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By Julia Fioretti BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union and the United States are close to completing negotiations on a deal protecting personal data shared for law enforcement purposes such as terrorism investigations, three people familiar with the matter said. The two sides have been negotiating since 2011 over the so-called “umbrella agreement” that would protect personal data exchanged between police and judicial authorities in the course of investigations, as well as between companies and law enforcement authorities. The protection of personal data in the United States has been a sore point in the EU since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed mass U.S. surveillance programs involving EU citizens.

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By Jonathan Stempel NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. spying program that systematically collects millions of Americans' phone records is illegal, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday, putting pressure on Congress to quickly decide whether to replace or end the controversial anti-terrorism surveillance. Ruling on a program revealed by former government security contractor Edward Snowden, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said the Patriot Act did not authorize the National Security Agency to collect Americans' calling records in bulk. Circuit Judge Gerard Lynch wrote for a three-judge panel that Section 215, which addresses the FBI's ability to gather business records, could not be interpreted to have permitted the NSA to collect a “staggering” amount of phone records, contrary to claims by the Bush and Obama administrations.

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SurveyMonkey Chief Executive Dave Goldberg died Friday from a head injury while exercising at a hotel gym in Mexico, the local prosecutor's office said Monday. Goldberg, the husband of Facebook Inc Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, fell off a treadmill at the Four Seasons Resort in Punta Mita and hit his head, the prosecutor's spokesman said. Goldberg's brother found him on the floor of the gym showing signs of life, the spokesman said. The Four Seasons hotel at Punta Mita denied the reports.

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Shares of LinkedIn Corp, operator of the most popular social network for professionals, fell 20 percent in early trading on Friday, wiping out more than $6 billion of market value, after the company slashed its full-year forecast. LinkedIn reported on Thursday its slowest quarterly revenue growth since it went public four years ago. The surprisingly weak results followed Twitter Inc's on Tuesday. Twitter's stock fell by as much as 24 percent, slicing about $6 billion off its market value.

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By Bill Rigby SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple's large-screen iPhones are a big hit in China, taking market share from Samsung and selling at a pace that may make China a greater source of revenue than the Americas for Apple in coming years, analysts said. The world's most valuable consumer electronics company reported on Monday a 71 percent increase in sales in China to $16.8 billion, driven by its new, bigger iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. In the first three months of the year, for the first time, Apple sold more iPhones in China than in the United States. Consumer demand for the newest electronics pushed sales in China to 29 percent of total global sales for Apple in the first quarter, compared with 21 percent a year ago.

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Chinese e-commerce leader Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and state-owned China Telecom Corp Ltd have tied up to sell inexpensive smartphones aimed at boosting mobile commerce in smaller cities and rural areas. The phones, dubbed “Tianyi Taobao Shopping Handsets”, will come installed with either an app for easy access to Alibaba's flagship Taobao online shopping platform or its home-grown YunOS mobile operating system, it said in a statement late on Friday. The partnership is a bid to deepen Alibaba's e-commerce base in less developed parts of the country and promote its mobile operating system in a shrinking, cut-throat handset market. Mobile Taobao is China's most popular mobile shopping app with more than 200 million monthly active users, it said.

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Facebook has warned of heavy investments in 2015 as it steps up efforts to expand a collection of products that include messaging service WhatsApp, photo-sharing service Instagram and virtual reality headset maker Oculus Rift. As a result, Facebook's operating expenses rose 83 percent in the first quarter as R&D costs jumped 133 percent and marketing and sales spending nearly doubled. “The question is, can they keep costs under control and what will be the new revenue streams around video, Instagram and virtual reality around Oculus?” he said. Facebook's net income attributable to stockholders fell to $509 million, or 18 cents per share, in the three months ended March 31, from $639 million, or 25 cents per share, a year earlier.

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(Reuters) – International Business Machines Corp reported a 12 percent fall in first-quarter revenue as the technology company continues to shed unprofitable businesses to focus on cloud-computing initiatives. It was the 12th straight quarter that the Armonk, New York-based company reported a drop in quarterly revenue, including the effects of currency. IBM's revenue has been shrinking for three years now as the company sheds low-profit businesses such as cash registers, low-end servers and semiconductors and focuses on emerging areas such as security software and cloud services, but the new businesses have so far failed to make up for revenue lost to divestitures. Some top shareholders have sought help from activist investors to shake up the company, Reuters reported earlier this month IBM did say that it has generated $7.7 billion in total cloud revenue over the past 12 months, up sharply from the year before.

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China's e-commerce giant, Alibaba Group, has been fined 800,000 yuan ($129,000) by the price bureau in eastern Zhejiang province for violations by third-party sellers during promotions on its e-commerce platforms. Since Alibaba turned “Singles' Day”, a November 11 Chinese response to Valentine's Day, into an online shopping festival in 2009, the event has grown to similar proportions as Cyber Monday and Black Friday in the United States. “The company has been fined 500,000 yuan ($81,000) for matters related to Singles' Day pricing by third-party sellers on our Tmall marketplace in 2013 and 2014 and 300,000 yuan($48,000) for pricing in other promotions in 2013 and 2015,” Alibaba Group said in a statement on Friday. While pricing is handled by third parties, not directly by Alibaba, the group said, it would nevertheless reinforce pricing rules and regulations with sellers to protect consumers.

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By Jussi Rosendahl and Leila Abboud HELSINKI/PARIS (Reuters) – Nokia Oyj is in talks to buy smaller telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent , a deal combining the industry's two weakest players that is backed by the French government but could pose challenges in cutting costs. In a joint announcement, the Finnish and French companies said they were in “advanced discussions” on a “full combination, which would take the form of a public exchange offer by Nokia for Alcatel-Lucent”. Shares in Alcatel, a group worth about 11 billion euros based on Monday's closing share price, rose about 16 percent. Shares in Nokia, worth about 29 billion euros, fell as much as 7 percent in morning trade before paring back losses to end down 3.6 percent.