User Data | featured news

Twitter said it had detected "sophisticated" unauthorized attempts to access information from the short-messaging service used by more than 200 million people.

Officials from Twitter are looking into what appears to be 50,000 email and password combinations posted to Pastebin earlier this week. After a brief analysis, the list consists of 20,000 duplicates, many suspended spam accounts, and unlinked user name and password combinations. No person or group has claimed responsibility for the leak.

The agency imposes a $25,000 penalty after the tech giant 'apparently willfully and repeatedly violated commission orders' during its data-collection investigation into Google Street View.

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.

Federal prosecutors say data from users of Megaupload could be deleted as soon as Thursday. U.S. prosecutors blocked access to Megaupload and charged seven men, saying the site facilitated millions of illegal downloads of movies, music and other content.

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.

Sony says it has detected a large number of unauthorized attempts to access user accounts on its PlayStation Network and other online entertainment services.

A document obtained by the ACLU shows for the first time how the four largest cellphone companies in the U.S. treat data about their subscribers' calls, text messages, Web surfing and approximate locations.

U.S. prosecutors have launched a criminal probe into whether eBay Inc employees misappropriated confidential information from classified ad service Craigslist, according to a copy of a grand jury subpoena obtained by Reuters.