Microsoft has announced that from next year they will automatically encrypt the origin of e-mail sent through its services Office 365. The new option, called Office 365 Message Encryption, will allow users to automatically send encrypted e-mail messages to recipients outside their organization.

When the leaks about how widespread the NSA’s surveillance is hit the news there was (and still is) talk about how much of an impact this would have on privacy. We all knew that having an agency that was able to dig into your online life like the NSA was not a good thing. What was less expected (although some talked about it) is the widespread effect on free speech, and also the economic impact in the form of people moving away from the internet and businesses closing down.

After the general announcement that Google’s Chrome exposes user information to capture, Google has come back with a reply. It seems that Google does not want anyone to know that there is a security hole in their flagship browser. They are continuing to claim that it is “the most secure” browser and that Chrome maintains user data in an encrypted format. They feel that there is nothing wrong and that the information being presented by Information Finders is no big deal. If Chrome is storing data then it will be encrypted… if your OS supports it and that it only collects this information if the user asks it to. It is a very interesting statement to be made given the information presented.

Although Google is probably the leader in internet advertising they are now taking their cues from Facebook. According to Google’s new terms and conditions they are giving themselves the rights to any images you post for advertisements. After Facebook’s recent slap on the wrist for illegally using the images of their users for advertising Facebook used the ruling to make important changes to their data usage policy which ensured they would still be able to use the data they wanted. It would seem that others were looking into this and are now making changes to follow Facebook’s lead.

Facebook is removing another privacy feature from their social networking site. For a number of years users have been able to hide themselves on Facebook from people looking for them with a simple checkbox. Starting today users that had previously hidden themselves from search will no longer have that protection. This does not mean that all of posts are visible if someone does go looking for you, but you will no longer have that invisibility like you did before.

There is a pretty interesting story about how the NSA has been targeting the TOR Network for the last couple of days. The news is just another piece of the much larger tapestry of US government surveillance being performed by the National Security Agency. Some of this surveillance appears to be at the behest of the administration while others pieces seem to be generated from within the agency and possibly outside their charter and license. It seems that the NSA is determined to bring all forms of communication under their domain. This is why we were not surprised to hear that the NSA has been working on being able to identify people using the TOR Network since at least 2007 (possibly before that).

Most people are aware of small bits that are used to identify and track your computer on the internet and no, I am not talking about the NSA. We are talking about cookies and there are no end users that I know of that like them. If you look around you will find that there are tons of utilities, applications and plug-ins that will help you avoid or delete cookies from your system. Yet these annoyances (in addition to being more than a little invasive) are still around after more than 15 years. However, there is some potentially good news about this as we hear that Google is looking to move away from the use of third party cookies for tracking your movement on the internet.

Kim Dotcom has announced that he filed a lawsuit against New Zealand due to the illegal spying and search of his home which happened in 2012.

Facebook is a company that we all love to hate and is one that none of us seem to be able to get away from. Much like Google Facebook has become so big that they feel they can do what they want with impunity; at least in regards to their users’ data. Over the last few years Facebook has come under fire for a number of things they have done with user information and even things they publicly said they wanted to do with user information. The latest one involves their attempts to use your information including picture, name, and other identifying information for… well anything they want.

In a statement to the Washington Post, Google announced that they have significantly accelerated their program and implementation process of end-to-end encryption of data which is exchanged between their own data centers.