MediaFile

Mine and Yinka Adegoke’s story today on Intel’s proposal to use facial-recognition technology with a virtual TV service and set-top box has raised legitimate concerns about allowing Big Brother into consumers’ living rooms.

People’s reluctance to have a camera keep tabs on who is sitting in front of their TV may be a hurdle that Intel has underestimated as it struggles to convince media content providers to hand over their shows.

When I bought a Kinect for my Xbox last year, I felt paranoid for at least a couple of weeks every time I sat down on my sofa in front of my TV. Each time I turn on my Xbox, a camera — connected to Microsoft and the Internet — sees everything I do.

Microsoft doesn’t currently use the Kinect to track who is watching TV in my house, but it has also discussed this possibility with programmers and it might come one day.

For now, I’ve gotten used to Kinect looking at me, just like most people have become accustomed to Google tracking what they do on the web.

Facebook is having a vote on changes to its privacy policy. Not that you’d know it.

Voter turnout has always been a problem for developed nations, but what about developed social networks? Facebook, with its 900 million users, is often written about as if it were the personal prelature of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. But Facebook itself prefers the term “ecosystem” – with good reason. Facebook’s engineers provide the basic conditions for life – the agar at the bottom of the social-media Petri dish. In turn, it’s developers and users who really craft their own worlds, their own experiences of Facebook – not Facebook itself. And whatever world they craft, it can only exist in the laws that govern the Facebook universe. Who ultimately decides those laws? Facebook.

Given that reality, it’s amazing that most users don’t care a lick about the vote happening on the site, right now, today, over proposed changes to Facebook’s privacy policies. Nor did they care much about the last vote over the site’s Terms of Service, which happened in 2009. Of course, it’s hard to care about something you don’t know is happening. Even though the vote is making the news here and there, there’s no inkling of any promotion on Facebook itself about what sounds like a rather important site event.

Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker has finally found a company that meets her standards. Just days after saying she spent the first quarter turning down overpriced investments, her fund is investing $15 million in Lending Club.

Meeker, who leads Kleiner’s $1 billion Digital Growth Fund, told the All Things D conference last week that private-market valuations were high and she and her colleagues “just were having trouble getting comfortable.”

Lending Club is a service that matches people who want personal loans with others who would like to make them. Meeker is taking a seat on its board. John Mack, chairman emeritus of Morgan Stanley, where Meeker worked as an Internet analyst before joining Kleiner in 2010, is also investing $2.5 million.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is considering lowering the minimum membership age to include tweens. It raised eyebrows and kindled a new discussion about privacy and the propriety of inviting youngsters into what the company aspires to make the world’s biggest salesroom.

But I have a different concern: Soliciting children would be pretty strong evidence that Facebook needs a big boost to its already staggering 900 million membership to justify its valuation and business model. Having courted every early, middle and late adopter possible, there isn’t much low-hanging fruit for Facebook anymore. But courting tweens would inevitably invite scrutiny and regulation, since the prospect of cyberstalking is even more toxic that cyberbullying.

In other words, the potential rule change looks like an act of desperation. Coming off a miserable stock market debut, both the merits and atmospherics of this notion are decidedly bad.

Taylor Swift, country music’s current sweetheart, performed at the Wal-Mart annual meeting Friday. But her record label doesn’t really want you to know that. Or at the very least, they didn’t want you to see or hear her.

Neither side is saying why, but is this a good time to mention the Mexican bribery allegations swirling around Wal-Mart?

Wal-Mart typically brings in top acts for its annual meeting, which is as much a pep rally for its employees as an exercise in corporate governance. Ben Stiller and Will Smith have served as hosts in the past, and this year’s MC duties went to none other than Justin Timberlake. In addition to JT and Swift,  other musical acts who showed up to serenade Wal-Mart workers Friday included Celine Dion, Lionel Richie, Juanes and the Zac Brown Band.

With about 900 million people, Facebook is larger than all but two countries in the world. But the nation of Facebook’s experiment with direct democracy may be coming to an end after only a few years.

On Friday, Facebook said it will “review” a process that allows users of the online social network to vote for or against changes to its privacy and site governance policies.

The user feedback process was implemented at a time when Facebook a much smaller, privately-held company and may no longer be well-suited to the company’s current situation, Facebook explained  in a blog post.

As Facebook continues its search for a bottom after only eight trading days as a public company, there’s a much bigger problem than the $40 billion in market cap it has lost. The people behind Facebook’s dubious $100 billion-plus self-valuation were apparently as doubtful as the rest of us. At stake is the fate of Wall Street’s soul. To paraphrase Sir Thomas More’s line in A Man For All Seasons: “It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world…” – but for Facebook?

Facebook’s interests are no more aligned with The Street’s than with its members‘. Wall Street needs to take the offense, see the handwriting on the wall and project itself as the ultimate defender of transparent, market principles, which is the only asset it has.

Facebook’s much-anticipated public launch has gone from bad to worse. It priced itself at the high range of $38 and opened 30 minutes late – some 20 of those with traders completely in the dark. Nasdaq has egg on its face and a possible liability in the tens of millions of dollars. Retail investors who bought into the hype are still losing money. Days after the May 18 launch, the tangled mess of positions that may or may not have been taken were still being unwound.

This morning, Google took the wraps off  how it plans to use Zagat, the popular restaurant guide known for its burgundy pocket books. The Zagat restaurant  listings are now incorporated in Google + and its local service and, more to the point, are now free. People can access more than 35,000 summarized user reviews from Zagat for more than 90 cities across the globe using either Google +, its search function or through maps.

Google said it will continue to publish the guidebooks and expand to other cities like Dubai, Sydney and Melbourne.

Google picked up Zagat for $151 million last September in a move to broaden its offerings for local based content. Founded by Tim and Nina Zagat,  the 30-plus year old eponymous guide  takes customer surveys and compiles them into brief and snappy summaries . It was a pioneer of amassing local restaurant reviews by people but over the years it  faced stiff challenges from upstarts such as Yelp– especially when a majority of Zagat’s content was subscription based.

Google just put out a study touting metrics as a way to sell more advertising.

But the most interesting part of the study is the timing. It comes on the heels of the Facebook advertising fiasco, when just days before its hotly anticipated IPO, General Motors said it would stop advertising on the social network, raising the question of the value of a Facebook ad.

The lure of online advertising has always been the promise of immediate and precise information (in theory at least) about how an ad worked. In industry speak, it is referred to as ROI– return on investment.

Google and Facebook are fierce rivals for online advertising and part of the reason for Facebook’s astronomical valuation (yes, even though its IPO was widely considered a flop)  is the promise of it sucking up more ad dollars down the line.

Kleiner Perkins partner Ellen Pao has unleashed one of Silicon Valley’s juiciest lawsuits in recent memory, alleging discrimination, harassment, and even an out-of-the-box solution to her woes proposed by a colleague: marriage to her harasser.

But Pao didn’t let this awkward legal situation stop her from stepping out to a couple of parties in Palo Alto Thursday night, just days after news of her lawsuit leaked out.  That included one held by her employers at Palo Alto’s Reposado, a busy Mexican restaurant, for some of Kleiner’s start-up companies.

There, Pao held court on one side of the room, greeted with hugs and hearty handshakes by a number of start-up entrepreneurs she has worked with. Meanwhile, other Kleiner partners at the bash– including Matt Murphy and Ted Schlein– clutched their drinks and steered clear of their suddenly famous colleague.