Google is to offer users the option of automatically deleting their search and location history after three months.

The search giant has faced scrutiny over the personal data it collects. In November, it was accused of tracking where people went even when they had switched off location history.

And earlier this month, to the surprise of many people, Google said human reviewers sometimes listened to voice recordings from its Home speaker and Assistant app.

If Zuckerberg wants to prove just how serious Facebook is about guarding user privacy, though, he should it prove it by announcing he's quitting.

Incidents where Facebook was too cavalier with user data stretch back years, and while the particulars change from scandal to scandal, the one constant is the guy sitting in the CEO chair.

Zuckerberg also promised a Clear History feature that would let you easily delete information about apps and websites you've interacted with, sort of like erasing your browser history.

Well, the Clear History feature never launched — it's coming later in 2019, Facebook now says.

Bewildered customers of A2 Hosting have endured a multi-day outage this week as the company battled to clear some pesky malware from its fleet of Windows Servers.

The full horror of the situation started to become clear just over four hours later when it announced: "Our System Operations team has taken all Windows services offline."

Vodafone has been rated as the UK's worst mobile network provider for the eighth year in a row, in consumer lobby group Which?'s eighth annual survey.

In a statement, the company added: "We are working hard to understand the issue and what more we can do."

Amazon first entered the Chinese market 15 years ago, when it acquired an online book retailer, but it has struggled amid fierce competition. Research suggests that the company's market share in China was miniscule compared to local rivals.

"There is too much domestic competition and Amazon lacks the kind of brand awareness that Tmall or JD.com have," said Ben Cavender, an analyst at China Market Research Group. "That leaves Amazon in a position where it has to spend a lot of money to acquire customers while also competing aggressively with multiple strong players on price."

The documents, which include emails, webchats, presentations, spreadsheets and meeting summaries, show how Zuckerberg, along with his board and management team, found ways to tap Facebook’s trove of user data — including information about friends, relationships and photos — as leverage over companies it partnered with.

However, among the documents leaked, there’s very little evidence that privacy was a major concern of Facebook’s, and the issue was rarely discussed in the thousands of pages of emails and meeting summaries.

Thousands of reviews were unverified, meaning there was no evidence the reviewer bought the product, it said.

One example, a set of headphones by an unknown brand called Celebrat, had 439 reviews, all of which were five-star, unverified and were posted on the same day, suggesting they had been automated.

“Facebook cannot be trusted,” wrote John Edwards.

“They #dontgiveazuck” wrote Edwards. He later deleted the tweets, saying they had prompted “toxic and misinformed traffic”.

Edwards was responding to an interview given by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg to America’s ABC network, in which he failed to commit to any changes to the Facebook live technology, including a time delay on livestreams.

In one instance, Mexico City-based digital platform Cultura Colectiva, openly stored 540 million records on Facebook users, including identification numbers, comments, reactions and account names. The records were accessible and downloadable for anyone who could find them online.

The problem of accidental public storage could be more extensive than those two instances. UpGuard found 100,000 open Amazon-hosted databases for various types of data, some of which it expects aren’t supposed to be public.

The report, published earlier this month, found that all but three EU member states' main government websites were littered with undisclosed commercial ad-tech trackers from a total of 112 companies.

A separate assessment of public health service sites found that 52 per cent of the main landing pages for questions related to conditions such as pregnancy, HIV and alcoholism had commercial trackers on them.