Privacy

Yahoo on Monday announced it will extend 2048-bit encryption planned for Yahoo Mail across its entire network. CEO Marissa Mayer reiterated that the company "has never given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency." However, documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Sno...

A class action asserting that LinkedIn harvests and sells users' email addresses was brought in September 2013. More than a month after the lawsuit was filed, LinkedIn still uses the same approach to collect email addresses and personal information -- that is, it encourages users to "sync your conta...

Facebook announced Thursday that it will finish killing off the privacy setting that previously let users opt out of searches. Members of the social network used to have a privacy setting called "Who can look up your Timeline by name?" that allowed their profile to be hidden from searches within the...

Google may have breached federal and California wiretapping laws by machine-scanning Gmail messages in order to deliver targeted advertising, U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh ruled on Thursday. As a result of the ruling, a class-action suit against Google over the issue can now proceed. The suit, whi...

LinkedIn has responded to claims in a class action lawsuit filed against it, maintaining that it does not break into users' email accounts and insisting that it asks for permission before using information from anyone's email accounts. Four LinkedIn users filed the suit, claiming it had appropriated...

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Facebook's latest overhaul of its privacy policies. "We're monitoring compliance" with an FTC order issued previously against Facebook, said FTC spokesperson Peter Kaplan. Part of that "involves interacting with Facebook," Kaplan added. That order was pa...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did not pull any punches Wednesday in describing the U.S. government's communications approach to revelations that the National Security Agency has been accessing digital conversations around the world -- and using tech companies such as Facebook in the process. "Frankly...

The 9th United States Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled, in essence, that Google broke federal wiretap laws when its Street View cars collected data from unencrypted WiFi networks. The federal court affirmed a district court's order denying Google's motion to dismiss the claim. Google's data collec...

An October 2010 class action lawsuit against Google included allegations that "Google transmitted user search queries to third parties without knowledge or consent in order to enhance advertising revenue and profitability." Following three years of litigation, Google and the plaintiff users this Jun...

Google is contesting the right of UK Safari users to bring a case against it in the UK, according to a statement from the plaintiffs' law firm. To emphasize its stance, in fact, the search engine did not accept notice of the lawsuit in the UK but forced the plaintiffs to file in California instead -...

The continuing flood of news about the NSA's surveillance of Americans' communications, which has already forced secure email providers Lavabit and Silent Circle to shut down, has now claimed yet another victim. Specifically, award-winning tech legal news site Groklaw, which served the free and open...

Most of us have a hard enough time keeping track of the security implications of the services we've signed up for, but recently an assertion was made that should send chills down the spine of virtually anyone who ever uses the Web. Namely, Google can scan and use the electronic communications not ju...

Following the voluntary shutdown of two secure email services to prevent the NSA from obtaining information about their subscribers, Internet bad boy Kim Dotcom's cloud-based file hosting service Mega is stepping up. The company is working on a secure, encrypted email service that will extend the en...

Mobile device users' privacy will be safeguarded under a new transparency code of conduct created in an effort involving 40 groups ranging from businesses to advocacy groups and led by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. NTIA Administrator Lawrence E. Strickling hailed ...

American cloud service providers seeking to do business abroad are feeling the fallout from the NSA's PRISM surveillance program, suggests a month-long online survey by the Cloud Security Alliance. Fifty-six percent of more than 200 overseas respondents said they were less likely to use U.S.-based c...