"My friend got a call from her friend at Facebook, asking why she kept looking at his profile," says a privacy-conscious source at a major tech company. Turns out Facebook employees can (and do) check out anyone's profile. Not only that, but they also see which profiles a user has viewed — a major privacy violation. If you've been obsessed with a workmate or classmate, Facebook employees know. If Barack Obama's intern has been using the campaign account to troll for hotties, Facebook employees know. Within the company, it's considered a job perk, and employees check this data for fun.

Dear label-hating pundits who gush about Madonna's oh-so-innovative deal with Live Nation: Have you tried to buy anything from Live Nation's site? All I wanted was tix to a local show at a midsize club. Live Nation splatted my screen with so many upsells, signups and talking audio popups that I felt like I'd walked into the old Tower store on Newbury Street. Live Nation surcharged me nine bucks a pop for general admission seats. My print-at-home passes (left) were lost amid pages of tree-killing, color-ink-squandering ads. I Photoshopped the tickets onto one clean page for printing, solely for my own peace of mind.

Comcast has gotten a bitch-slap from Congressman Rick Boucher. Quick recap: Users said Comcast was screwing up file-sharing downloads via BitTorrent but no one believed them. Then the Associated Press did their own report, trying to download the Bible but failing. Comcast blundered through a denial, calling the wire report "web gossip." And it might get sued. All that and a pissed-off Congressman too? Not a good week for Philadelphia's cable guys.

A reader emailed Comcast to complain about its blocking the Bible and received back a typical PR-speak response. Within was this gem: "We have a responsibility to manage our network to ensure that our customers have the best broadband experience possible." Aha! I hadn't realized the "best broadband experience" excluded BitTorrent. That's Comcastic! Also a nice touch: Dismissing a story that ran over the Associated Press wire service as "web gossip." The full email after the jump.

It was only last week that Comcast was getting called the Antichrist for disrupting BitTorrent users on its network and preventing the Associated Press from downloading the Bible. Since then, Comcast has offered nothing but excuses. Now, Comcast might get sued.

Oh, god. For a few months, there have been rumblings of Comcast, the cable and Internet provider, intentionally disrupting BitTorrent traffic. The Associated Press verified the dusruption by trying to download a copy of the King James Bible via BitTorrent over Comcast-connected computers. A devilishly clever move, downloading a public-domain work unprotected by copyright, and suggesting that Comcast opposes the distribution of the Holy Book.

Gmail is increasing storage allocations for Google Apps accounts and speeding up the storage increases for standard Gmail accounts. I'm excited to get more space — I'm currently taking up 52 percent of my 2.7 gigabytes — but why now? With competitors offering free unlimited storage, Google is falling behind in webmail features. In August it started offering paid upgrades to Gmail. But why pay for space if you can get unlimited from Yahoo, gratis? Our guess is that the pay-to-play storage service has fallen flat, now that customers are used to getting the world for free. And that speaks to another problem for Google: Why did it want to charge in the first place? Some people whisper that Gmail may not be generating as much advertising revenue as people hoped.

Sorry to get your hopes up, folks. After early reports that American Express was giving cardholders $200 refunds on their iPhones — after Apple slashed the price earlier this month — it now seems the company has reconsidered its generosity. Early adopter Muhammad Saleem blogs that he only got a $100 refund, not the $200 he requested. An AmEx rep told him that he had to apply to Apple, which now offers a $100 credit to premature iPhone buyers, to get the other half. Saleem and other cardholders should consider themselves lucky to get anything at all, though. American Express discontinued its price-protection benefit last fall, and the company is only offering iPhone refunds at its discretion — likely because it's a high-profile case of a price drop, and it hopes to win positive publicity and customer goodwill.

There's one class of privileged iPhone buyers who are going to get all of their money back: Those who bought the phone with an American Express card. Extending its usual price-protection policy, the card issuer is refunding $200 back to anyone who paid the old $599 price for an iPhone, blogger Muhammad Saleem reports. All they need to do is call customer service, he writes. (It's not clear what's going to happen to people who bought the cheaper 4GB iPhone, since that was discontinued, rather than reduced in price.) Some Visa and MasterCard issuers have 60-day price-protection policies on their cards, but for early adopters who waited in line to buy the iPhone on June 29, that window has already passed. Update: American Express apparently discontinued its price-matching benefit last year. Anyone else, like Saleem, luck into a generous customer-service rep? Another first-hand report after the jump.

Thank goodness Ollie Kottke is a newborn and not a Harry Potter-obsessed preteen. If he were, then his father Jason Kottke would have had a real problem on his hands when UPS lied to him about its delivery of Kottke's copy of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" on Saturday. As it was, he was just inconvenienced. As was I. Here's my story — and to my mind, proof that Kottke's missing copy was not an isolated incident, and instead, a big problem for UPS and Amazon.com.

If you're an Amp'd Mobile subscriber, you're officially out of luck at midnight, when Amp'd stops providing customer service. Not that the bankrupt wireless carrier was providing much before. The Amp'd FAQ page, for example, tells customers that they can use their phones with Sprint and Verizon Wireless — but those carriers are telling would-be subscribers that the models are incompatible. There's no graceful exit from Amp'd, in other words. Unless you're former CEO Peter Adderton. Here's how he's planning a comeback, according to a well-placed source.

Valleywag has already noted the curious resemblance of Andrew Frame, the founder of VOIP startup Ooma, to "Arrested Development" character George Oscar Bluth II, a failed magician. But that's not the only curious resemblance we've spotted, now that Ooma's launched its long-delayed product. It turns out that Ooma's Hub, a $399 pice of hardware for making cheap Internet calls, competes with a $99 product that does the same thing and is already on the market.

Poor, deluded Meg Whitman. The eBay CEO is so out of touch with her customers' discontent that she brags to Bloomberg News about this fact: Less than half of the users of PayPal, eBay's online-checkout service, think it's "good." Granted, Google Checkout, the search engine's rival payment product, comes off less well. But Whitman should be distraught, not gleeful, at such low customer-satisfaction scores.

You know what's yet one more great thing about the gay people? Their consumer consciousness! They're early adopters, they're curious consumers—and they buy a HECK of a lot of phones. Here's author Jack Shamama's recent phone history, annotated. It's true what they say: a single gay can pretty much keep the economy happily spinning! And here's another fun anecdotal fact. Nearly half of the iPhone buyers we know are of the gay persuasion. Look around at the swishy corner of your office and tell us it's not true.

The offer at right (click to enlarge) recently went out to lifetime subscribers of Dave Eggers' whimsical quarterly McSweeney's. Written in that publication's oh-so-precious house style (which was funny seven years ago but now just makes you want to punch someone) the note starts off as a standard change of address form. But wait, there's more! They want to renege on that whole "lifetime subscriber" thing.

Hey, j-schooled kiddies scrivening away at the Podunk Times-Picayune in the hopes of one day making it into the Gray Lady's bosom? Check this out!

Apparently uninterested in the possibility of accidentally gaining microwave-based superpowers, San Franciscans are objecting to the growing number of microcell antennae planted surreptitiously in residential areas. Microcells are ostensibly designed to fill in coverage holes that big antennae can't reach, but since installing microcells requires no public or civic review beyond a building permit, they're easy for cellphone providers to slap up indiscriminately. The only concrete objections at present are aesthetic and safety, the latter on the grounds of wires blocking fire escapes. No correlation has yet been established with the increasing incidence of newborns with heat vision.

Two weeks ago Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni reviewed Kobe Club, the newest highly-contrived chowhouse from restaurateur/felon/Rocco DiSpirito co-star Jeffrey Chodorow. The Brunster did not find favor with the place, granting it zero stars and noting that "it presents too many insipid or insulting dishes at prices that draw blood from anyone without a trust fund or an expense account." Today Chodorow strikes back, taking out a full-page ad in the back of the Dining section (click to enlarge) that rambles on in crazy-person tiny type about how Bruni is out to get him and ends with this inevitable warning:

Remember, fondly, the time when companies were moderately coy about viral marketing? When there was at least a small degree of modest subtlety involved in deceiving consumers? Those days are long gone, as demonstrated by this Monster ad by Blockbuster for a "Blog/Viral Mkt Manager." The ideal candidate shall:

Today's the big day! Wal-Mart launches video downloads to compete with everybody else who's dipping their toe in the water. Movie downloads from $9.88 to $19.88, TV shows for $1.96, nicely undercutting the competition. Sure, the interface is a little garbled this morning, but have patience — you're just a few clicks away from Boynton Beach Club.