A couple of days ago Google launched a Chrome extension that compresses web pages. This is a feature that has been available for the iOS and Android versions of Chrome, but now it has hit the desktop. It's something that will be off interest to people whose ISP puts data caps in place.

Launched on March 23, the Data Saver extension is currently in beta (come on, this is Google… what did you expect?) and it helps to "reduce the amount of data Chrome uses". This might sound appealing, but it does mean that your traffic is routed through Google's own servers. Do you trust Google enough?

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Data leaks due to security flaws and hacker activity constantly make the news, but they're not the only ones that businesses have to worry about. Leaks can stem from employee or industrial espionage activity too and of course there's always government snooping.

Whilst larger businesses with sensitive data or intellectual property to protect often check for old-style surveillance they may not be as aware of the potential for PCs and other gadgets to gather intelligence as well as leak data. We spoke to Andre Ross, Director of Australian digital forensics and information security company Elvidence to find out how businesses may be at risk and what they can do to combat it.

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Microsoft has teamed up with the likes of Mozilla, Silent Circle, Human Rights Watch, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others, signing a letter to the White House and Congressional leaders that calls for an end to bulk collection of data. Many people and organizations have called for reform to the USA Patriot Act and this letter is the latest attempt to pile pressure on the government to make changes.

Scores of signatories point out that the USA PATRIOT Act Section 215 is due to expire in June, and now is the time to instigate reform. A call is made for greater privacy protection to be put in place when data is collected, as well as for improvements in transparency.

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A Pew Research study published last week on Americans' awareness of government surveillance programs revealed just 15 percent of American adults have changed their mobile phone habits in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations.

Security firm Lookout has just released the findings of its study on mobile device use, and that echoes Pew Research’s findings, showing that while many mobile phone users claim to be highly aware of privacy issues, few actually do enough to safeguard their data, and many are willing to trade privacy for convenience. There’s bad news for businesses too, as a huge percentage of smartphone owners admit to not caring too much about protecting work data on their devices.

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It’s a big day for freedom of speech in India. The country’s Supreme Court today scrapped an ambiguous and controversial law which governed the consequences of posting sensitive and offensive content on the web. The ruling challenges the IT Act, including Section 66A, Section 79, and Section 69. With this decision the Supreme Court -- the highest judicial forum and final court of appeal under the Constitution of India -- ruled against the Central government which had defended the section.

The bench which consisted of Justice Chelameswar and Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman struck down Section 66A of the IT Act. For a refresh, the Section 66A orders 3 years imprisonment for anyone making offensive statements on the web; Section 79 forces the intermediary to take down the content from the web; and Section 69 allows blocking of online content.

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One of the technological highlights of 2015 so far has been the official announcement of the much anticipated Apple Watch, almost two years after Samsung’s first Galaxy Gear smartwatch. The iPhone compatible smartwatch is initially priced from $349 for the entry-level Sport model to around $17,000 for an 18-carat gold version. Some of the manufacturers, like Samsung, LG, SONY and Motorola, are already presenting the 3rd generation of their smartwatches.

While opinion is divided about how successful Apple Watch will prove to be, it’s clear that smartwatches and other wearable technologies are a great way to collect and display contextual data quickly and easily. However, because this is a technology boom that is still in its infancy, there are several questions that remain to be answered when it comes to data security and recovery. There are four things you might like to consider when protecting data accessed via a smartwatch.

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GreatFire.org, the website with the aim of delivering uncensored news to China, has been hit by a massive DDoS attack. The attack started on March 17 but the anti-censorship site has only just gone public about it and made a call for help.

The organization believes that the attack -- which it calls "censorship by brute force" -- could be a response to an article in the Wall Street Journal. With a peak of 2.6 billion page requests per hour, servers were simply unable to cope with the traffic, knocking GreatFire.org's mirror sites offline.

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Opera Software, the company behind the web browser of much the same name, has acquired SurfEasy, a provider of VPN security. SurfEasy's software bolsters the security of internet users by adding a layer of encryption that helps to protect privacy.

More than this, the software also makes it possible to bypass some online restrictions and to access sites that are region locked. Few details have been revealed yet, but it's possible we could see VPN features integrated into future versions of the desktop and mobile Opera browser.

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Data is precious -- that much is obvious. For wearable tech and the quantified self in particular, digital brands and hardware vendors are increasingly conscious of the huge opportunity that this data provides them. It gives them greater insight into the lives, behaviors and tastes of consumers than ever before. But as we learned in Spiderman, "with great power comes great responsibility" --  although a responsibility that I feel many organizationals are not taking seriously enough. Google is currently in the British high court accused of bypassing security settings to track the online browsing of Apple's Safari users and target them with personalized adverts. Facebook's privacy policy is being investigated by Dutch regulators for similar reasons. The company has come under fire before for using consumer data without making consent processes explicit and transparent enough, and its constant updates to its privacy policies are creating an incomprehensible puzzle which many consumers struggle to solve.

With this in mind, I've listed five steps I think hardware vendors and brands should take to prevent wearables becoming an unquantifiable nightmare:

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Amnesty is taking legal action against the US and UK governments, challenging “the lawfulness of their indiscriminate mass surveillance programs”.

The human rights campaigning group will head to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg on Friday because, it says, "every legal avenue in the UK has been exhausted".

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More than half of internet users in the US, UK and Germany believe it's impossible to keep their personal information private if they're to enjoy the Internet.

This is one of the findings of research by Open-Xchange, the German open source software company. The Consumer Openness Index surveyed 1,000 internet users in each of the three countries to gauge their opinions about online privacy.

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Private information relating to more than 280,000 domains registered via Google Apps has leaked, leaving the registrants open to risk of identity theft or spear phishing.

The ability to buy domain names from one of Google's partners is a feature offered by Google Apps to allow easier access to and management of services.

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When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the activities of the NSA, it sparked a global interest in how internet traffic is monitored. The UK's Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament today published a report into online surveillance carried out by GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 after an 18-month inquiry.

Among the findings is the conclusion that surveillance is legal, but an overhaul is needed to increase transparency. The suggestion that GCHQ's interception of emails "does not equate to blanket surveillance, nor does it equate to indiscriminate surveillance" is likely to be met with skepticism. But what's likely to raise more eyebrows is the revelation that the agency has apparently managed to crack encryption.

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We all know that web hosting companies receive legal requests ranging from copyright take down notices to search warrants. But how many such requests do they receive and where do they come from?

US hosting company DreamHost has released a first of its kind transparency report detailing all of the requests it's received in the last year. The three most common types are DCMA/Copyright notices, government requests -- such as those related to criminal investigations -- and requests to remove or censor content, usually related to defamation or privacy suits.

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Let's be clear right off the bat, you won't be slipping these glasses on and disappearing from the people around you, though there are times you may want to. However the name of the new product from AVG lends itself to these comparisons, though the actual glasses are a bit different from what the imagination conjures up.

So what does this product from AVG Innovation Labs actually do? The security firm claims it can protect your identity in this new era of cameras everywhere. It's not as tin-foil hat as it sounds -- we've seen malware that can activate cameras on phones and computers, security cameras in public abound and we'd be hard-pressed to leap to any conclusion that says the NSA and others aren't also doing this.

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