Privacy

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law on Friday making it a crime to buy telephone records or obtain them through deceit, an issue that has become important amid a furor over Hewlett-Packard Co.'s attempts to track down boardroom leaks to the press.

AOL is being sued for its inadvertent leak of member search data this summer, accused of violating privacy as well as deceptive business practices.

Technological changes and personal privacy have been at odds ever since modern notions of privacy emerged more than a century ago. Numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that 'what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the housetops', wrote two Boston lawyers in 1890 in a seminal paper that articulated the modern right to be left alone that is the basis of U.S. privacy law.

Second Life, the fast-growing online site where hundreds of thousands of people play out fantasy lives online, has suffered a computer security breach that exposed the real-world personal data of its users.

Fast-growing U.S. social network Web site Facebook said on Friday it has adopted new privacy controls following an unprecedented online backlash over a new feature that let users track their friends online.

Sprint Nextel Corp. said on Thursday that it had secured a $1 million settlement from 1st Source Information Specialists in its case against the company related to the sale of call detail records.