Internet, Privacy | featured news

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.

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.

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.

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.