There’s a big problem emerging for social media companies (and tech firms more generally): they don’t really know how to respond to Government buck-passing and pressure on the one hand, and rising demands for privacy and data security on the other.

You don’t have to be a genius to work out that Tumblr, as the internet’s fastest growing social media platform (November’s Global Web Index revealed its user base had grown by 120 per cent in six months compared to Facebook’s 2 per cent), it’s got A LOT of content to wade through. 214 million blogs and 100 billion published posts, if you’re counting. Which is probably why it’s decided to make finding liked content a lot easier with a new discovery feature: introducing Tumblr’s new “Explore” button.

With diverging views on data privacy emerging between the UK and pretty well the whole of the rest of the EU (Ireland excepted), the market in privacy-focused hardware is beginning to expand. And one example of this is the rise of the Blackphone, the world’s first privacy-optimised smartphone. When it launched earlier this year, it met with sell-out success almost immediately. And now it’s launching another world first: a privacy-focused app store.

There’s a big problem with internet advertising: more and more consumers are getting irked by pop-up ads while they’re trying to concentrate on their news feeds or video entertainment. But internet giants are fighting back with a range of measures, including legal action, to dissuade the rising use of ad blocking software.

The hopes of Google, Facebook and other US internet giants for a single, one-stop-shop data privacy watchdog in the European Union are heading toward the political toilet as several EU states back away from plans to set one up.

Well, it’s finally happened: as more and more publishers navigate the tricky path toward digitalising their content, and more and more consumers indulge their obsession with tablets, smartphones, online shopping and social media, the UK is poised to become the first country on the planet to divert over half of its advertising spend to digital media.

It couldn’t be true, could it? Google couldn’t really have pushed out a Penguin refresh that hit on Black Friday weekend of all times, could they? They’ve repeatedly insisted that they refrain from pushing major updates during busy holiday periods. So the strange search patterns that webmasters were noticing over the weekend must have been down to something else, right? A mistake or some peculiar bug maybe?

The Social Media Examiner recently reported that 92 per cent of marketers consider social channels crucial for their business. That’s a lot of people. But in our age of big data, ad-retargeting, in-app purchases and automated ad buys, are they in danger of overlooking something vital about social media? Like humans, maybe?

Now here’s an ironic turn of events: consumers who bought iPads so that they could access their news feeds and other digital content on a larger, easier-on-the-eye screen are reverting to iPhones in droves. Is Apple about to bring about the extinction of a newer product line via an older one?

According to The Verge, Microsoft will unveil the consumer features of its long-awaited new Windows 10 platform in January. Can we expect the issues that have plagued Windows 8 to be rectified?