According to a Harris Poll carried out for Google, 75 percent of Americans get frustrated trying to manage all their passwords.

This results in unsafe practices as 24 percent have used the following common passwords, or some variation: like 'abc123', 'Password', or '123456'. 59 percent of US adults have incorporated a name (their own, a family member's, a partner's, or a pet’s) into their password to an online account, 22 percent have used their own name and a third have used their pet's name or a variation as their password.

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Around two thirds of businesses have experienced a data breach in the last year and seemingly innocent workplace mistakes could be one of the main causes.

A new report produced by the Ponemon Institute for document security specialist Shred-it reveals that 71 percent of managers have seen or picked up confidential documents left on a printer.

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One year ago this week Facebook suffered a massive data breach that prompted the company to reset access for around 90 million accounts.

A year on from this event what has been done to make users' data more secure and are people becoming more aware of the risks to their privacy from using social networks and other sites? We spoke to Fouad Khalil VP of compliance at SecurityScorecard to discuss these things and more.

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Consumers are becoming more aware of how valuable their personal data is to businesses, in return for this information they expect customized, relevant online experiences.

From the business side this means ensuring that data is held in line with the law, internal policies and customer preferences. Data infrastructure company Segment is launching a new tool to help businesses with this privacy management.

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A new survey by machine identity protection company Venafi shows consumers don't trust major cyber security policies pushed by their governments.

Government officials in nearly every country believe the security risks inherent in government-mandated encryption backdoors are less important than giving law enforcement broad access to encrypted personal data. However, US and European consumers overwhelmingly disagree. When asked if laws allowing governments to access encrypted personal and private data would make them safer from terrorists 64 percent don’t agree.

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BullGuard is launching its range of 2020 security products which include a new Secure Browser and machine learning capabilities.

The 2020 product suite also now enables direct integration with BullGuard VPN to ensure users' privacy when connecting to public Wi-Fi.

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Cloudflare introduced a privacy-focused DNS service last year, and rolled out a mobile app for it as well. The 1.1.1.1 app for Android and iOS aims to speed up and protect your mobile browsing by routing your DNS queries through its own resolver.

Earlier in the year the company announced a VPN service to go along with this called Warp, and invited users to sign up to a waiting list. It was a very long list though -- I was number 1,932,244! The good news today though is the wait is now over and anyone can start using Warp.

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Digital assistants have been in the spotlight recently after various stories about contractors listening to recordings. Following a backlash from users and privacy advocates, Google has announced a number of changes to how it stores and processes audio data.

The company also takes the time to explain a little bit more about how it processes audio recordings and to reveal the new privacy protections it will use in the recording transcription process.

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Most US citizens acknowledge and accept that state and local government agencies share their personal data, even when it comes to personal information such as criminal records and income, according to a new survey conducted by YouGov and sponsored by Unisys Corporation.

The survey of nearly 2,000 people across eight states finds that more than three-quarters (77 percent) accept that their data is being shared between government agencies.

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Digital rights and advocacy group Fight for the Future has launched a campaign protesting against the use of facial recognition technology at music events.

Big names such as Tom Morello, Gramatik and Amanda Palmer are backing the campaign which calls upon the likes of Ticketmaster to commit to not using the invasive surveillance technique at their festivals and concerts.

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Few people would argue with the assertion that Facebook knows a lot about its users. The social network is hard to avoid, but could it really know when you have sex?

The answer, it seems, is yes. This is not -- you'll be very pleased to hear -- because Facebook is listening to you or using your webcam to spy on you. Rather it is down to period-tracking apps. A study by Privacy International shows that a number of apps used to track menstrual cycles can share a huge amount of highly personal information with the social media company.

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Microsoft has lost an appeal aimed at preventing companies from scraping public data from LinkedIn profiles.

Back in 2017, Microsoft sought to block hiQ Labs Inc from using bots to gather information from profiles which it then used to help employers predict if or when people will quit their jobs. At the time, a court ruled that Microsoft could not block hiQ Labs from scraping data in this way; now an appeal court has upheld the original decision.

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Trust in politicians is at something of a low at the moment and at the same time we regularly see them calling for cyber measures, like backdoors to encryption, without seemingly understanding the implications.

The results of a new survey therefore shouldn't come as too much of a surprise.

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Google has today announced the launch of an open-source version of the differential privacy framework that powers many of the company’s data analysis systems.

Differentially-private data analysis is an approach that enables organizations to learn from the majority of their data while simultaneously ensuring that those results don't allow any individual's data to be distinguished or re-identified.

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Google stands accused of using hidden web pages to circumvent EU privacy regulations, secretly sending users' personal data to advertisers.

The accusation comes from the privacy-focused Brave web browser which says it has, "uncovered what appears to be a GDPR workaround that circumvents Google's own publicly stated GDPR data safeguards". Evidence has been handed to the Irish Data Protection Commission that allegedly shows Google using hidden web pages to share data on its Authorized Buyers exhange, formally known as DoubleClick.

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