A bipartisan group of senators introduced comprehensive identity-theft legislation Thursday that throws some of the burden for preventing the increasingly common crime onto businesses and other organizations that collect personal information. The new legislation also would give consumers more control over their personal data. The Identity Theft Protection Act, introduced in the Senate commerce committee by a bipartisan coalition, addresses problems with recent high-profile data breaches by requiring entities that collect sensitive information, such as Social Security numbers, to secure the data physically and technologically and to notify consumers nationwide when data is compromised.

Former dissident shareholder Roy Disney, who led a revolt against the Walt Disney Co management last year, said on Thursday he will shut down his Web site, savedisney.com, days after striking a truce with the company.

Washingtonpost.com yesterday quietly began integrating advertising into its RSS feeds, the first major news site, it says, to offer such a service. The MSNBC TV show The Situation with Tucker Carlson is the inaugural advertiser.

Google is making changes to its AdWords program intended to provide advertisers with more control over campaigns while potentially improving relevance for users. The position and frequency of ads are displayed on Google has long been determined by a combination of the amount bid by the advertiser and the perceived relevance of the ad, as measured by clicks from users. Ads that performed well were often boosted in position, displayed above ads with higher bid prices that were deemed less relevant by users.

XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. on Wednesday said it agreed to buy privately held WCS Wireless in a stock deal worth $198 million, giving it additional frequency to broaden its offerings into such areas as video. Under deal's terms, the nation's No. 1 satellite radio provider offered 5.5 million XM shares for the assets of WCS Wireless.

At its essence, Technorati may be a search engine, but its approach is vastly different. Google, for instance, views the web as the world's largest reference library, where information is static. Instead of the Dewey Decimal System, Google employs its PageRank technology, which orders search results based on relevance. Google uses words like web page, catalogs and directory, which are more than just words: They convey an entire worldview. In contrast, Technorati sees the internet as a stream of conversations. This makes it much more immediate. Google requires two to three weeks to input a site into its search engine. …

Google, some worry, is amassing a tempting record of personal information, and the onus is on the Mountain View, Calif., company to keep that information under wraps. Privacy advocates say information collected at Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN, Amazon.com's A-9 and other search and e-commerce companies poses similar risks. Indeed, many of those companies' business plans tend to mimic what Google is trying to do, and some are less careful with the data they collect. But Google, which has more than a 50 percent share of the U.S. search engine market, according to the latest data from WebSideStory, has become a lightning …

If marketers aren't thinking about how teens identify themselves within their peer set, their brands are going to miss the mark. That was the overriding message from experts at yesterday's What Teens Want conference held here at the Marriott Marquis.

A decade after Amazon.com led a cyber-shopping revolution that threatened to demolish bricks-and-mortar stores, rash web sites have perished while the sage have evolved to survive. As consumers begin to trust the Internet to satisfy their shopping, travel and banking needs, cyber business is expected to account for 7.7 percent of total US consumer spending this year, experts said Thursday.

Microsoft has ended its acquisition talks with behavioral targeting firm Claria, ClickZ News has learned from a source close to the discussions. Another Microsoft source later confirmed that report. A Microsoft staffer, who asked not to be identified, characterized the end of the talks as driven by concerns about a PR fallout that could follow a Claria purchase. That company has, in the past, been associated with spyware.