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.

Google is again blaming technical glitches for violating privacy policies and collecting personal data, this time from those using Apple’s Safari web browser. Google has agreed to pay the Federal Trade Commission $22.5 million – the largest amount that the FTC has ever fined – because they sneakily undermined the privacy settings of millions of Safari users by using computer code to trick Safari into granting Google access to user activity through cookies.

Here’s the skinny: LinkedIn experienced a password breach today – 6.5 million passwords were leaked. Now, according to reports, LinkedIn has 160 million users, so that’s not even 5% of the total number of LinkedIn passwords that could have been compromised, but its certainly enough that you should go to LinkedIn right now and change your password. Here’s how.

Rodney Knight Jr. is clearly no criminal mastermind. In fact, some news outlets are giving him their “Most stupid criminal ever” award, although we think we have a few candidates for that as well. He’s right up there, though. Knight broke into a house. The house of a major journalist for a major paper. And stole the journalist’s son’s laptop. Then he used the stolen laptop’s browser to post a picture of himself to the son’s Facebook account!

One of our most often-read articles is What to Do if you’ve Lost Your Cell Phone or Your Cell Phone is Stolen, which tells us that this is an issue for a lot of people. Among other things, the article advises that you be sure to have your cell phone provider turn your cell phone off if you believe it to be stolen. This is still good advice, but there is one situation in which you may not want to have it turned off right away, and that is the situation where the thief is using your cell phone to make and receive calls, and/or to send and receive text messages.

A large number of people wind up here at the Internet Patrol site every week looking for ways to track their lost or stolen cell phone. Unfortunately, those phones are rarely recovered. Now, a new application for the Google phone changes all that!