There were a couple unrelated items floating in the blogosphere over the last couple days, which, when taken together, offer a glimmer of hope that vendors and service providers might be starting to get more serious about security and privacy. 

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), which is trying hard to get a piece of the enterprise IT pie, is expected to hire David Rice, an ex-Navy information specialist, to lead its global security efforts, according to The Wall Street Journal. Apple isn't talking, but the Journal's Arik Hesseldahl speculates that Rice would be positioned to improve Apple's appeal to business customers. He was a special duty cryptologic officer in the Navy and a global network vulnerability analyst at the National Security Agency. In his 2007 book "Geekonomics," Rice argued that the software industry has no accountability for the losses of its customers, who serve as "crash test dummies." Bringing a critic on board could signal a considerable shift in approach for a software maker not known for security.

Meanwhile, Facebook said it will change its (creepy) "Friend Finder" feature so that invitations to join the network via applications like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Mail are no longer emailed automatically to unsuspecting victims. The change comes in response to complaints from data protection authorities in Germany, Spiegel Online International reported Sunday. 

Under an agreement with German officials, Facebook will give members control over the addresses they import into the social network so that invitations don't just go out to everyone in a member's address book. A data protection official in Hamburg is quoted saying, "Facebook will be required to alert users that they should only send invitations to those contacts who they know personally and who, in their opinion, want to receive such an invitation." Sounds like common sense to me, and if German citizens gain this minimal respect for their privacy, I certainly hope U.S. citizens will as well.

Google, for its part, promised last week to do more to fight spam generated via its search engine. You may have noticed over the last few months that there has been a rise in spam popping up in search results. In a post on the official Google blog, Principal Engineer Matt Cutts wrote that the company should be doing a better job of filtering spam out of its results.

"[P]eople are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content," Cutts wrote. "We take pride in Google search and strive to make each and every search perfect. The fact is that we're not perfect, and combined with users' skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better."

As businesses wade further into the murky waters of consumer-oriented technologies, it is all the more important that vendors make security and privacy a priority. A collection of three efforts may not constitute a trend, but it can't hurt. - Caron