Nothing in life is free, and with Walmart’s latest iTunes gift card deal – $100 of iTunes credit for $80 – that is especially true. Sure you receive $20 of “free” turns through this deal, but it’s going to cost you – your personal information.

Investors are quickly bailing as Groupon experienced a new closing low on Friday, with shares down 5% at $4.75. Their stock-price declined even more last week after their second-quarter results reflected a decline in customer growth and revenue.

Google has found themselves in hot water over privacy issues yet again. As we previously reported, it was discovered that the Google Street View vehicles were collecting data illegally, while taking street pictures in the US, Australia and Europe. In fact, they were doing it for three years, between 2007 and 2010, by harvesting personal data through open wifi routers as the Street View car drove by. This data included entire emails, site visit history, passwords, and other private information that the average citizen probably does not want floating around.

Have you checked your Facebook email lately? Us neither, since we never started using it. Well it appears that Facebook is determined to thrust Facebook email into the spotlight, as today they replaced your public primary email address with your new Facebook email address.

If you have been searching for a way to add an attachment – such as to attach an image – to an email in an iPhone, and think that you must be crazy because you can’t figure it out, well, you’re not crazy. While there is a way to email an image from the iPhone by first selecting the image, then hitting “email it”, there is in fact no obvious way on an iPhone or iPad to attach an image or other file to an already-existing email. And that, we think, is the crazy thing. In any other email application, and on any other smartphone (particularly Android) there is usually an “attach” button right in the email window! But not on the iPhone. But, there is a way to attach an image or other attachment in an iPhone, it’s just not obvious. Here it is.

If you are getting a lot of email from Amazon, besides order confirmations, and wondering why, this may be the reason (and here’s what to do about all that email you are getting from Amazon).

One of the biggest (and indeed only) frustrations for people who use the iPad (be it iPad 2, iPad 3, or originally flavor iPad) for business, or even for personal email use if you don’t use a Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL or other webmail address) is that the native mail app on the iPad will only use your webmail address as your “From” address, even if you have a different default email address set within your webmail app. For example, your Gmail address may be example@gmail.com, but you may have example@yourdomain.com set as your default “From:” address in Gmail, and Gmail will honor that, but the mail app on your iPad will insist on sending your email ‘from’ your example@gmail.com address instead of your default example@yourdomain.com address. There is no way to change that default “from” address on your iPad. But it turns out that there is a way to beat your iPad into submission, and to set your default “from” address to whatever you would prefer it to be. Here’s how.

Microsoft Hotmail, the world’s largest email provider, is better at blocking spam than Google Gmail and Yahoo Mail, according to a study released by the independent research firm Cascade Insights. The study only tested these companies – the so-called big three email providers – and was sponsored by Microsoft, which funded the research to combat their bad reputation for allowing loads of spam into users’ inboxes.

Several email providers that normally compete with one another, like Google Gmail and Microsoft Hotmail, have teamed up in an effort to better protect email users from spam and fraudulent messages. The new system is called DMARC, short for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance. With a united front, the war against spam may have a powerful new weapon.

Three researchers in Germany at the University of Ulm have discovered a massive security hole in Android – so big, in fact, that it affects at least 97%, and as many as 99%, of all Android users. The researchers, Bastian Könings, Jens Nickels, and Florian Schaub, have discovered that the security flaw allows anyone who is sniffing around your connection on an unsecured wireless network to acquire your Google authorization credentials from a specific token (the authToken), giving them access to your contacts, your calendar and, well – really any application that authenticates you by using your Google authorization credentials contained within that authToken.

If you received a notice from one or another company with whom you do business or have done business in the past, saying that your email address has been compromised due to a data security breach at email service provider (ESP) Epsilon (due to their customers’ email lists being hacked and stolen), you’re not alone. Oh, you are so not alone. Banks, large merchants, and others, have all had their entire list of customers’ email addresses swiped and leaked due to the Epsilon data breach. Chase Bank, Citi Bank, Best Buy, Krogers – even Disney, have all been affected – as have their customers. Of course, lots of people receiving these notices will assume that they are phishing attempts (and there will undoubtedly be phishing attempts riding on the coat tails of this fiasco). Here is the complete list as we know it today – if you have received a notice saying that your email address has been compromised, please add the name of the company involved to the list here.

For those of you who follow email deliverability, whitelisting, etc., you may be surprised to learn that Goodmail is closing up shop. This means that there are just two main email deliverability services out there now – Return Path, and SuretyMail email accreditation and deliverability services (the latter of which is provided by our parent company, ISIPP).

According to government officials and insiders, the Federal government is seeking broad authority and discretion to monitor all Internet communications, including communications on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, instant messaging systems, and even (or hey, perhaps especially) encrypted emails.

In a unanimous decision today, the United States Supreme Court has held that a government worker had no right to an expectation of privacy when it came to whether or not his employer might review the content of his text messages that were sent and received on employer-provided equipment, even those messages sent while he was off-duty. In the case of City of Ontario v. Quon, the Ontario California Police Department reviewed text messages sent and received by their employee, Officer Jeff Quon, on the text pager which was provided to Quon by the Ontario PD, including messages sent while Officer Quon was off-duty. Quon objected, but the Supreme Court held that Quon had no legitimate expectation of privacy.

The newest phishing scam is a fake order confirmation from Apple, exhorting you “To view the most up-to-date status and make changes to your Apple Online Store order, visit online your Order Status.” The “visit online your order status” link actually goes to https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/brick-wall/. And while it says that it’s from up-to-date @store.apple.com, it’s not really (our version came from dj @accountingsevices.co.nz)