Google News has started soliciting feedback from people mentioned in articles that appear in the mainstream media.

The influential advocacy group Center for Democracy & Technology is calling for new legislation to force search engines to protect users' privacy. "Unfortunately, industry self-regulation by itself will never provide strong enough privacy safeguards," the CDT states in its new report, "Search Privacy Practices: A Work in Progress."

The New York Times plans to scrap its two-year-old TimesSelect subscription service and once again make all of the newspaper's columns available for free online, according to a report in today's New York Post.

Vodafone, Prudential and the British government's Central Office of Information are among the six marketers who just pulled all ads from social networking site Facebook after realizing that they appeared next to content by the right-wing extremist group British Nationalist Party.