Online privacy is a big issue in the US and around the world. Every day we as consumers dump information about ourselves into the web in the form of email, texts, tweets, Facebook updates, documents purchasing habits and more. We put our trust in the companies that maintain that data and have faith that the laws that should protect our private information are being followed and even more to the point enforced. Sadly it seems that we have never really had a right to have our personal information protected after it leaves our computers and enters the Internet.

Apple is continuing their divorce of Google as they are now rumored to be in talks to bring in another search partner. The parent in question is none other than Google rival Yahoo!. We are not sure what Apple hopes to accomplish by partnering up with a search company that has fallen as far as Yahoo has, but we are betting that some of it has to do with removing as much Google as possible. In the past year Apple has moved away from Google Maps and pulled YouTube as a pre-installed App.

Continuing their series of taking over smaller companies, Yahoo has announced that it will now acquire Summly Company which specializes in the collection and presentation of news. Summly was founded by 17-year old Nick D'Aloisio two years ago from his home in London, the company has specialized in the collection and sorting of news and adjustment for display on mobile phones.

According to several rumors, Yahoo could soon expand areas of cooperation with Facebook. One consequence could be a cessation of the partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo. Will the two ladies Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg change the way we search the internet, or at least give some decent competition to Google and other search engines.

Once nearly ubiquitous, Yahoo has been losing ground to more successful companies such as CNN, FOX, and other media outlets. This might just be due to their lack of variety in stories. True, they have several different sections, like sports, weather, local, etc, however, the one I am most interested in is Tech, as are many of the current and upcoming generations.

We have said this once and we will say it again; 2012 will be remembered as the year of the breach. This year alone we have seen a significant number of services penetrated with relative ease and user account information pulled out at an alarming rate. So far this year we have watched as Linkedin, eHarmony, Last.fm, Formspring, League of Legends and more have been compromised and literally Millions of user account details have been posted to the Internet. It is a very disturbing trend considering the rather big push to the cloud for so many critical services (like hosting our personal records).