Stories by: Peter Sayer

Google may conceal YouTube users' identities when it hands a database of their viewing habits to Viacom International in response to a court order, the companies agreed Monday.

For Google, ready Privacy: That could be the subliminal message Google wants to send by replacing its name on its famously spartan home page with a link to its privacy policy.

Venezuela has joined the list of countries that have lodged appeals against the adoption of an international standard based on Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) file format.

Bull has a gadget for businesses worried about the security of data stored on laptops: a bootable, portable password-protected hard disk drive with an embedded cryptographic processor that protects data if the device is lost or stolen.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has adopted an international standard based on Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format.

Countries previously against adoption or abstaining whether the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopts a file format based on Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) as an international standard, such as the Czech Republic, Denmark and Finland, are now voting in its favour.

Google's acquisition of DoubleClick does not pose a significant threat to competition in the European online advertising market, the European Commission said this week. However, it reminded the companies that they also have an obligation to respect European Union legislation on the privacy of personal data, one of the grounds on which opponents lobbied to block the merger.

A phone from Sony-Ericsson, a notebook from Sony and PCs from Dell and Hewlett Packard came top of their categories in a study of green electronics devices conducted by Greenpeace. There's little cause for celebration, though, as they only scored around half marks, leaving plenty of room for improvement.

Next month, national standards bodies will vote for the second time on whether to adopt the Office Open XML (OOXML) document format as an international standard.

With 6,000 pages of text subject to 1,100 modifications, all to be approved by 120 delegates from 37 countries in just five days, the task facing the standards committee discussing Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format in Geneva this week is mammoth.

The teams developing the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Office Open XML (OOXML) standards should work together, evolving the two in parallel, the editor of the ODF standard said Tuesday in an open letter to the standards-setting community.