In U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that emails must be afforded the same protection as letters and telephone communications under the 4th Amendment.  In other words, before the government can search and seize e-mails, it will need to obtain a warrant.

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Safeguarding the privacy of internet users has become a popular topic of discussion and rightly so. Due to ongoing technological developments the internet has made life more convenient for its users. Ordering products online has become relatively simple and fast when the specific website already has the user’s information and the user appreciates the suggestion of other products by the website that are related to the product the user just purchased.

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The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in the Microsoft v. i4i case and will have to decide the whether the invalidity of a patent needs to be proven by clear and convincing evidence or by a preponderance of evidence.

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On November 23, 2010 a jury in the US District Court Northern District of California awarded $1.3 billion in damages for software copyright infringement. The awarded damages are said to be the largest in copyright infringement cases ever.

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The European Commission recently released a paper in which it announced its strategy to create stricter data protection rules in the European Union. Due to fast developments in technology and globalization it has become easier for individuals to provide and share personal information on the internet, information that companies efficiently can use for various business purposes. The personal information needs more protection than the current EU Data Protection Directive of 1995 provides for, according to the European Commission.

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Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, has a history of exhibiting a cavalier attitude towards privacy. Recently, the internet has been abuzz with a transcript of an instant message exchange between then 19-year-old Zuckerberg ("Zuck") and an unidentified friend shortly after The Facebook was first launched in six years ago, in 2004. The instant message exchange reads:

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If you have a cellular phone with you, the federal government can probably pinpoint your location to within 150 feet. The U.S. Court of  Appeals for the Third  Circuit recently heard a case addressing the level of privacy the public can expect in their cellular-phone use, in particular, information regarding when and where cellular phone calls are made and received.

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In 2008, a European Union panel of privacy regulators asked Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to eliminate all online query data after six months. This data, which is valuable for the companies running search-engines, includes a computer's unique identification number, location, and the search queries. The Article 29 Working Group held a hearing with representatives from the search engine companies in February 2009, and had established a deadline of the end of January 2010 for each company to respond.

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For the past few years Google has been expanding its reach in the realm of operating systems, quickly attracting users and developers alike by releasing the source code under open source. It started in
2007, with the unveiling of Android, a mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel. Android has been available as open source since October 21, 2008 (Google opened the entire source code under an Apache License, which allows vendors to freely add proprietary extensions without submitting those back to the open source community). Now, Google is gearing up to directly compete with Microsoft's Windows OS with Google's Chrome OS.

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Health records are one of the most important statistical factors that keep health insurance companies and the medical industry as lucrative and succesful as they are. The market for health record systems is $8 billion to $10 billion annually, of which approximately 5% comes from the sale of patient data and analysis.

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