Alex Howard, resident government geek at O'Reilly Media, has a great roundup of the questions swirling around online privacy this summer. Congressional hearings! Grandstanding! Acronyms! Actually, the action on the Hill is pretty important, and Howard narrates it well:

Last week, both the House and Senate held hearings on online privacy, featuring testimony from top executives from Facebook, Apple and Google. The Washington Post published a massive investigative report on the growth of "Top Secret America" in July. And the Wall Street Journal's new series on online privacy, "What They Know," has laid bare the scope of tracking technology on the Internet. In the Information Age, our family, friends, neighbors, employers and government all have unprecedented abilities to watch one another, changing the nature of our relationships, workplaces and schools. Solving the privacy dilemma will be difficult, controversial and crucial for the nation's citizens, businesses, regulators and lawmakers.

Can privacy, social media and business get along? The balance between privacy and societal benefit will be difficult to strike, given the potential to harm civil liberties and the need to preserve the expectation of privacy described by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.

Read the full story at O'Reilly Radar.