Technology, Privacy | featured news

U.S. authorities are leading the charge as governments around the world pepper Google with more demands to remove online content and turn over information about people using its Internet search engine, YouTube video site and other services.

IT knows who you are. It knows where you live. It knows what you do. It peers deeper into American life than the F.B.I. or the I.R.S., or those prying digital eyes at Facebook and Google. If you are an American adult, the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on.

Proving that Facebook should never become a real country, a recent user vote on privacy changes resulted in ... hardly anyone voting. "Hardly anyone" meant 342,632 votes — a smidgen of a smidgen of the social network's 900 million-plus users worldwide.

Last Thursday, Microsoft announced several new features to the upcoming IE10, which will launch as part of Windows 8. One of these features, which turns on “Do Not Track” by default, has caused quite a stir over the weekend as new outlets and bloggers have discussed the potential benefits and ramifications of this feature.

The White House threatened on Wednesday to veto cyber-legislation that is widely expected to pass the House this week, asserting that the bill would put Americans’ privacy at risk and give a pass to companies that fail to secure their computer networks.

U.S. regulators pushed Internet companies on Monday to adopt a "Do Not Track" system that would give consumers more control over their personal data online, and asked Congress to pass privacy legislation.

A Democratic senator from Connecticut is writing a bill that would stop the practice of employers asking job applicants for their Facebook or other social media passwords, he told The Associated Press on Thursday. U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal said that such a practice is an "unreasonable invasion of privacy for people seeking work."

In their efforts to vet applicants, some companies and government agencies are going beyond merely glancing at a person's social networking profiles and instead asking to log in as the user to have a look around.

Dean Obeidallah asks whether the Department of Homeland Security's surveillance of social media websites is an invasion of our privacy.

On Thursday, Google's much-discussed new privacy policy goes into effect.