FRAMINGHAM – Apple’s new $1 billion dollar data center looms large on Google Earth, putting its Maiden, N.C., home on the map. From the roof to its sides, the 500,000-square-foot building is painted white to reflect the sun’s heat back into space.

It would be unfair to call Maiden, population 3,409, an unlikely place for a new data center.

Large cloud providers are building monolithic facilities in areas that offer relatively low-cost land as well as abundant and somewhat inexpensive electricity.

Western North Carolina, where Maiden is located, fits such a bill.

Google has already built a $600 million data center in Lenoir, N.C., less than an hour’s drive from Maiden. And Facebook is building a $450 million, 300,000 square foot data center in Forest City, N.C., just over an hour way.

When Google announced plans for its North Carolina data center in 2007, Scott Millar, president of the Catawba County Economic Development Corp., was hopeful that the decision would draw the curiosity and interest of other tech firms.

Now, Millar said, “I think the dynamics that brought Google are still in place for others.” The addition of an Apple data center has only increased interest in the area, he noted.

“Having the Apple brand in our community says to a lot of folks that if Apple’s investing here, then we can invest here,” said Millar.

It also has intangible benefits, particularly among young people who see the Apple logo and think, “Maybe there is a future for me here,” he said.

The region is appealing to data centers partly because it has a good electric grid. There’s a long legacy of furniture and textile manufacturing, both power-intensive industries.

Tax breaks help as well. Apple has received 10-year 50% break in real estate taxes and an 85% break in personal property taxes. The economic development effort also includes fast turnaround on permits, and for Apple, a building inspector was stationed on-site to help speed construction, said Millar.

Apple also has room to expand. Its facility is located on some 200 acres, and it is occupying only a small part of the site for now, said Millar.

Apple “brought us national attention as a player in the tech world,” said Todd Herms, Maiden’s town manager.

Apple’s data center turned up on Google Earth just recently, something Fortune may have been the first to report. But Herms said there are plenty of large buildings in the area, including an industrial park three miles south with 12 buildings of similar size. The area also has furniture, paper products and textile manufacturing facilities, he said.

Apple’s data center is creating about 50 direct jobs and 250 indirect jobs, such as contractors who will work on the site. The construction work created 2,500 to 3,000 jobs.

Herms said he isn’t expecting Apple to change the fundamental, Mayberry-type nature of the town, a place where everybody knows one another.

The town is planning to buy some iPads for next year, and it has some Apple computers as well, but Dell machines and BlackBerries are also in use. Herms uses an iPhone, “but I’ve always used an iPhone,” he noted.

SAN FRANCISCO – Once again, Facebook has messed with users’ privacy in the name of a new feature.

The latest controversy is over Facebook facial recognition, which can automatically tag friends in photos just by matching the image to a massive database of faces.

Face recognition is a useful, time-saving feature — at least when it works. But it’s also a creepy addition to Facebook that opts you in automatically. As my colleague Sarah Jacobsson Purewal reported, you can only opt out of getting automatically tagged by friends. The database can still technically match your name to your face.
Therein lies Facebook’s big dilemma, the one that comes up time after time, with each new change to the site that demands more of users’ personal information: Yes, letting users opt-in to new features would be a more respectful approach. But because Facebook is inherently social — that is, it relies on the participation of many users — opt-in is much trickier to pull off. In some cases, it’s just impractical.

Take, for example, the “instant personalization” feature introduced last year. This allows partnering Websites to use and display information from your public Facebook profile, and from your friends’ public profiles. For example, if you write user reviews on Rotten Tomatoes or Yelp, your friends can see those reviews when they visit the site, provided they’re logged into Facebook. Had Facebook made this feature opt-in instead of opt-out, most people wouldn’t have bothered. That would defeat the purpose of personalization, which relies on having lots of recommendations from people you know.

A simpler example is Facebook’s broader attitude toward public vs. private information. In late 2009, Facebook made changes to its privacy settings to put an emphasis on “everyone,” so that users would share their status updates with the entire Internet by default. In making this change, Facebook was trying to be more like Twitter — a massive, ongoing, public conversation between lots of people, regardless of whether they’re friends or strangers. I like Twitter, and I understand by Facebook would want to make this change. But again, it only works if a critical mass of people are participating. That’s why the “Everyone” option for status updates is opt-out, rather than opt-in.

With facial recognition, Facebook faces the same dilemma. Facebook could give people the choice to opt in to its photo recognition database, but then how many people would bother? The whole point of Facebook facial recognition is to tag all of your friends in a photo without any manual work. If most of your friends aren’t participating, the feature is worthless.

I’m not defending Facebook’s actions, but I understand why the site behaves the way it does. As long as Facebook introduces new features, there will be new privacy snafus. Facial recognition wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last.

FRAMINGHAM – As more people create Facebook profiles (500 million and growing), and sign on to the many social media sites available today, hiring managers are finding they have new opportunities to get background information on job candidates.

Tapping into a potential hire’s Facebook profile, or Twitter account, for information means you can learn more about a candidate’s personality than you might get with just a job interview. A Facebook profile, or collection of tweets, can offer additional insight into whether or not a person might be a good fit with a corporation’s culture. On the flip side, a thorough check of one’s social media footprint might also uncover some serious missteps, or questionable judgments, a potential hire has made in their past. Having the benefit of finding this BEFORE a hire has been made may make some organizations feel thankful they’ve dodged the bullet of a potential disastrous addition to the work ranks.

[See also: Checking job candidates' FB pages can come back to haunt you]

But in between the good and the bad information is plenty of data that is illegal to view if you are making a hiring decision. And even if a hiring manager honestly does not use off-limits material, once they have seen it on Facebook, it can become grounds for a lawsuit.

“It not about the medium,” according to Victoria Mavis, president & senior consultant at Core People Resources, a human-resource-services firm in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.”It’s about what you do with the information you get. Whether I get it off the background information check or off of Facebook, is it information I should have access to in the first place?”

For a little guidance on navigating the new landscape of information out there on potential hires, we spoke with human resource and labor law experts on ways to be smart when using Facebook and other social media to check up on job candidates.

Tip #1: If you’re going to use Facebook to vet job applicants, make it clear, up front, in the hiring process

If you plan to take advantage of social media venues, like Facebook, to conduct background investigations, the most important first step is to have a policy, and make sure candidates are aware of it, said Mavis.

“Let candidates know you are going to do background checks so you can do it properly and get authorization,” she said.

That means disclosing all of the places you may go searching for information about a potential hire, and all of the things you may go looking for.

“Identify ahead of time the five or ten things that, if you saw them on a candidate’s profile, would concern you about them. That might be a reference to use of illegal drugs, or graphics promoting hate,” said Mavis. “Also figure out what might be some positives you would seek, such as a candidate who is active in their community, or involved in a cause, such as cancer research.”

Tip #2: But remember, once you’ve viewed it, it can put you in a legal conundrum

Using Mavis’ previous point about finding out a potential hire is involved in cancer research, brings us to a concern that goes along with discovery this kind of information. As Jon Hyman, a partner in the Labor & Employment Group at Ohio legal firm Kohrman Jackson & Krantz, notes, finding out someone is involved with a cancer-related cause also means you might discover health information you shouldn’t access as a hiring organization.

“There are a lot of EEO (Equal Employment Opportunity) issues to consider,” said Hyman. “Say you are doing a Facebook search on a potential employee, and find they have “liked” the Komen Foundation. You read through the page and find this person is a breast cancer survivor. Now the bell has rung that this person has had cancer, and you now have disability-discrimination issues, whether it’s based on the actual disability, or perceived disability. You now also have genetic-information-discrimination possibilities. And that bell can’t be un-rung. And as an employer who has to make a hiring decision, you get put in the unenviable position of having to prove a negative; of having to prove that you didnt use that information as part of the decision.”

Other obvious EEO areas you don’t want to view while looking at Facebook and other social media would include religious affiliations, race status or age.

“You would never ask on a job application what year someone graduated from college, because that could disclose how old someone is,” noted Hyman.”That is not something you want to know when making hiring decision. But if you go on Facebook, you can see what year a person graduated, and you can easily put two and two together and figure out something that is information you would never ask for otherwise.”

Tip #3: Consider a third party to do the research for you

Having an independent researcher, someone not linked to the hiring and recruiting process, look for information and report back to you may be the best way to avoid any impropriety on the part of the hiring organization, said Mavis.

“If I can access your Facebook profile, I can see your sex, your age, your race. All that is privy to me and I can’t realistically say I didn’t have access to it,” she said. “But as a researcher, I could have access to it. I just dont report it on to the hiring managers.”

An independent researcher does not always have to be someone outside the company, said Mavis. Smaller organizations that may not be able to afford to hire a third-party can recruit an employee within the company who has no influence on the hiring decision.

Whoever conducts the background check should work from a list of information the employer has predetermined that they want to find, which can be both positive and negative attributes. The researcher can then print or copy the materials they have found and bring them back to the hiring organization; omitting any information that is illegal to use in a hiring decision. This ensures hiring personnel do not have access to protected information, said Mavis.

Tip #4: Understand what you find may not be reliable or accurate

“Just because someone puts it on a blog or Twitter, doesn’t mean it’s true,” said Hyman.

While information uncovered during a background investigation using Facebook, Twitter, blogs or other online sites, may make a candidate seem like a poor fit, it’s important to follow up and let them know what you have found.

“If you decide not to hire a candidate based on something a researcher has found, present them with that information, explain why it’s a concern,” said Mavis. “There is always a chance it’s incorrect on social media. It could even be the wrong person. But the candidate deserves a chance to explain.”

SAN FRANCISCO – It was only a matter of time before complaints over Facebook’s new facial recognition technology resulted in a complaint with the Feds. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has done just that: it filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, asking the FTC to bar Facebook from using the technology.

EPIC is not alone in pressuring the FTC: Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has also called on the FTC to look into the social networking site’s efforts. He commended EPIC for filing the complaint, saying it was an important privacy matter.

“When it comes to users’ privacy, Facebook’s policy should be: ‘Ask for permission, don’t assume it,’” Rep. Markey said in a statement. “Rather than facial recognition, there should be a Facebook recognition that changing privacy settings without permission is wrong.”

Indeed, EPIC highlighted in its complaint Facebook’s seemingly careless attitude when it comes to changing user’s privacy settings. EPIC cited the company’s Beacon service, as well as the company’s controversial policy of having a right to your data, even after you delete your account.

EPIC’s central argument seems to be that Facebook may have run afoul of consumer protection laws with how it rolled out the feature. The site gave little warning to users that it was going live, and only admitted the procedure was a mistake after the fact.

“Users could not reasonably have known that Facebook would use their photos to build a biometric database in order to implement a facial recognition technology under the control of Facebook,” the complaint reads in part.

In addition to calling for the FTC to force Facebook to stop using facial recognition, EPIC is also asking the agency to require the company to develop a “comprehensive privacy plan,” and forbid the site from reintroducing such a feature until its opt-out system is improved and “appropriate security safeguards” are established.

SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook’s new real-time commenting feature is now available to all users. Live commenting allows Facebook members to see new comments from their friends without having to reload the page.

“Live commenting, which we rolled out to all of our users a couple weeks ago, creates opportunities for spontaneous online conversations to take place in real time, leading to serendipitous connections that may not have ever happened otherwise,” writes Facebook’s Ken Deeter in a Monday blog post.
The upgrade, which brings a more dynamic feel to the social network’s interface, may also encourage users to spend more time on the site-certainly good news from Facebook’s perspective. Enabling live commenting wasn’t easy, however. Facebook engineers had to devise a new “push-based design” to get the feature to work on such a massive scale.

“This wasn’t a small challenge: every minute, we serve over 100 million pieces of content that may receive comments,” Deeter writes. “In that same minute, users submit around 650,000 comments that need to get routed to the correct viewers. To make this feature work, we needed to invent new systems to handle load patterns that we had never dealt with before.”

So will Facebook users take to live commenting? That remains to be seen. It’s possible that only the most devoted members will take advantage of the feature, while more casual users-those who visit the site occasionally a few times a day (or less)–won’t find it very compelling.

“Love the idea! But honestly, I didn’t expect comment to be real time. Because I only check my Facebook feeds at most once an hour. I am not expecting to use fb as a communication tool such as MSN,” writes user Zhang Yunqiao in the comments section of Deeter’s blog.

How about it, Facebook fans: Will you “Like” live commenting?

FRAMINGHAM – The Apple App Store hit the 10 billion app download mark overnight on Friday, marking a milestone involving an awful lot of Doodle Jump, Tap Tap Revenge and Angry Birds playing, not to mention Facebook and Pandora usage.

Apple is rewarding the downloader of the 10 billionth  free or paid App Store app with a $10,000 iTunes gift card in a bit of showmanship that Willy Wonka would be proud of. As of 7AM EST, however, Apple hadn’t publicly identified the winner, only saying that you’d need to come back later to find out who won.

MORE APPLE: iPhone 5 “iPhoneys” emerge

Apple put an iOS app countdown ticker on its Website last week to build buzz around the milestone and generated about 250 million app downloads since.  It also revealed a list of all-time most downloaded free and paid iPhone and iPad apps.

The Apple App Store hit the 1 billion mark in April of 2009, after opening in July of 2008.

Apple celebrated the 10 billionth song downloaded a little less than a year ago: Johnny Cash’s “Guess Things Happen That Way.

ANALYSIS: A billion reasons to read about Apple, Facebook and others

Apple’s year has gotten off to a captivating start, with CEO Steve Jobs taking a medical leave,  the company posting stellar financial results for Q1,  Apple showing up among the top 50 patent recipients in the United States,  and with buzz building for the iPhone 5 smartphone and iPad 2 tablet computer.