Privacy, Search Engine | featured news

Google has been fined by German data regulators after it admitted illegally recording information from unsecured wi-fi networks.

Regulators in Google's largest European markets are taking joint action to try and force the company to overhaul its privacy policy.

In its biannual report, Google reveals which countries are asking for the most data... Governments around the world made nearly 21,000 requests for access to Google data in the first six months of this year, according to the search engine. Its Transparency Report indicates government surveillance of online lives is rising sharply. The US government made the most demands, asking for details 7,969 times in the first six months of 2012.

Turkey topped the list for requests to remove content.

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.

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.

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.

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.