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One of the biggest drawbacks for Facebook is its overcomplicated and difficult to use privacy and security settings. People struggle through many different menus in order to try and prevent any and every company, application and malicious user from getting hold of their precious data. We even see constant scams attempting to take advantage of users in order to spread their viruses across the platform.


Google+ appears to be in the midst of a population explosion.

A statistical analysis by Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com and chief executive of Facebook app maker FamilyLink.com, concludes the Google+ population reached 7.3 million on Sunday, July 10, and likely will reach 10 million today.

And if Google keeps the Google+ invitation button active, as it has since Sunday, he expects Google Plus to reach 20 million users by this weekend, he said in a Google+ post late Monday night. "The user base is growing so quickly that it is challenging for me to keep up," Allen said.

Some early adopters of Google+ have found themselves bombarded with multiple notification messages in their email, due to a bug in the social networking's code after the site - astonishingly - ran out of disk space.

Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice-President of Social for Google, posted an apology (appropriately enough) on his Google+ account to those users affected, painting the social network as having been a victim of its own success.

There was speculation back in March that Google was going to launch a  social network when it was announced that there would be no more private Google profiles after July 31st.   The launch of Google+ solidified this stance as on Google’s public profiles page it states:

In what may very well be the first major cybercriminal campaign exploiting the Google+ brand, spammers are sending out bogus Google+ invitations that in reality point to online pharmacies.

The messages look similar to the real emails that users may receive from friends who are already members of Google+.

Looks like Google Street View cars may have been "officially" riding dirty and Google may get slapped hard for its Wi-Spy fiasco. A federal judge did not dismiss the case against Google; instead in the first such decision of its kind, the judge ruled that sniffing open Wi-Fi packets might violate the Federal Wiretap Act.

A penetration tester has exploted a hole in Google Chrome that granted unauthorised access to gmail accounts.

WhiteHat Security researcher Matt Johansen identified the vulnerability in a Chrome OS note-taking application. He disclosed the hole to Google which patched it and gave him US$1000 as part of its Chromium security initiative.

Johansen told Reuters he intercepted data travelling between a Chrome browser extension and the Google cloud.

Last night, you may have heard talk of a mysterious black bar appearing on the top of Google.com. Or you may have even seen it yourself. No, you weren’t hallucinating. It was a sign of something about to show itself. Something big. Google+.

Google brags that computers running its recently released Chrome operating system are a lot safer than traditional PCs, partly because user data is stored in the Internet cloud and not on the machine.

Yet researchers at an independent computer security firm warn that the Chrome PC's reliance on Web computing makes it vulnerable to the same attacks that hackers have been launching on websites and Web browsers for years.

Google continued to demonstrate its commitment to transparency on Monday by releasing fresh statistics on the number of times it has disclosed private user data to a government, or removed content at government request. The country-by-country report covers the second half of 2010.

During that period, the United States was the top requester of user information (4,601 requests), while Brazil was the leader in takedowns, with 263 requests leading to the removal of 12,363 items.