On most smartphones today, the address book contains details that go far beyond basic information. Along with phone numbers, there are e-mail addresses, birthdays, work and home numbers, photos and so on. What kind of mindset thinks it's OK to grab all of this data and just upload it, without telling the user? Path has displayed complete disrespect for user privacy and Morin's cynical "We are sorry" response is filled with so much weasel language that it takes one's breath away: "We care deeply about your privacy and about creating a trusted place for you to share life with your close friends and family." Really? Why did you enable the thievery, then, dude?

Our thanks go out to Arun Thampi for his vigilance. Similarly to Josh Davis who noticed that another new, hot social startup, Pinterest was rather shy about disclosing its activities. "If you post a pin to Pinterest, and it links to an ecommerce site that happens to have an affiliate program, Pinterest modifies the link to add their own affiliate tracking code. If someone clicks through the picture from Pinterest and makes a purchase, Pinterest gets paid. They don't have any disclosure of this link modification on their site..." wrote Josh Davis on LLSocial.com on Tuesday.

The worry now is that an entire generation of social networking startups are populated by people — founders, funders, managers, programmers — who think that it's perfectly in order to deceive or steal from their customers.

THIS JUST IN: Hipster is also uploading parts of user iPhone address book to its servers.

Tellingly, Greece, which is the subject of so much attention these days, is at the back of the field. Indeed, the total lack of innovation and entrepreneurship in the Greek economy is such an elephant in the EU room that it cannot be ignored much longer. In his most recent report, Hugo Scott-Gall of Goldman Sachs wrote that "the competitive advantage of innovation is one that developed markets need to keep" and in the case of European countries that need to find a way to grow, innovation is vital. Unfortunately for Athens, its team performs dreadfully on the innovation-entrepreneurship front. Greece has got the lowest overall patent grant rate, the lowest corporate start-up rate and highest cost of starting a new business. No wonder Merkel & Kroes are starting to feel comfortable with the "letting go" meme. And the rest of the PIIGS who trumpet "We are not Greece!" need to read the Brussels report on where they rank for innovation. Portugal, Spain and Italy are not exactly "Leaders", and neither is Ireland, for that matter. After studying the report, the political classes in these countries might try to do something about the non-innovation and un-growth that marks their economies before it's too late to even contemplate catching up with their neighbours.

Wonder if Lavrov has read Assad: The Struggle for the Middle East by Patrick Seale? First published in 1988, it has lost little of its relevance despite the passing of time. Indeed, given what's now going on in Syria, its 552 pages remain ultra relevant. Despite, or perhaps because of his anti-Israel prejudice, Patrick Seale remains an influential commentator on events in the Arab world and he possesses a deep understanding of the Arab mind and how it works. On page 412 of Assad: The Struggle for the Middle East, Seale displays his skills as an observer and writer when describing the cunning of Hafiz al-Asad. Sergey Lavrov might take note here:

"Over the years, Asad had developed a negotiating technique which he frequently used with foreign guests, and [Robert] McFarlane [national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan from 1983 to 1985] was no exception. He would begin by exchanging a few pleasantries. Then he might ask, 'How is the weather in your country?' A Western guest would usually reply to the effect that at home it was colder than in Syria , giving Asad his opportunity. 'Indeed', he would say, 'it's warm here because the United Sates is stoking the fire!' There were two sorts of climate in the world, he would explain, one given by God, the other by the United States, and step by step he would make his point that the tension, crises and wars in the area must all be laid at Washington's door. An American visitor would feel compelled to defend himself, starting the meeting at a disadvantage.

Asad's next stratagem was to be extraordinarily digressive and argumentative. If the name of God were mentioned, this might set him off on a long discourse about Islam, Judaism and Christianity before he could be brought back to the matter in hand. Negotiating sessions would last for hours. More than one envoy who suffered this treatment came to the conclusion that Asad raised all sorts of irrelevant subjects simply to tire his visitors the better to control them. At the end of a wearisome session the temptation was to accept what he had to say simply to escape."

Academic prose is not everyone's thing, so Megan Garber of The Atlantic has filtered the research findings into "Be Better at Twitter: The Definitive, Data-Driven Guide". The result is distilled down into what we might call "Garber's Eight Rules for Tweeting": Old news is no news, Contribute to the story, Keep it short, Limit Twitter-specific syntax, Keep it to yourself, Provide context, Don't whine and Be a tease.

Will these stand the test of time as well as George Orwell's Six Rules of Writing have done? The author of Nineteen Eighty-Four was ahead of the game in 1948 when he advised "Never use a long word where a short one will do" & "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out". Orwell rules.

In a very comprehensive and very moving article titled The Cult of Nic Jones, music journalist Colin Irwin recalls the event that broke the hearts of so many fans of the English singer and guitarist: "And then it happened — one desperate February night in 1982. He'd been playing at Glossop Folk Club in Derbyshire and was almost back home in Cambridgeshire when his car was involved in a headlong collision with an articulated lorry. The theory is that Nic fell asleep at the wheel but nobody knows for sure, least of all Nic, who remembers nothing about the accident or any of the horrors that followed. His injuries were massive and his career was in tatters..."

"The 'never give offence' brigade imagines that a more plural society requires a greater imposition of censorship. In fact it is precisely because we do live in a plural society that we need the fullest extension possible of free speech. In a homogenous society in which everyone thought in exactly the same way then the giving of offence would be nothing more than gratuitous. But in the real world where societies are plural, then it is both inevitable and important that people offend the sensibilities of others. Inevitable, because where different beliefs are deeply held, clashes are unavoidable. And we should deal with those clashes rather than suppress them. Important because any kind of social change or social progress means offending some deeply held sensibilities. The right to 'subject each others' fundamental beliefs to criticism' is the bedrock of an open, diverse society. Or, as Rushdie put it in his essay In Good Faith, human beings 'understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the unsayable; not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.'

Rainy Day does not set out to offend, but it insists upon the right to offend. We wish to say the unsayable.

"By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world's information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date.

We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring. We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate."

Rewiring society? That's a pretty big claim to make about social networking. And there's more. According to Zuckerberg, a more open and connected world will "help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services", and Facebook will be right in the middle, of course. But it gets better because all this social networking will "bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government".

"By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few."

The person who wrote this is the CEO of a company with a projected market value of $100 billion that affects nearly a billion people. And he now wants to play a central role in how societies develop and are governed. This is an audacious move. Mark Zuckerberg is 28.

Today, 1 February is the St Brigid's Day Raftery commemorated in Anois teacht an Earraigh, but there's certainly no evidence of the coming of spring where your writer is typing this. The temperature is firmly under zero and while it's not as cold in Ireland, the weather there is anything but springy. To be sure, there's "a stretch in the evening", as the people say, but conditions are chilling. An unscientific analysis of Raftery's poem then might lead one to conclude that our winters are getting colder, not warmer, as some alarmists would have us believe. The poet certainly suggests that it was quite mild in early February around the end of the 18th- and the beginning of the 19th century.

Why would the wandering poet Raftery have been so aware of St Brigid's Day? Well, back in his time, when Ireland was an agrarian society, the first of February was considered the start of the growth season. The date had long been held sacred as Imbolg, the Celtic festival of Spring, but after Christianity arrived, Saint Brigid was honoured instead of the pagan gods. She was a fifth-century mystic who became the patron saint of blacksmiths and healers. By the way, my mother will attend the "blessing of the scarves" in the local church today and, like many believers, she considers the wearing of such a scarf to be far better protection against a sore throat that any amount of antibiotics. Saint Brigid was also the patron saint of poets, a second reason, perhaps, for Raftery's mentioning of her feast day.

Being a saint, Brigid was able to perform miracle. Most of hers involved the multiplication of food such as providing butter for the poor. It is said that she once caused cows to give milk three times the same day to enable visiting bishops to have enough to drink. As Irish monks wandered through Europe, they carried their belief in Brigid with them. In England, many churches were dedicated to her, most notably St. Bride's Church in London's Fleet Street. Designed by Wren, it was the spiritual home of the printing and media trades for 200 years. And now it's in cyberspace — where most hacks and ink-stained drudges (St. Matt?) hang out.

Apart from the blessed scarves, the last vestiges of the Brigid cult in Ireland today are plaited crosses fashioned from rushes. In 1961, when the Republic decided to launch a national television service, the St Brigid's Cross was chosen as its logo and it remained part of the station's corporate identity for many years before being reduced to such a stylized form as to be all but unrecognizable. Then it was disappeared.

Snippet: "The German solution will only cause a recession, or more recessions, in the periphery. This will cause money to flow into Germany, not out of Germany, because the risk of default in the periphery increases and in time much of Europe will begin to look like Greece, teetering on the edge. As money flows into Germany, German bond yields fall, Greece will default, and this will give the others permission to do likewise because a default in Greece sets off a domino effect all over Europe because Europeans will say, 'Well, if the Greeks can do it, why can't we?' Is it any wonder right now that the price of gold is firm, that the yield on German bonds is falling and that the euro is weakening against the dollar?" He's onto something.

Seseña, in Toledo province, is home to a property development that encapsulates the madness which has led to Spain's dramatic fall from prosperity to poverty. Of the 13,000 apartments in Residencial Francisco Hernando, barely ten percent are occupied, and anyone who dares venture into this spectral space cannot wait to find the exit sign. But this is not the only development of its kind. In 2006 alone, 800,000 apartments were built in Spain — more than in France, Italy and Germany combined that year. Like Ireland, which was similarly gripped by an irrational property speculation fever, Spain is facing ruin. At the end of September last year, El Pais reported that Spanish banks had some €210 billion worth of mortgages on their balance sheets and 40 percent of that amount was said to be "doubtful". That should give those meeting in Brussels today something extra to think about as they ponder what to do about the crisis engulfing the world's "lifestyle superpower".