Technology, Personal Data | featured news

The operator of Web sites for Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez and others agreed to pay a $1 million civil penalty to settle federal charges that it had illegally collected information about thousands of young children.

Mitt Romney's success in raising hundreds of millions of dollars in the costliest presidential race ever can be traced in part to a secretive data-mining project that sifts through Americans' personal information - including their purchasing history and church attendance - to identify new and likely, wealthy donors, The Associated Press has learned....

A coalition of nearly 20 children’s advocacy, health and public interest groups plans to file complaints with the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday, asserting that some online marketing to children by McDonald’s and four other well-known companies violates a federal law protecting children’s privacy.

If you don't have an up-to-date backup of your important data, then this tale of woe should encourage you to make one over the weekend. A couple of weeks ago I reported the story of Matt Honan. He's a smart guy and former journalist for Gizmodo and former contributing editor to WIRED magazine.

The company said that although the breached accounts include user names from Yahoo and other companies, only 5% of the accounts had valid passwords. Yahoo said it is working to fix the vulnerability and is changing the passwords of the affected users. The company also said it is notifying other companies whose users may have been affected -- earlier we reported that they may include people who use AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and many others.

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.

Federal, state, and local law enforcement requested about 1.3 million cell phone records from wireless carriers in 2011. It's the first time cell phone carriers have reported on the staggering surveillance numbers. Millions of innocent Americans are having their privacy invaded via the dragnet requests.

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.