Technology, Privacy | featured news

Mitt Romney's success in raising hundreds of millions of dollars in the costliest presidential race ever can be traced in part to a secretive data-mining project that sifts through Americans' personal information - including their purchasing history and church attendance - to identify new and likely, wealthy donors, The Associated Press has learned....

A coalition of nearly 20 children’s advocacy, health and public interest groups plans to file complaints with the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday, asserting that some online marketing to children by McDonald’s and four other well-known companies violates a federal law protecting children’s privacy.

The Federal Trade Commission voted Friday to finalize its settlement with Facebook, resolving charges that the social network exposed details about users' lives without getting the required legal consent.

Google Inc will pay $22.5 million to settle charges it bypassed the privacy settings of customers using Apple Inc's Safari browser, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday.

Facebook now uses your name to post the things you "liked" maybe long ago, in a way that can get you in hot water in the here and now.

Yahoo has been the victim of a security breach that yielded hundreds of thousands of login credentials stored in plain text. The hacked data, posted to the hacker site D33D Company, contained more than 453,000 login credentials and appears to have originated from the Web pioneer's network. The hackers, who said they used a union-based SQL injection technique to penetrate the Yahoo subdomain, intended the data dump to be a "wake-up call."

Yahoo Inc. said Thursday it is investigating reports of a security breach that may have exposed nearly half a million users' email addresses and passwords... The little-known group was quoted as saying that they had stolen the passwords using an SQL injection -- the name given to a commonly-used attack in which hackers use rogue commands to extract data from vulnerable websites.

As technology enables smartphones to function like cash, lawmakers seek answers to questions about competing systems for mobile payments and their security and privacy. When Abraham Lincoln allowed the Treasury to print money for the first time in the depths of the Civil War, it was a major innovation born of a pressing reality.

A New York judge has ordered Twitter to give prosecutors tweets and account information from an Occupy Wall Street protester who was among 700 people arrested during a march on the Brooklyn Bridge in October.

Your smartphone can be your second brain, but it can also turn you into a person with no sense of direction, poor social skills and next to no privacy. Fixing these problems is easy, but first you need to know about them. Here are all stupid things you're doing with your smartphone.