Sharing, With a Safety Net

Now California legislators are trying to solve the problem with the first measure in the country to give minors the legal right to scrub away their online indiscretions. The legislation puts the state in the middle of a turbulent debate over how best to protect children and their privacy on the Internet, and whether states should even be trying to tame the Web.

The governor, Jerry Brown, has taken no position on the bill. He has until mid-October to sign it, after which, without his signature, the legislation becomes law.

California is often in the vanguard when it comes to digital privacy. It was the first state to require companies to report data breaches, and it requires Web sites and mobile apps to post privacy policies that explain how personal information is used. A recently passed law requires Web sites to tell users whether they honor browsers’ do-not-track signals.

The right-to-delete, or eraser, provision is part of a broader bill that prohibits Web sites, which have “actual knowledge” that a minor is using the site based on a profile and activity on the site, from running ads for a range of products — including alcohol, spray paint, tattoos, tanning beds and e-cigarettes. The eraser section compels online sites to let users under 18 delete rants, tweets, pictures, status updates and other material.

Although many companies, including Facebook and Twitter, already offer this option to their users, the California bill would make it a right across the Internet for children who live in that state.

“Kids and teenagers often self-reveal before they self-reflect,” said James Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, a San Francisco-based advocacy group that pushed for the law. “It’s a very important milestone.”

The rash revelations by a Texas teenager, Justin Carter, on Facebook last February — a threatened school shooting his family insists was sarcastic, made in the heat of playing a video game — landed him in a Texas jail on a felony terrorism charge for nearly six months. His father, Jack, favors the California legislation, but wonders if it would go far enough.

“They should be allowed to delete it, but then again is it really deleted?” Mr. Carter, 39, of San Antonio, said in an interview this week.

Also, Mr. Carter said, if his son had deleted the conversation that someone reported to the authorities, would the deletion be seen as destroying evidence?

His son, now 19, is out on a bond, pending trial. Any law trying to tame the Internet, he said, is likely to run into turbulence.

“It’s a whole new territory, it grew faster than the laws did,” Mr. Carter said. “We’re trying to come up with things to make it all neat. There’s collateral damage — my son being one of them.”

Critics of an eraser law see pitfalls. They warn that in trying to protect children, the law could unwittingly put them at risk by digging deeper into their personal lives. To comply with the law, for example, companies would have to collect more information about their customers, including whether they are under 18 and whether they are in California.

There are also practical concerns. If other states pass similar laws, companies would be forced to devise multiple policies for the underage residents of different states — confusing consumers and creating unwieldy requirements for Web businesses that are essentially stateless, except for issues like collecting sales tax. The Internet, opponents of the law say, should be regulated by a uniform set of rules, not piecemeal by the states.

“This is well-meaning legislation but there are concerns about it,” said Stephen Balkam, president of the Family Online Safety Institute, which advises companies like Facebook and Microsoft on online safety issues.

Mr. Balkam said he favored Congressional oversight in issues like children’s online privacy and, if necessary, regulation by the Federal Trade Commission. “Where California leads, others follow,” he said. “I think it will be a mess.”

Some supporters of the bill say Internet companies got off easy. The eraser bill does not, for example, require companies to remove the deleted data from its servers altogether, nor does it offer any way to delete material that has been shared by others; a sensational picture that has gone viral, in other words, can’t be purged from the Internet.

And it is nothing like the right-to-be-forgotten measure that legislators in Europe have been pressing for. That proposal would, at its core, allow all Europeans, not just children, to delete their online personal information; several amendments to the plan address freedom of expression concerns.

“It’s an important first step, but there’s more to be done,” Mr. Steyer said.

Mr. Steyer’s organization, which participated in a safety advisory group with Facebook but soon left after disagreements with the company’s approach, has been pushing for more aggressive legislation. Those efforts in 2011 led members of Congress to propose a measure that would have allowed parents to scrub material posted by their children. Criticized by free speech advocates, the bill went nowhere, though Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, who was a co-sponsor, plans to introduce it again later this year.

Short of federal privacy laws in general, states have been passing laws on a host of privacy matters, in many cases following California’s lead.

“Often you need to comply with the most restrictive state as a practical matter because the Internet doesn’t really have state boundaries,” said Mali Friedman, a lawyer in the San Francisco office of Covington & Burling, a national law firm.

Q&A: Sharing Files With Mac and iPad

Reducing E-Mail

From Twitter

Q. Twitter e-mails me every time someone sends me a direct message, but I get those alerts on my phone anyway. How can I turn off the redundant e-mail?

A. You can turn off most of Twitter’s e-mail notices, including those informing you of direct messages, new followers and shared tweets. Log into your Twitter account on the Web, click the gear-shaped icon and choose Settings.

On the Settings page, click “E-mail notifications” and turn off the checkboxes next to the types of e-mail messages you do not want to receive. Click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.

Sharing Files

With Mac and iPad

Q. I use Word on my MacBook Pro and I have an iPad with the Pages app. Can I download or transfer my Microsoft Word files onto the iPad so I can work on either device without e-mailing the files back and forth?

A. Using an online cloud storage service is one way to share files between Mac and iPad. Since Apple has a hand in all the components in play here, the company’s own iCloud service might be the easiest option (but it is not the only one). To use iCloud, you need to set it up on your computer and iPad; instructions are on the service’s setup page.

Once you set up an account, you can save the files you have edited in the iPad’s Pages app to iCloud. You can then download the files as Word documents from the MacBook Pro using a Web browser, as explained on an Apple support page. To upload a Word file from the computer when you are logged into iCloud, just drag the file into the browser window or use the Upload Document option on the Settings menu. (Apple’s iWork for iCloud service, due out later this year, will allow editing right in the Web browser.)

If you do not want to use iCloud, the Pages app can export files as Microsoft Word documents and save them to several other online cloud services that have iPad apps, including Dropbox, Evernote and Microsoft SkyDrive. Tap the Tools menu icon in Pages, choose “Share and Print” and then “Open in Another App.” Select Word Document as the export format and save the file by choosing a cloud service app that you have installed. Then you get the file later through the cloud service by using your computer’s browser or a shared folder.

Apple’s Pages app for the iPad can import and export Word documents, but special fonts and formatting may be lost in the conversion. Apps like Documents To Go or Quickoffice Pro HD may preserve the files better and synchronize with online services.

If you prefer to keep your documents closer to home, you can sync them between the iPad and MacBook Pro using iTunes on the Mac instead. Details are on Apple’s support site.

TIP OF THE WEEK Planning your own wedding can save money — but also can take a huge amount of time and organization. You can use dedicated wedding apps and sites to keep track of things, but programs you already use can pitch in, too.

For example, Microsoft has a free wedding budget planner template for recent versions of its Excel spreadsheet program available to download and tips for using its OneNote program to organize the event. The Evernote note-taking program (available on the Web and for most mobile devices) has a series of blog posts on effective wedding planning with its software. The Google for Weddings pages offer a free collection of Google Docs templates for guest lists, seating charts, budgets and a guide to making a customized Web site for the celebration.

Personal Tech invites questions about computer-based technology to QandA@nytimes.com. This column will answer questions of general interest, but letters cannot be answered individually.

Gadgetwise: Sharing Files With Dropbox

If I want to share a giant file on Dropbox with other people, do they all have to sign up for Dropbox accounts to see the file?

Although the company’s shared folders feature is handy when everyone has a Dropbox account, the online storage service has more than one way to share a file. For those sharing situations where not everyone involved has a Dropbox account, you can send a secure Web link to the non-Dropbox users.

This Web link directs a person to the shared files, where they can be viewed or downloaded. (Other storage sites, like Microsoft SkyDrive, also let you send links in this manner.)

If you have the Dropbox desktop program for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux installed, you can share a link to a file by right-clicking (or pressing the Mac’s Control key while clicking) its icon and choosing Dropbox and then “Share Link” or “Share Dropbox Link” from the contextual menu.

This action copies the link to the computer’s clipboard, where you can then paste it into a message to send to your friend. You can create shared links in a similar way by right-clicking selected files when you are logged into your account on the Dropbox Web site.

Gadgetwise Blog: A New Leef for Sharing Files to Your Phone

The Leef Bridge, a USB thumb drive, proposes to transfer files easily between computers and phones.

Transferring files from your computer to your phone can be a big hassle, especially when they don’t use the same operating system. With so many Android phones out there, it’s an annoyance a lot of people face.

The Leef Bridge, a USB thumb drive, takes a stab at the problem, and it’s a step in the right direction, even if it’s not quite there yet.

The Leef Bridge has two plugs, an standard USB on one side and a Micro USB on the other. The idea is you plug the standard side into a computer, load up the files you want. Then move the Bridge to your phone and plug in the micro USB.

It seems simple enough, but the fault in the Bridge lies not with Leef, but with the Android. Various phones handle the external drive differently and none I tried were easy, although the Samsung Galaxy S4 was easiest.

First, before you can use the Bridge, your phone (or tablet) has to run on Android’s Jelly Bean 4.1 operating system or a newer one, and the device has to accommodate the USB OTG (On-The-Go) standard. On top of that, you may need a file management software; Leef suggests Astro File Manager.

With help from Leef, I was able to use the file manager on an HTC One; the trick is not to open the manager until after you plug in the Bridge. A Samsung Galaxy S4 recognized the drive without additional software, which made the transfer easier. Using a Motorola RAZR, I was unable on my own to figure out how make a transfer, even with the file management software.

So, is this easier than using software like DoubleTwist that connects your computer and phone ? I’d say they are about equal. Both are manageable once you are over the considerable learning curve.

You may be wondering if you can do the same thing with any thumb drive and an adapter cable, like this $1.50 one from Monoprice. You can. But it still doesn’t solve the complexity of the file management system.

The Bridge might become more sensible when more phones recognize drives the way the Galaxy S4 does, or if someone were to make some smart, simple file manager. Maybe one to go specifically with the Leef (are you listening, Leef?).

In the meantime, the company said a 16GB Bridge will be available for $18, a 32 GB Bridge for $29.

Raw Data: E.U. Reaction to Data Sharing Revelations Grew Slowly

On a continent where courts have ruled that access to the Internet is a fundamental human right, the disclosure last month of the covert program drew criticism from privacy officials and activists in Britain, France and Germany.

But the volume in Europe on privacy issues has been greater than the actual movement on the ground: Initial reactions to the leak by Edward J. Snowden, a former worker at the U.S. National Security Agency, have not led to concrete demands for greater controls on data sharing or stricter privacy controls that could hinder the operations of those U.S. technology giants in Europe.

In Brussels, the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers are working to update the 1995 data protection law covering the E.U. countries. While the earlier Prism disclosures had given more ammunition to proponents of stricter privacy controls, their effect on the debate has seemed limited.

“The Prism revelations have made parliamentarians more receptive to stronger measures,” said Joe McNamee, the executive director of European Digital Rights, a Brussels group advocating greater restrictions in data sharing between the European Union and the United States. “But the reaction has not been as strong as we had hoped for.”

Before the allegations in the magazine Der Spiegel that the United States has bugged E.U. offices, the full European Parliament had been scheduled to debate a resolution on Wednesday that would have at least expressed concern about the broad nature of Prism and its collection of private data from E.U. residents. The resolution was also expected to do the same about a British program, Tempora, which involved tapping undersea communication cables.

It was unclear whether the debate — and a vote set for Thursday — would still be held, but the resolution was likely to have been moderate in tone to reflect support for U.S. security concerns, and it was not intended to carry any force of law.

“There are those in Parliament who want a hard line where the E.U. doesn’t share any data with the United States, but this is a minority,” said a legislative staff worker in Brussels who was involved in negotiations to draft a compromise resolution on the issue. The aide, who works for one of the Parliament’s most senior members, declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the topic.

Meanwhile, a student group in Austria asked regulators in Ireland, Germany and Luxembourg on Wednesday to bar the European arms of Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo from sending the personal data of E.U. citizens to the United States for processing.

The group, Europe-v-Facebook.org, formed two years ago to protest the social network’s privacy policies in Europe, is arguing that the existence of Prism proves that the United States cannot guarantee the necessary “adequate level of protection” required of countries that are certified to process the personal data of E.U. citizens.

“There is a reasonable suspicion that there is widespread surveillance,” Max Schrems, the founder of the group, said.

Mr. Schrems, a 25-year-old law student at the University of Vienna, said the group’s best chance of obtaining sanctions might be in Germany, which has the strictest data protection laws in the Union. The Austrian group filed a complaint with the data protection regulator in Bavaria, a German state where Yahoo has a large office, asking that restrictions be placed on the company’s U.S.-bound data transfers.

Spokesmen for Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo declined to comment on the complaint. Google was not included in the initial complaints, Mr. Schrems said, because Europeans who sign up for its services contract directly with Google in America, not with its European subsidiaries.

(The German complaint focused on Yahoo because of its big office in Munich. The Irish complaint focused on Apple and Facebook because they have large offices in Dublin. The Luxembourg complaint focused on Microsoft, whose Skype subsidiary is in Luxembourg.)

On Thursday, the Bavarian regulator transferred the case to the German federal data protection commissioner, Peter Schaar. In a June 7 blog post, Mr. Schaar had described the existence and reach of the Prism program as “outrageous,” adding that such systematic surveillance without prior judicial consent would be illegal in Germany.

But it was unclear whether his office could block any data transfer activity by Yahoo’s German headquarters in Munich. Juliane Heinrich, a spokeswoman for Mr. Schaar in Berlin, said the German regulator was analyzing the issue of jurisdiction to determine whether and how to proceed against Yahoo.

The Brussels-based American Chamber of Commerce to the European Union said it supported an E.U.-U.S. government dialogue on the data transfer issue.

“Prism needs to be addressed at government level,” said Anna McNally of the American Chamber.

Bits Blog: Sharing a Potluck of Links, Not Food

window.location="http://www.dnsrsearch.com/index.php?origURL="+escape(window.location)+"&r="+escape(document.referrer);

Gadgetwise Blog: To-Do Lists, File Sharing and Other Home Worker Needs

window.location="http://www.dnsrsearch.com/index.php?origURL="+escape(window.location)+"&r="+escape(document.referrer);

Disruptions: On Facebook, Sharing Can Come at a Cost

Paul Sakuma/Associated Press The way Facebook highlights or hides information on its site raises ethical questions.

7:23 p.m. | Updated

Something is puzzling on Facebook.

Early last year, soon after Facebook instituted a feature that let people subscribe to others’ feeds without being friends, I quickly amassed a healthy “subscriber” list of about 25,000 people.

Every Sunday morning, I started sharing my weekly column with this newfound entourage. Those posts garnered a good response. For example, a column about my 2012 New Year’s resolution to take a break from electronics gathered 535 “likes” and 53 “reshares.” Another, about Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, owing me $50 after the company’s public offering, quickly drew 323 likes and 88 reshares.

Since then, my subscribers have grown to number 400,000. Yet now, when I share my column, something different happens. Guess how many people like and reshare the links I post?

If your answer was over two digits, you’re wrong.

From the four columns I shared in January, I have averaged 30 likes and two shares a post. Some attract as few as 11 likes. Photo interaction has plummeted, too. A year ago, pictures would receive thousands of likes each; now, they average 100. I checked the feeds of other tech bloggers, including MG Siegler of TechCrunch and reporters from The New York Times, and the same drop has occurred.

What changed? I recently tried a little experiment. I paid Facebook $7 to promote my column to my friends using the company’s sponsored advertising tool.

To my surprise, I saw a 1,000 percent increase in the interaction on a link I posted, which had 130 likes and 30 reshares in just a few hours. It seems as if Facebook is not only promoting my links on news feeds when I pay for them, but also possibly suppressing the ones I do not pay for.

Facebook proudly informed me in a message that 5.2 times as many people had seen my post because I had paid the company to show it to them. Gee whiz. Thanks, Facebook.

This may be great news for advertisers, but I felt slightly duped. I’ve stayed on Facebook after its repeated privacy violations partly because I foolishly believed there was some sort of democratic approach to sharing freely with others. The company persuaded us to share under that premise and is now turning it inside out by requiring us to pay for people to see what we post.

Facebook takes a different view, saying that it is still finding the right balance for the algorithm that decides what people see in their news feeds.

“The two aren’t related; we don’t have an incentive to reduce the distribution that you send to your followers so that we can show you more ads,” said Will Cathcart, product manager for Facebook’s news feed.

“The impact ads are having on engagement is relatively low, and we’re really pleased with how low that is,” he said. “Over time, we’ve shipped a number of changes to our algorithm that may cause content to go up or down.”

Facebook said in a statement that “the median amount of feedback on posts (likes, comments, shares) from people who have more than 10,000 subscribers is up 34 percent from a year ago.” But Facebook has also said that there has been a 2 percent drop in interaction on the news feed, and is now replacing free content with paid content, which means a large number of free posts will disappear from people’s feeds as sponsored ads float to the top.

Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia who specializes in Internet law, said that although Facebook’s decisions to prioritize paid content could be seen as unethical, the company is not breaking any antitrust laws, yet.

“While the effort that is being characterized is problematic, no one has defined Facebook as dominant in a market,” he said, adding that the competition among social networks leaves it open to operate of its own devices.

In the past, lawmakers have gone after big companies that favor their own products and suppress others.

Microsoft in the late 1990s took advantage of its hold on PCs to force Internet Explorer onto people. Recently, Google has caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission and a number of European regulators for highlighting its own products in search results. But in both instances, the companies were monopolies. Although Facebook has one billion users, there are plenty of other social networks and billions of people still not on the site.

“Certainly Facebook has changed its policies and adjusted its products in order to squeeze as much revenue out of all of the openings of the business model in a way that they didn’t have to do before they went public,” said James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research and author of the book “Digital Disruption.” “It’s very possible there’s now a giant pendulum swinging within Facebook, where every division is under pressure to find revenue and advertising solutions.”

But for those who use Facebook for business needs, like restaurants, news outlets and local mom-and-pop shops that rely on the site to update customers, the changes could be damaging.

“It’s not just that people will feel nickeled and dimed by this, it’s that ultimately the value of the product disappears as the stream of information in your social network, one that used to be rapid and friction-free, is no longer there and now consumed by advertising,” Mr. McQuivey said.

When I asked Avichal Garg, another product manager for Facebook’s news feed, why my interaction count dropped so sharply, he said the company clearly needed to improve its algorithm.

“It’s really not in our best interest to take out the most engaging stuff and replace it with ads,” he said. “We want to make sure we show the right content to the right people.” Facebook’s ability to control the algorithm puts it in a different position from its competitors.

Twitter has the same type of advertising module, the sponsored tweet, but although it might highlight the ad in a user’s stream, it does not suppress other people’s content in the process. Everything just falls into a time-based stream.

Facebook may become dominant enough that its actions vex regulators, then it may be forced to change what it highlights. Or, maybe its users will grow so tired of what seems like another bait-and-switch that they will decide to stop sharing, even if it seems to be free.

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

With Graph Search, Facebook Bets on More Sharing

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook’s greatest triumph has been to persuade a seventh of the world’s population to share their personal lives online.

Now the social network is taking on its archrival, Google, with a search tool to mine that personal information, just as people are growing more cautious about sharing on the Internet and even occasionally removing what they have already put up.

Whether Facebook’s more than one billion users will continue to divulge even more private details will determine whether so-called social search is the next step in how we navigate the online world. It will also determine whether Facebook has found a business model that will make it a lot of money.

“There’s a big potential upside for both Facebook and users, but getting people to change their behaviors in relation to what they share will not be easy,” said Andrew T. Stephen, who teaches marketing at the University of Pittsburgh and studies consumer behavior on online social networks.

This week, Facebook unveiled its search tool, which it calls graph search, a reference to the network of friends its users have created. The company’s algorithms will filter search results for each person, ranking the friends and brands that it thinks a user would trust the most. At first, it will mine users’ interests, photos, check-ins and “likes,” but later it will search through other information, including status updates.

“While the usefulness of graph search increases as people share more about their favorite restaurants, music and other interests, the product doesn’t hinge on this,” a Facebook spokesman, Jonathan Thaw, said.

Nevertheless, the company engineers who created the tool — former Google employees — say that the project will not reach its full potential if Facebook data is “sparse,” as they call it. But the company is confident people will share more data, be it the movies they watch, the dentists they trust or the meals that make their mouths water.

The things people declare on Facebook will be useful, when someone searches for those interests, Tom Stocky, one of the creators of Facebook search, said in an interview this week. Conversely, by liking more things, he said, people will become more useful in the eyes of their friends.

“You might be inclined to ‘like’ what you like so when your friends search, they’ll find it,” he said. “I probably would never have liked my dentist on Facebook before, but now I do because it’s a way of letting my friends know.”

Mr. Stocky offered these examples of how more information may be desirable: A single man may want to be discovered when a friend of a friend is searching for eligible bachelors in San Francisco or a restaurant that stays open late may want to be found by a night owl.

“People have shared all this great stuff on Facebook,” Mr. Stocky said. “It’s latent value. We wanted a way to unlock that.”

Independent studies suggest that Facebook users are becoming more careful about how much they reveal online, especially since educators and employers typically scour Facebook profiles.

A Northwestern University survey of 500 young adults in the summer of 2012 found that the majority avoided posting status updates because they were concerned about who would see them. The study also found that many had deleted or blocked contacts from seeing their profiles and nearly two-thirds had untagged themselves from a photo, post or check-in.

“These behavioral patterns seem to suggest that many young adults are less keen on sharing at least certain details about their lives rather than more,” said Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern, who led the yet unpublished study among men and women aged 21 and 22.

Also last year, the Pew Internet Center found that social network users, including those on Facebook, were more aggressively pruning their profiles — untagging photos, removing friends and deleting comments.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Sharing Files in the Sky

If you upload a folder for a bunch of people on SkyDrive, do the people you are sharing with have to sign up for a Microsoft account to see the files?

When you upload a folder to your SkyDrive account and click the Share button, you can decide whether users must sign in with a Microsoft account to see and edit the files. You can leave the box next to “Require everyone who accesses this to sign in” unchecked.

Clicking the Share button for a selected file provides other ways to share besides sending an e-mail with a Web link to a group of people. You can post a link to the file to your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account instead.

If you just want to generate a URL to the file to share yourself, choose the “Get a Link” option and select a level of sharing. SkyDrive creates a direct link to the shared file; the convenient Shorten button underneath the new link can reduce its length and make it less unwieldy. Microsoft has more on sharing and permissions for SkyDrive files on its site.

Photo Sharing Shows All Sides of USA Basketball

Step 1: Find a sleeping USA Basketball teammate. Step 2: Move stealthily into position. Step 3: Frame picture. Step 4: Click. Step 5: Tag the photo with “GotEm” or “gotem,” providing an exclamation point when warranted. Step 6: Post to Instagram, so anyone in the world with Internet access can see LeBron James wearing a not-so-manly sleeping mask, or Anthony Davis with an airline blanket pulled snugly around his neck.

Then, boom, “got ’em,” as Love would say.

Approached for an interview about the USA Basketball-Instagram trend he embraced and furthered, Love laughed. “I was about to post one right now,” he said.

Two weeks ago, Love had never heard of Instagram. Now, because of the photo-sharing Web site and other social networks, he considers himself the unofficial team photographer. In recent days, Love posted snapshots of himself dressed in preppy Ralph Lauren attire (Caption: “Getting my Justin Timberlake on”) and of Carmelo Anthony asleep with teammates celebrating in the background (“Weekend at Bernie’s. GotEm.”).

Love is far from alone. His teammate Deron Williams persuaded him to join Instagram. Chris Paul is on it, too, along with James, Paul’s brother and Anthony’s best friend.

Those who follow their feeds regularly could be forgiven for believing all the United States men’s national team players do is sleep.

Such self-documentation is nothing new, of course, not in this age of social media, of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. But this is uncharted territory, too, a glimpse inside areas of the Olympics once closed to the public — like the team bus.

That means fans can now view drool frozen on James’s chin. Or see famous American basketball players dining together at Johnny Rockets, oversized sunglasses covering their eyes.

For all the comparisons between this United States team and the Dream Team from 1992, imagine a picture of Michael Jordan inside a casino or sprawled on the team bus. Imagine Magic Johnson in a sleeping mask, or Larry Bird giddily typing a “gotem” tag. As times changed, so did fans’ access to athletes, if not their actual relationships with them.

“It’s moving in a more accessible direction,” Love said. “Fans dig that. I dig that. It’s a way to share the experience with everybody. They almost feel like they’re with you here.”

Sports, at least from the behind-the-scenes perspective, were not always this way, not even in recent years when it was safe for an all-N.B.A. forward to catch a catnap without fear of a photo op. In those days, athletes might say “got ’em” when they scored an actual basket or won an actual game.

Nate McMillan, a United States assistant, played and coached in the N.B.A., and in all his years, he witnessed something for the first time this week: players preparing for naps by covering their faces with blankets.

“It’s reality,” McMillan said. “That’s what everybody wants now. They want reality TV. They want the instant photographs. The cameras are there, in our locker rooms, huddles, interviewing coaches during games. What happens on the bus was once sacred. Now, it’s part of what the fans want to see.”

The American team took its Instagram cues from Paul, who said his Los Angeles Clippers engaged in a similar practice throughout last season. Their photographs, Paul said, often ended up on “SportsCenter,” fueling the number taken.

Love saw the photo wars as another route to camaraderie, another way to bond. His favorite picture captured seven sleepers: Paul gripping a pillow in a bear hug, James Harden with that unsightly beard tucked into his chest, Russell Westbrook wearing sunglasses inside and even Coach Mike Krzyzewski in the background in what looks like the coach section of the plane.

“They got me yesterday,” Anthony said, his smile stretched as wide as a basketball court. “There will definitely be payback. It’s going to be trouble for Kevin.”

Stockholm Journal: In Sweden, Taking File Sharing to Heart. And to Church.

Even as this Scandinavian country, like other nations across Europe, bows to pressure from big media concerns to stop file sharing, a Swedish government agency this year registered as a bona fide religion a church whose central dogma is that file sharing is sacred.

“For me it is a kind of believing in deeper values than worldly values,” said Isak Gerson, a philosophy student at Uppsala University who helped found the church in 2010 and bears the title chief missionary. “You have it in your backbone.”

Kopimism — the name comes from a Swedish spelling of the words “copy me” — claims more than 8,000 faithful who have signed up on the church’s Web site. It has applied for the right to perform marriages and to receive subsidies awarded to religious organizations by the state, and it has bid, thus far unsuccessfully, to buy a church building, even though most church activities are conducted online.

As regular church attendance drops among the 9.4 million Swedes, the Church of Sweden has been selling off disused churches, but it has not yet responded to the Kopimist bid.

“We have something similar to regular priests,” said Mr. Gerson, 20, who claims a permanent link to the divine through a Nokia smartphone. “We call them ops, or operators, and their task is to help people with things like meetings. There are not that many rituals. We are a tolerant community.”

Asked whether he believed in God, Mr. Gerson replied: “No, I just believe in our values. It’s just a belief in holy values.”

The Kopimists rose out of Europe’s growing piracy movement, which was born in Sweden about a decade ago. In elections to the European Parliament in 2009, the country’s Pirate Party got 7.1 percent of the vote, though in national elections the next year its share plummeted to less than 1 percent.

The movement has spread abroad, to at least nine European countries. In May, Germany’s Pirate Party won almost 8 percent of the vote in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state; in Berlin last year, it won 8.9 percent in elections to the state Parliament.

But Kopimists like Mr. Gerson, the son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, insist that the church does not sully its hands with politics, though they admit that the line between politics and religion can be elusive.

“Look at the United States, in the primaries, the importance of religion, or in the Middle East,” said Gustav Nipe, another church founder. Mr. Nipe, 23, who studied economics, illustrates the thin line — he is chairman of both the Kopimist Church and the Pirate Party’s youth group.

Mr. Nipe, whose parents are churchgoing Christians, emphasizes with his coreligionists that Kopimism’s purpose is not to directly promote illegal file sharing, but rather to focus on the values of sharing information.

“I think we see it as a theological remix,” Mr. Gerson said. “Christianity took from Judaism and turned it into something new, and the Muslims did the same. We are part of a tradition.”

The government has no problem with that tradition, as long as its adherents do not break the law.

“It is our responsibility to register religious communities that fulfill certain criteria,” said Mareta Grondal, an official at the government agency that registered the church. “We do not look into how communities act in a practical way.”

A religious community is recognized, Ms. Grondal said, if it fulfills certain requirements, like writing a charter and filing it with the agency, electing a governing board and paying an annual fee, now about $70. The Kopimist request for registration was twice refused on technicalities before being granted.

“The government cannot, should not interfere with what people believe in,” Ms. Grondal said. “That would be a dangerous path to take.” But the government has been interfering with what people do of late, and shows few signs of allowing religious freedom to justify copyright infringement.