This historic town, where America's founding fathers plotted during the Revolution and Milton Hershey later crafted his first chocolates, now boasts another distinction. It may become the nation's most closely watched small city. Some 165 closed-circuit TV cameras soon will provide live, round-the-clock scrutiny of nearly every street, park and other public space used by the 55,000 residents and the town's many tourists.

For more than 2 1/2 years, Farrah Fawcett's battle with cancer has sparked a flurry of headlines for celebrity tabloids. But it has also stripped the actress of her ability to seek treatment while maintaining her privacy, she said in an interview.

Individual privacy is under threat around the world as governments continue to introduce surveillance and information-gathering measures, according to an international rights group. Although privacy is improving in the former communist states of Eastern Europe, it is worsening across Western Europe, London-based Privacy International said. Concerns about terrorism, immigration and border security are driving the spread of identity and fingerprinting systems, it said. Greece, Romania and Canada had the best records of the 47 countries surveyed.

Cable company Charter Communications Inc. should delay plans to track customers' Internet use because of privacy concerns, two members of Congress said. Collecting data about Web surfing habits "raises substantial questions" about compliance with privacy law, Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) said in a letter to Charter President and Chief Executive Neil Smit. Charter, which has 2.8 million Internet customers, plans to begin the service as a test project in June with "a couple of hundred" customers in four markets, a spokeswoman for the St. Louis-based company said.

Party on, YouTubers. No need to worry about your privacy. Google Inc. has reached a deal with Viacom Inc. to protect the privacy of tens of millions of YouTube viewers. A judge had ordered Google, YouTube's corporate parent, to hand over user data as part of the $1-billion copyright infringement case brought by Viacom. According to the agreement, YouTube will mask the identities of individual viewers when it provides viewership records to Viacom. Among the things YouTube will cloak: user IDs and Internet protocol addresses (the unique numbers for each Web-connected device)

In his first public comments since allegations that he assaulted his mother and sister at a London hotel, actor Christian Bale asked for privacy Thursday. The Welsh-born actor brushed off questions about the alleged family dispute, saying he preferred to focus on the blockbuster movie "The Dark Knight," which had its premiere in Spain on Wednesday. "It's a deeply personal matter," Bale said at a news conference in Barcelona. "I would ask you to respect my privacy in the matter." The 34-year-old actor spent four hours talking to British police Tuesday after allegations he assaulted his mother and one of his three sisters in his suite at London's Dorchester Hotel two days earlier.

The Obama administration on Friday lost its bid to halt a lawsuit charging that President George W. Bush broke the law when he authorized warrantless spying on terrorism suspects, the only such case to make it to federal court. A federal appeals court rejected the Justice Department's bid to halt the lawsuit by a now-defunct Islamic charity over warrantless wiretapping.

In an effort to help Sen. Larry Craig, the American Civil Liberties Union is arguing that people who have sex in public restrooms have an expectation of privacy. Craig (R-Idaho) is asking the Minnesota Court of Appeals to let him withdraw his guilty plea to disorderly conduct stemming from a restroom sex sting at the Minneapolis airport. The ACLU filed a brief Tuesday supporting Craig.

Millions of fingers scurrying over mobile electronic devices probably paused this week as news emerged of a trove of text messages containing flirty and sexually explicit chat between Detroit Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick and one of his top aides. Even those engaging in more wholesome dialogue would be wise to wonder: Do text messages disappear -- like oral conversations -- or are they permanently logged somewhere for potential retrieval -- as e-mail usually is?

The Senate on Monday left the fate of a new electronic surveillance law backed by the Bush administration up in the air, as a Republican-led effort to cut off a Democrat-led debate and proceed to a vote on the bill failed, mostly along party lines. Heightening the drama surrounding expiration of the existing surveillance law at midnight Thursday, the Senate also failed to approve a Democratic effort to extend the deadline by 30 days.