Mobile phone apps are accessing users' private data and transmitting it to remote servers far more than appears strictly necessary, while users have inadequate tools to monitor or control such access, according to a new study by two French government agencies.

Six European data protection authorities will conduct formal investigations of Google's privacy policy after the company repeatedly rejected their requests that it reverse changes it made to the policy last March, they announced Tuesday.

German government officials including Chancellor Angela Merkel could soon be communicating about classified matters using BlackBerry Z10 smartphones equipped with a new micro-SD card from SecuSmart.

Uniscon's IDgard, a service for securely exchanging documents between companies and their clients or partners, uses two-factor authentication and stores only its customers' encrypted data on the server, with no passwords or hashes for hackers to steal.

Fujitsu Technology Solutions has named European bank UniCredit as the first major customer for its PalmSecure authentication system, which is on display at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, this week.

European privacy authorities have threatened action before the Summer to curb Google's collection, combination and storage of its users' personal information, after growing impatient with the company's failure to respond to their criticisms of its revised privacy policy.

A power station in the south of Iran has been hit by a cyberattack, an Iranian news agency reported Tuesday, citing a local civil defense official. But now agency and official are in dispute over whether he really made the remarks.

European privacy authorities have asked Google to tweak the unified privacy policy it introduced on March 1, but have stopped short of asking it to undo all its changes. They set no firm deadline for Google to make the tweaks, and will leave it to national data protection authorities to decide whether to take regulatory or legal action..

An investigation by the French privacy watchdog has found no truth to worldwide press reports last week that a Facebook bug was exposing old private messages to public view. Users had not grasped the public nature of the personal messages they were posting, and the "bug" was in their understanding of Facebook's privacy settings, the French National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL) said late Tuesday.

Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg will remain in detention for at least two more weeks while Swedish prosecutors investigate his alleged involvement in the hacking of IT company Logica, a Swedish court ruled Friday.

A French company must pay a €10,000 (US$12,281) fine for failing to provide an employee with GPS data tracking the movements of his company vehicle, the French National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL) announced Monday.

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Yahoo websites worldwide will comply with visitors' "do not track" preferences starting later this year, Yahoo announced Wednesday.

The French National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL) has fired a salvo of questions at Google about the new privacy policy it introduced at the start of this month.

A password store that lets attackers in every time may not sound very useful, but researchers at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology beg to disagree.