Google is making clear how they will be handling warrants and subpoenas for users’ personal information. With January 28th being Data Privacy Day, Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, shared three initiatives on the Google blog, which detail how Google plans to protect user privacy when faced with a warrant or subpena to hand over private user information.

An Android app that helps you catch your smartphone or tablet thief is an idea whose time has come! If you are the owner of one of these phones, a stolen phone is one of the worst fates that can fall upon your phone, behind being left behind or falling in a toilet. Well now Android users can rest assured that they now have a way to increase the chances of recovering their phones; with the Lock Cam app, by Lookout Mobile Security service.

The French-language version of Twitter has been an ugly and contentious place lately, and the French government is taking action. With recent hashtags of #SiMonFilsEstGay (if my son is gay), #UnBonJuif (a good Jew), and #SiMaFilleRamèneUnNoir (if my daughter brings home a black guy), the Grand Instance Court in Paris has ordered Twitter to create a way to alert French authorities of illegal content when an offending tweet is sent out.

Today Google posted some news on their blog, along with the release of their Transparency Report, which shows increasing requests from the government for private user data. In fact, the report shows that, of all the governments in the world, the U.S. leads the pack in personal information requests.

The scene was a pudgy man being chased around by scantily clad girls, but it wasn’t an homage to Benny Hill, it was Kim Dotcom’s launch party for his re-emergence back into the .com world – his new site, Mega (not to be confused with his now defunct file sharing website, Megaupload). Mega outdoes Dropbox by offering 50GBs of free file storage, unlike the 2GBs offered by Dropbox.

Facebook’s new graph search feature is proving that it is good for so much more than just finding which of your friends watches The Walking Dead. You can also find out who on Facebook likes sexism, or young women with large breasts.

It has come to the surface that Facebook took away the ability to hide profiles from search results this past December, which is awfully suspicious timing with the subsequent announcement of their new “graph search” feature. With graph search relying on Facebook user profile content for its search results, Facebook needed the extra information from previously private profiles.

Notre Dame athletic director, Jack Swarbrick has confirmed that the school’s star football player, Manti Te’o, is a victim of an Internet hoax. Te’o’s girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, was a complete fabrication and reports that she died from leukemia during the 2012 football season are a lie. Initial reports had Te’o as part of the hoax, but Te’o and his family are flatly denying this, saying that Te’o is profoundly hurt and embarrassed by the entire situation.

Facebook has just announced their big Facebook news: Facebook search. Or, more properly, Facebook GraphSearch. So just what is Facebook Graph Search? Facebook suggests that it is a great new way for people to search for information on Facebook, and for people to find your business through your Facebook business page. We call it a great new way to spy on your friends and family, to stalk people, and to further invade their privacy. And, to have your own privacy invaded.

SOPA Activist and RSS author Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit, has been found dead in his Brooklyn, NY apartment, from a hanging suicide. The 26 year-old was facing Federal prosecution for allegedly stealing 4.8 million documents from MIT’s computer networks, as well as from JSTOR, or Journal Storage, a nonprofit organization that offers journals and scholarly books to subsidized institutions. The death came as a shock to Swartz’s parents and girlfriend, who never expected him to hang himself, and they contend that the suicide was as a result of a “criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security alerted users of Java to a serious and urgent security risk, recommending that users disable Java until a suitable fix has been released. In the statement, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), the branch of the federal government that manages computer security risks, warned that any system using Oracle Java 7 (1.7, 1.7.0) including Java Platform Standard Edition 7 (Java SE 7), Java SE Development Kit (JDK 7) and Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE 7) are at risk.

Hailed as a rapist and stalker’s haven, “Girls Around Me” is not only a creepy app in its concept, it enables iPhone and android users to track nearby women based on their geographic location. The information is aggregated from check-ins through Facebook and Four Square, and perhaps what makes it the creepiest app, and why it is being called the “stalking app,” is because if a user of the app likes what he initially sees about the girl, he can see more information about her as pulled from her Four Square account and Facebook link, including more photos of her.

#Boycottinstagram is trending on Twitter and with good reason. Now that Facebook officially owns Instagram, they can use your pictures to sell and use however they want, royalty-free, and short of deleting your Instagram account, you have waived your rights and can’t opt out. Facebook has proven time and time again that they care little about user privacy, but now they are blatantly stating that they can use your own content for revenue, and they don’t care a lick about paying royalties.

If you, like many, have been using Amazon.com for some of your Christmas shopping, then your account may be vulnerable to a scam using your order number that is genius in its execution, and uncovers some of Amazon’s failings in inventory control. It all comes down to the individual order numbers assigned to your orders. Those order numbers are for sale, along with the corresponding email address (as in your email address), and scam artists are using that information to get duplicates of your orders sent to them.

15-year-old Texas teen Andrea Hernandez has launched a fight against the Northside Independent School District to avoid wearing the electronic tracking RFID chips embedded in her high school ID. Hernandez, from a deeply evangelical religion, believes that the ID is “the mark of the beast,” as talked about in the Book of Revelation. But even without the religious aspect, this is an important issue, and the religious nature of her objection helps to provide a more solid basis over which to object to the microchipped school I.D.