Technology, Privacy | featured news

France's online privacy watchdog has fined Google €100,000 for unfair data collection from wireless networks through the company's Street View mapping service and localization program Latitude.

Dozens of websites have been secretly harvesting lists of places that their users previously visited online, everything from news articles to bank sites to pornography, a team of computer scientists found....

Google Inc. has acknowledged that it trespassed when it took a photo of a Pittsburgh-area house for its Street View service, but will pay only $1 in damages to a couple who sued....

The Obama administration is expected to announce Internet privacy regulations as well as a new position to oversee what would be a more aggressive government involvement with the Internet, according to a published report.

MySpace and some popular applications have been transmitting information to outside advertising companies that could be used to identify users, a Journal investigation found.

A Facebook engineer said that some applications were passing along personal data in a violation of policy.

Google confirmed on Tuesday that it fired an employee earlier this year for violating its policies on accessing the accounts of its users.

Social-networking site seeks to leverage user data to boost ad revenue, raising privacy concerns.

Google says it has inadvertently scooped up snippets of people's online activities broadcast over unprotected Wi-Fi networks during the past four years.

Facebook's latest modifications make it pretty clear that the company is eager to spread its brand even further across the Web -- and that's left some privacy advocates a little freaked out as they look at the vast amount of personal information that Facebook has on hand.