BBC News - Net giants challenge French data law. Great idea from France, mandatory storage of plaintext passwords, so they can be handed over to any random authority. The Federal Interior Friedrich will probably like that, as he is so keen on all data ... (Discussions on reddit claim that bbc misrepresented the situation, it's only about storing account data even after closing the account for one year - if a service does not do this, it will be held liable for activities of non-identifiable users afterwards - so not quite what you could read in the BBC article)