In what is seen by many as an alarming move, the UK Government has been discretely expanding a contentious surveillance technology with the potential to log and store the internet histories of millions of individuals.

Facebook has taken out a full-page “Tips for Spotting False News” ad in British newspapers, telling people how to spot and avoid fake news ahead of the UK general election. Facebook has also been deleting tens of thousands of fake Facebook accounts that were created solely to spew false news stories, particularly ahead of elections. In fact, Facebook has said that ahead of this week’s election in France, they removed more than 30,000 accounts that were spreading fake news stories that could have (and were likely intended to) influence that election.

A new report by the UK’s top Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, David Anderson, says that bulk interception and acquisition of Internet and communications data is of ‘vital utility’ to security and intelligence agencies.

The United Kingdom has passed a law that recognizes ‘domestic violence over social media’, and makes it a punishable offense. According to the new law, threatening or even monitoring someone via social media counts as domestic violence. So how do they distinguish between the average act of ‘following’ someone on Facebook or Twitter, and monitoring? Good question.

It turns out that the U.S.’ NSA is not the only intelligence agency conducting privacy-invading surveillance on average citizens. The UK’s GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) has been quietly collecting data – including revealing screenshots of breasts and other body parts – from Yahoo webcam chats – under an effort called Project Optic Nerve.

Arab spring, flash mobs, and last week’s riots in England. What two things do these have in common? Well, first, they have a people ready to be incited to action – be it for the cause of democracy, for a flash mob, or for chaos, mayhem, and lining their own pockets with ill-gotten goods. And second, social media has contributed to the lightning speed with which each of the groups coordinated and coalesced.

From our “Why online scams work” department, a woman (if she is indeed a woman) who was in an online relationship with an Illinois man for over two years has managed to scam at least $200,000 from the man. The scam came to light when the 48-year-old man from Naperville, Illinois contacted police because his ‘girlfriend’ had disappeared right after he wired her the last of the $200,000, and he feared she had been kidnapped.

A German court has ruled that an IP address is not afforded the same privacy protections that Internet users enjoy for their names and other personally identifying information, even though a user may have a static IP address which is directly linked to the user alone.