Internet, Privacy | featured news

Maryland is poised to become the first state to ban employers from demanding applicants or workers hand over their log-in information for social media sites like Facebook....

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.

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

Google recently announced it was unifying its privacy policies and would be sharing the data it collects about users between all of its products, starting March 1st. That means your web searches and sites you visit will be combined with other Google products like Google Plus and YouTube. If you'd rather avoid that, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reminds us you can remove your Google search history and stop it from being recorded.

Discovery comes just days after Web giant was found to be sidestepping the user privacy preferences in Apple's Safari. Read this blog post by Steven Musil on Security.

The web giant and other ad companies bypassed privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser on mobile devices and computers – tracking the online habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.

Google’s announcement that it is sharing more user data across its services has already raised the hackles of privacy advocates, technology writers and at least one national data-protection agency.

Facebook has settled a complaint by the Federal Trade Commission that the social networking giant deceived consumers by promising privacy protections while it shared and made user data more public, according to the FTC.