Apple has rejected Smuggle Truck, an iPhone and iPad game in which players drive a truck packed with immigrants across a desert border and through underground tunnels.

In the game, immigrants can be hurled out of the truck and die as the vehicle navigates obstacles such as ramps, hills and explosives.

Although Apple rejected the Smuggle Truck game for its App Store, the Cupertino, Calif., tech giant did approve a less controversial version of the game called Snuggle Truck to be sold for iOS devices.

Snuggle Truck is essentially the same game, but with stuffed animals taking the place of immigrants. Also, rather than trying to move immigrants across a boarder, the objective of Snuggle Truck is to get the animals into a zoo where they'll be taken care of.

Both versions of the game were developed by Owlchemy Labs, a Boston start-up, that told the Associated Press its immigrant-themed game was rejected by Apple about three weeks ago for "content-related" reasons. The game makers are selling Smuggle Truck on their own as a computer game for both Macs and PCs.

In a statement on Owlchemy's website, the company said Smuggle Truck was built as an "interactive satire" to criticize an immigration system "largely avoided in popular media, especially video games."

The game's inspiration came from the developers' friends who have attempted to immigrate to the U.S., Owlchemy said.

"This idea originated as a result of learning that the process of legal immigration was not as straightforward as we had assumed," the company said. "As we lived through a painful 12 months of our friend struggling through the absurd legal minefield that surrounds U.S. immigration, we felt that we should create a game that touches on the issue. The comment was thrown around that "it's so tough to legally immigrate to the U.S., it's almost easier to smuggle yourself over the border," and thus Smuggle Truck was born."

A prototype of the game was built for the iPhone in two days by Owlchemy's founders, Alan Schwartz and Yilmaz Kiymaz, the statement said.

"Throughout the creation of the game, we maintained a meticulous eye to avoid depicting a specific stereotype or location, instead opting to generalize smuggling to its most basic abstract form," Owlchemy said. "Through user testing and feedback from fellow developers and even random strangers, we worked to maintain a light and humorous representation of a subject that is normally avoided.

"With a satirical angle on a real issue, we want to create a game that is fun to play but also stirs up discussion on ways to improve the problematic immigration system in the United States."

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Image: A screenshot of the Smuggle Truck computer game. Credit: Owlchemy Labs

The royal wedding found a couple million friends on Facebook.

Over the last 24 hours or so, nearly 3 million people in the U.K. and the U.S. posted on Facebook status messages, links, photos and reactions related to the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, who today became the duke and duchess of Cambridge.

More than 1.95 million people in the U.S. posted about the ceremony, which was more than the just over 1 million who did the same in the U.K. where the ceremony actually took place, said Joanna Shields, Facebook's vice president of Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Photo gallery: The royal wedding

During a four-hour span this morning, 684,399 status updates about the wedding were posted in the U.K., at a rate of about 47 mentions per second, Shields said.

Facebook offered more details about what people were talking about:

• David Beckham, worldwide soccer star and member of the L.A. Galaxy, was mentioned 9,000 times on Facebook in a 20-minute span after his arrival at the wedding.
• Nearly 18,000 people wrote on Facebook about Beckham and his wife, Victoria, the singer and member of the Spice Girls.
• While celebrity mentions were high, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip and Prince Andrew didn't make it into Facebook's top 10 list of discussed people. The Queen was, however the 14th most discussed person in the U.S., which was the same spot held by Victoria Beckham in the U.K.
• Prince Harry, Prince William's brother, was the third most mentioned person on Facebook behind the wedding couple
• Princess Beatrice's unique hat spawned a Facebook fan page for those who aren't exactly fans of her style, called Princess Beatrice's Ridiculous Royal Wedding Hat.

In the U.K., the top 10 most discussed people related to the Royal Wedding on Facebook were:

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Image: A screenshot of a Facebook fan page titled "Princess Beatrice's Ridiculous Royal Wedding Hat." Credit: Facebook

Britain's royal weddings are for many the stuff of fairy tales and story books.

But the marriage between Prince William and Kate Middleton, his college sweetheart, is also going to be written on Facebook and Twitter, too.

Millions of onlookers worldwide are expected to not only watch the wedding on TV, but also post on social media outlets about the event as it happens.

With Twitter, ABC News plans to track and influence the conversation as it happens on the popular microblogging platform. 

ABC News partnered with Twitter to create hashtags that ABC hopes viewers will use when reacting to the event as they watch it on TV or monitor it on the Internet.

Twitter and ABC came up with #RoyalMess and #RoyalSuccess to indicate a tweeter's opinion of "every guest and every dress," said Andrew Morse, ABC News Digital's executive producer for innovation.

And, of course, there is the first kiss of the couple as husband and wife -- quite possibly the biggest moment of the wedding, Morse said.

For that moment, taking place on the balcony of Westminster Abbey, ABC and Twitter are hoping Twitter users will tag their reactions with the hashtag #RoyalKiss.

"You can't control the conversation in every way, and the best part of any live event is the unexpected. And you have to roll with that," Morse said. "But we are professional journalists, and it's our job to know what the key events are and let our audience know about that.

"It's not different in any respect than an anchor or newspaper reporter saying, 'Here's something important coming, you should pay attention to it.' That's what we are trying to do with the hashtags and as other hashtags pop up organically, we'll roll with those, too."

The news gathering team of the broadcast network is also looking to capture its viewers' attention on Facebook. Messages posted on Facebook and Twitter will be read on the air, Morse said.

A Twitter Ticker" graphic will scroll across the bottom of the screen on ABC's TV broadcast of the wedding, displaying in real time the total number of tweets and a tweets-per-minute count from around the globe relating to the ceremony, he said.

"We've been thinking about how we can cover this event differently about as long as they've been engaged," Morse said. "Interestingly enough, Prince William and Kate Middleton announced their engagement on Twitter."

That announcement came in November, when ABC News and Twitter began collaborating, he said.

"The fact is, we are using Twitter as an editorial tool," Morse said. "A tool we can use to engage our viewers, rather than something as a novelty. Twitter is a very real and valuable resource and Facebook is a very valuable resource, but we want to do more than just post links to our stories or have our anchors read tweets.

"Being on every platform in many respects now is the cost of doing business -- on TV, on our own website, on Twitter and Facebook, and whatever comes next. I think our audience has grown to expect that. And this all comes at a time when I think the mainstream media's approach to social media has been constantly evolving and maturing. And now we have this interesting and new opportunity to create this mosaic, this portrait, of what's going on as it happens."

Hashtags are the building blocks of that mosaic, he said, noting that hashtags give Twitter, and in this case ABC, a marker they can use to sort and group messages and see what people have to say.

In an emailed statement, Chloe Sladden, who lead's Twitter's media partnership team, said what ABC News is going to do during the royal wedding is cutting edge.

"ABC News is taking innovative steps towards integrating Twitter's real-time engagement into their coverage and storytelling," Sladden said.

The network's Twitter Ticker, she said, is a way to capture the world's excitement and measure of attention in the event.

Using and monitoring wedding-related hashtags, in a method that amounts to a polling of sorts, is "an engaging way of using hashtags to capture immediate audience opinion while also shaping and driving the conversation," Sladden said. "Since hashtags are hyperlinked on Twitter, they act as conversation organizers and entry points to shared experiences."

Morse said that while the royal wedding is ABC News' first effort to suggest hashtags to its viewers and is the initial launch of its Twitter Ticker, the network has plans to use similar coverage methods during other major events about sports, celebrities or politics.

"We have a megaphone, we have a TV program, and we'll be able to use our megaphone to do something unique for our viewers in the social media space," he said. "This certainly isn't a one off. Social media isn't a novelty anymore, and you can't treat it as such. It's not something you can even just do. You have to constantly iterate and push things forward, and that's what we're trying to do."

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 Photo: Prince William accompanied by his fiancee Kate Middleton, as they arrive at Witton Country Park in Darwen, England, on April 11. Credit: Tim Hales/AP Photo.

Breaking nearly a week of silence on why its iPhones and iPads stored up to a year of specific location data, Apple Inc. on Wednesday denied that the devices were tracking users but noted that it had "uncovered" bugs that resulted in too much location data being kept on the phones.

Apple said it stored the data, which first received wide attention last week, on the devices to enable them to quickly provide location-based services, such as map directions. It is not a precise log of users' whereabouts, the company said, but a database of nearby WiFi networks and cell towers that can help the phone calculate routes and nearby destinations.

"Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite," the company said in an emailed statement.  "Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date."

In an explanation that was somewhat complex itself, the company said that the many thousands of location data points kept on the phone were "a subset (cache) of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database which is downloaded from Apple into the iPhone."  In other words, Apple is sending location data about your surroundings to your phone, rather than your phone sending that data to Apple.

Apple's response followed a growing chorus of questions from U.S. and international officials about the nature of the location data file, reflecting increasing concern about digital privacy issues.

The company emphasized that the data were not a user's exact, real-time location, but an amalgam of WiFi access points and cell-tower data, "which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone."

The company, however, did not highlight that many WiFi access points can be much closer, including in specific rooms in users' homes and offices.  And as cellular networks have become larger and more sophisticated, companies have built many more towers so that each one can cover a smaller area more effectively. 

Experts have said that WiFi and cell-tower location data may soon be as specific as the highly precise GPS satellite data.

Apple said it would fix two issues with the way the data was stored, each of which it called a "bug."  An upcoming version of its mobile software, iOS, would store only about seven days of location data on the phone, rather than a year's worth.  And the phones will not store the data after users have turned off "Location Services," as is now the case.

That software update would come sometime in the next few weeks, the company said.

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Image: a map that plots location data from an iPhone of someone who traveled around the Netherlands.  Credit: marketingfacts / Flickr

Wael Ghonim never sought to become the public face of the Egyptian revolution.

But the Google executive who helped organize the political uprising on social media was thrust into the spotlight in February after he was arrested and beaten by government forces during the protests that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak.

Since then, Ghonim has been traveling the globe to spread word of Revolution 2.0, tapping the power of the Internet and social media to foment revolution. He has also lent his support to protests in other hot spots in the region, such as Syria.

Last week, Ghonim, head of marketing in the Middle East for Google, made a pit stop in Silicon Valley, where his appearance at the company's Mountain View campus was described as "emotional." He also spoke on the Stanford University campus.

On Saturday, Ghonim said on Twitter that he would take a long sabbatical from the Internet search giant. He plans to start a technology-focused nongovernmental organization to help fight poverty and foster education.

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Photo: Egyptian Google executive Wael Ghonim attending a roundtable discussion entitled Youth, Jobs, and Inclusive Growth in the Middle East and North Africa at the IMF/World Bank Spring meetings in Washington, DC, on April 15, 2011. Credit: Nicholas KAMM/AFP/Getty Images

It's official -- Twitter is staying in San Francisco.

On Friday, Twitter announced that it had signed a lease to move the micro-blogging service's headquarters into the Central Market area's Market Square building, also known as the San Francisco Mart building.

The move will bring to fruition a promise Twitter made in a letter of intent to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that said the social networking site would stay in the city if a payroll tax exemption was approved. Twitter had been expected to leave San Francisco if the exemption had not passed.

In a 8-to-3 vote this month, the supervisors approved an ordinance that gave Twitter and other tech firms what they were looking for -- an exemption from a 1.5% city payroll tax for the next six years, as long as a business is located in San Francisco's Central Market Street and Tenderloin areas.

"The city where we have started and grown will remain our future home," said Sean Garrett, Twitter's vice president of communications, in a blog post. "Twitter is staying in San Francisco and has signed a lease to move our headquarters to Market Square, a historic building in San Francisco's Central Market neighborhood."

Garrett said Twitter looks forward to being part of an expected wave of companies that will move into the Central Market and Tenderloin areas, which San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee has said badly need to be revitalized.

"San Francisco's unique creativity and inventiveness is a part of Twitter's DNA, and we feel like we are part of San Francisco," Garrett said. "Three-quarters of our employees who live in San Francisco are involved in causes and charities in the city. Our employees are excited to be active members of our future neighborhood as volunteers, customers, diners and patrons of the arts."

Twitter expects to make the move from its current headquarters in the South of Market area of the city into the Market Square building sometime in the middle of 2012, he said.

"We can't wait," Garrett said.

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Photo: A Muni train passes by the building at 1355 Market St. in San Francisco on March 31. Twitter is planning to move into the building next year. Credit: Jeff Chiu / Associated Press

As it faces rising scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators, Google spent more on lobbying in Washington so far this year than in any other quarter since the Internet giant opened a lobbying operation in Washington in 2005.

The Mountain View, Calif., company shelled out $1.48 million, according to documents it filed this week.

That was a 7% increase from the same quarter last year, when Google spent $1.38 million.

Google mostly lobbied Congress, but also focused its efforts on the Commerce Department, the executive office of the president, the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Trade Representative.

The increase in spending comes as Google deals with a number of headaches, including a government inquiry into its $700-million purchase of airline fare tracker ITA Software and the privacy uproar after the launch of social networking service Buzz.

Google got clearance for its purchase of ITA Software after making concessions. The Federal Trade Commission closed an investigation into Buzz after Google agreed to independent audits of its privacy protections.

Google still does not spend as much as Microsoft, which ponied up $1.72 million in the first quarter.

One technology player looking to ramp up its visibility and activity in the nation’s capital is Facebook, which hosted a town hall meeting with President Obama on Wednesday. It spent $230,000 on lobbying in the quarter, which is chump change compared with Google and Microsoft but is more than five times what Facebook spent the first quarter of 2010.

Want to check out the numbers? Here is the link to the U.S. Senate's lobbying database.

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/Public_Disclosure/LDA_reports.htm

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Photo: Google signage is displayed at the company's headquarters in Mountain View on April 14, 2011. Credit: Tony Avelar/Bloomberg

Following widespread attention drawn by a file embedded on Apple iPhones and iPads that keeps a detailed log of the devices' location, Congressman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has sent Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs a letter asking him to explain the purpose of the file.

"I am concerned about this report and the consequences of this feature for individuals' privacy," Markey wrote to Jobs in a letter released Thursday (see below).  Markey then listed a number of questions about the location file, Apple's uses for it, whether the company intentionally created it to track users and whether it's used for commercial purposes.

Markey, who has written to Apple over location privacy concerns before, requested an answer to his questions by May 12.

From Rep. Markey: Apple Ios Letter 04.21.11

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Two leading U.S. senators introduced bipartisan privacy legislation Tuesday to safeguard consumer information online, aiming to prevent the misuse of personal data while not squelching the advertising that fuels the Internet economy.

Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), who both have a history of working on technology issues, said their Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights would protect Americans' personal information as it is increasingly shared between online companies.

"Right now there is no law protecting the information that we share. Companies can harvest our personal information online and keep it for as long as they like it," Kerry told reporters in Washington. "They can sell it without asking permission, or even letting you know that they're selling your own information. You shouldn't have to be a computer genius in order to be able to opt out of information sharing."

The bill would give consumers certain rights concerning their online data, and require companies to take steps to protect the data and obtain permission to share it.

Companies that collect consumer data would have to provide clear notice on their practices.

Those would include requiring consumers to provide clear consent -- known as opt-in -- for the collection of "sensitive, personally identifiable information." Companies also would have to allow consumers either to access and correct their information or request that the information not be used or distributed.

The legislation would allow the Federal Trade Commission to approve so-called "safe-harbor" programs -- voluntary efforts that companies could design and establish on their own to comply with the legislation.

The bill also would require state attorneys general to back off on enforcing the legislation when the FTC steps in to take action against a violator. And Kerry and McCain would prohibit private lawsuits based on the law.

The senators said they were trying to strike the right balance.

"Our bill seeks to respect the ability of businesses to advertise and market and recruit new customers while also respecting consumers'[ personal information," McCain said, noting that many consumers enjoy receiving targeted advertisements and visiting websites that are free because they are supported by ads. "But consumers must have control over how their data is used when it is transferred to an unknown third party."

Kerry and McCain said that Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp. and EBay supported the bill, as did some consumer groups. The Obama administration has called for Congress to pass comprehensive online privacy legislation.

Noticeably missing from the bill is a requirement for a do-not-track mechanism in Web browsers, similar to the do-not-call list for telemarketers, that would give consumers the ability to stop companies from tracking their online movements. Kerry and McCain said they anticipated that other senators might try to add such a requirement, but they felt the opt-in requirements on companies were sufficient to protect consumer information.

In a letter to the senators, five consumer groups said they welcomed the new legislation, one of several privacy bills introduced or expected this year. But they said the Kerry/McCain legislation was "insufficient" to protect consumers and needed to be strengthened.

"We strongly believe that any privacy bill should direct the Federal Trade Commission to
require and enforce a 'Do Not Track Me' mechanism," said the letter from Consumer Watchdog, the Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Action, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and Privacy Times. "Consumers should have the right to use the Internet and mobile devices with confidence that their privacy choices are respected, and with anonymity if they choose."

-- Jim Puzzanghera in Washington

Photo: Sens. John Kerry, left, and John McCain discuss their online privacy legislation. Credit: European Pressphoto Agency

A federal government shutdown could close the National Zoo, Smithsonian museums and national parks. It could also reveal which members of Congress are social media whizzes and which ones lean on staffers for their tweets and updates.

If a shutdown were to come to pass, thousands of furloughed government workers deemed "nonessential" might have to turn in their BlackBerrys, the Washington Post reports.

That could prove painful in an era when smartphones are a constant companion and stay close even when workaholics sleep (after all, the device is nicknamed is the Crackberry).

"I'm not sure I could handle it," Kevin Bishop, communications director for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), told the Post. "It's basically a part of who you are, from the moment you wake up in the morning to the moment you go to bed at night."

It's still unclear how a ban on BlackBerry use would be implemented if congressional leaders fail to reach an agreement on the federal budget. One idea being floated around requires workers to turn in their government-issued phones before exiting, the Post said. But it's unclear how carefully the government has tracked the handout of phones over the years.

This could mean that the Facebook pages and Twitter feeds of some congressional members will go silent, speculates Ben Smith at Politico, separating the true socia media savants from those with savvy employees.

Politicians have increasingly embraced social media to address their constituents directly. Facebook has also geared up its presence in Washington, sending staffers around town to show organizations how to take advantage of its network and flying executives in to discuss privacy and other hot-button topics with lawmakers, a Times story reported in February.

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Photo: President Obama talks with Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg before a dinner with technology business leaders in Woodside, Calif., on Feb. 17. In the background are Carol Bartz, Yahoo president and CEO; Art Levinson, Genentech chairman and former CEO; Steve Westly, founder and managing partner of the Westly Group; and Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google.
Credit: Pete Souza / European Pressphoto Agency