Search Engine, Personal Data | featured news

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

Google announced a new feature today: the innocuously named "Inactive Account Manager." "Not a great name, we know," writes product manager Andreas Tuerk in a public policy blog post that explains that the feature is a way for Google users to tell Google what to do with their digital assets when they kick the bucket.

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’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.

When law enforcement comes looking for evidence hidden in your Google search history, Gmail or the uncountable other Google services that touch many Internet users’ lives, don’t expect Google to turn the investigators away. In 19 out of 20 cases in the second half of last year, the company handed over at least some of the data the government demanded.

Google admitted in a blog post Friday that external regulators have discovered that e-mails, URLs and passwords were collected and stored in a technical while the vehicles for Google's Street View service were out documenting roadway locations.