Stories by Loek Essers

Mozilla is planning to gradually favor HTTPS (HTTP Secure) connections over non-secure HTTP connections by making some new features on its browser available only to secured sites.

Uber will require drivers of its Dutch UberPop ride-hailing service to have a taxi license. That will not, however, be enough to mitigate its legal troubles in the country.

Facebook has warned that overlapping national probes into its privacy policy could severely endanger the European Union's economy if such a fragmented strategy is continued and applied to other businesses.

The European Commission plans sweeping rule changes to better combat online terrorism and cybercrime.

Cars and light vans in the European Union will be fitted with an automatic emergency call device as of March 2018, now that the European Parliament approved rules that make such a system mandatory.

Google will give €150 million (US$163 million) to European publishers and digital journalism startups in the next three years as part of a wider package that aims to support the news sector.

Europe is still lacking real tech giants like Google, Facebook or Amazon, but it looks like things are slowly changing. However, if European companies want to start competing with Silicon Valley, they have to start thinking internationally from the beginning, says BlaBlaCar COO Nicolas Brusson.

AdBlock Plus users in Germany can breathe easily: A court there has ruled that the browser extension for filtering annoying ads is legal to make and distribute.

European Union data-protection reform proposals could undermine basic privacy rights globally, a growing chorus of critics say.

Europe's largest hotel reservation site Booking.com has settled antitrust cases against it in Sweden, Italy and France over contractual clauses it used to oblige hotels to offer it the same room prices as competitors, or better.

Twitter revised its privacy policy over the weekend, changing where it handles the account information of users outside the U.S. and clarifying some points.

Increasingly, computers are deciding what news stories we read, and may even end up teaching our children to speak. But whether we should allow them to is becoming the subject of a heated debate related to the use of algorithms.

The European Commission might have a hard time proving that Google abused its supposed dominant market power in the European search market.

The European Commission has charged Google with abusing its dominant position in Internet search services in Europe by systematically favoring its own comparison shopping product, Google Shopping. It also opened an antitrust investigation into Google's Android mobile operating system.

Victims of the CoinVault ransomware might be able to decrypt their files with a free tool released by Kaspersky Lab together with the Dutch police.