The White House today threatened to veto the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Privacy Act, unless the measure is amended to give people more privacy protections.

The Federal Trade Commission's new children's privacy rules are so complicated that companies need more time to figure out how to comply with the regulations, two trade organizations said today.

An actress who sued Amazon's IMDb.com for revealing her true age lost her case this week, when a jury rejected her contention that the Web company violated its privacy policy by posting her year of birth.

Consider it estate planning for the digital age: Google today rolled out a new feature that enables users to plan how their data will be disposed of after they die. The "Inactive Account Manager" -- which Google acknowledges is "not a great name" -- allows people to tell the search giant how to dispose of their emails, photos and other data associated with accounts no longer in use.

In case its name left any doubt, online video startup Aereokiller hopes to offer a service to rival Barry Diller's Aereo. So it's somewhat ironic that Aereo is shaping up as Aereokiller's biggest unwitting booster in court. But whether Aereo is happy about this or not, the company's recent win in a federal appellate court in New York is providing fodder to Aereokiller in its battle to resume operations in California.

Google's decision to share app purchasers' data with developers hasn't just sparked a congressional inquiry and a wave of bad publicity. It's also given Microsoft fodder to continue its attacks on Google.

Last week, online video service Aereo won a significant courtroom victory over the TV networks when an appeals court refused to order the cord-cutting company to shut down.

Hearst Corp. changed the online terms of service for publications like Seventeen, CosmoGirl and the Houston Chronicle this week, after the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out that the prior terms of service potentially transformed teenage readers into criminals.

Facebook's new mobile software, Facebook Home, is already raising the hackles of privacy activists, who say the company's poor record is cause for concern. "From a privacy perspective, Facebook is an unstable platform for a communication service," Electronic Privacy Information Center president Marc Rotenberg says in an email to MediaPost. "The company changes privacy settings of users too frequently. And in the U.S. there are too few legal safeguards for users."

Google's privacy practices are drawing scrutiny by a growing number of regulators in Europe. This week, officials in Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands said they plan to investigate Google for changing its privacy policy. Earlier this year, the French privacy agency CNIL said that Google failed to satisfactorily respond to criticism of its new policy.