Tagged: Google

Google is eliminating about 20 percent of the jobs at Motorola Mobility, the struggling cellphone manufacturer it finished acquiring earlier this year for $12.5 billion, according to reports from The New York Times, Dow Jones' All Things Digital blog and other news outlets.

As several news outlets had predicted last month would happen, Google is going to pay $22.5 million — the largest civil penalty the Federal Trade Commission has ever levied — to settle charges that it wasn't straight with users of Apple's Safari browser about how it would track their Web surfing.

Australia's privacy commissioner is asking Google to delete all personal data its Street View vehicles collected from unsecured wi-fi networks. The directive comes a little more than a week after Google said that in error, it had kept a small portion of the 600 gigabytes it collected.

As we reported, the slurped data is known to include passwords, emails, pictures and web searches.

I spent some time at the Defcon and Black Hat conferences in Las Vegas over the past few weeks listening to hackers describe the myriad security holes and flaws in some of the most popular products and applications that roam free in the online world.

While this experience made me nervous, so far at least I have fared better than writer Mat Honan.