Heartland Payment Systems, a company that offers payroll processing, loyalty cards and mobile payment tools, was hacked into on May 8th. The data breach exposed the personal information of clients, though it is unclear how many consumers were affected and which data pieces -- email address, bank account information, credit card information, etc. -- were exposed.

The average data breach costs the company an average of $3.79 million, or $154 for every lost or stolen record, according to a new story from IBM and the Ponemon Institute. This is up from $3.52 million and a per-record cost of $145 in 2014. The research included data from 350 major firms across 11 countries whose databases and consumer information had been hacked.

Australian grocery story chain Woolworths has cancelled more than $1 million worth of gift cards after a massive data breach. The chain accidentally emailed the redemption codes for the cards to customers that had bought the cards on Groupon last week. The email mistakenly included an Excel spreadsheet with customer names and email addresses as well as links to the gift card vouchers.

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has gained access to the complete Ready for Hillary email list. The campaign obtained the highly targeted list through an exchange with another independent group. The list includes about 4 millions names. The campaign is expected to start emailing the list very soon.

The United States government will stop collecting metadata from millions of Americans after the Senate allowed the legal authority to do so expire on Sunday at midnight. Legislation to extend the Patriot Act, which allows government surveillance on email and phone records, failed to pass after Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky criticized the program on the floor. Still, the House-passed USA Freedom Act, legislation that would allow some level of surveillance, is expected to pass in the coming days.

Hackers broke into the online tax platform run by the IRS and stole the personal tax information from more than 100,000 people. The IRS revealed the news this week, explaining that the cyber crooks had accessed a system called "Get Transcript," in which taxpayers could access tax returns and filings from previous years.

Salesforce has opened up its data platform to make it easier for marketers to integrate first-party data with external data sources. The Salesforce Wave is now connected to the external big data sources from companies including: Cloudera, Google, New Relic, Hortonworks, Trifacta and Informatica. The goal is to make it easier to build bridges between companies working with Salesforce tools and these big data platforms.

Online retailer Mood Fabrics has increased its conversion rates by 14 percent after implementing a targeted email program. Last year, the company began sending targeted emails based on a consumer's site browsing behavior on its site. The e-commerce firm worked with email marketing provider Listrak to send automated trigged emails based on products a consumer had viewed on the site or purchased in the past.

Google's Inbox app, an email management tool, is no longer in beta and is now open to anyone with a Gmail or Google Apps account. The tool is designed to help make email more efficient. The app tries to help email users better manage the inbox with to-do lists and notes and bundles.

Gmail now has 900 million users, up from 425 million in 2012. Google revealed this metric at the company’s annual I/O developers conference this week. The company also revealed that 75 percent of Gmail users access their accounts on mobile devices.