Archive

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian filed a lawsuit against the FBI to speed the release of records on the investigation and surveillance of Muslim communities in the Bay Area. Over the past several months, community members from Berkeley, Fresno, Visalia and San Jose, among other cities, have contacted the ACLU to share their experiences abo... Read More

Hundreds of millions of sensitive records have been compromised by data breaches. If your personal records were compromised by a breach, wouldn't you want companies to be required to tell you important information about the breach and how to protect yourself?Then ask Governor Schwarzenegger to sign SB 1166, which standardizes the details that must be disclosed to security breach victims.California... Read More

While the ACLU of Northern California and Facebook both agree that location information is very sensitive, we disagree that Places gives users adequate control of how and when to share this information. (Next time I visit my hometown, I'd like to be able to hang out with some of the Facebook crew at the Nut House without being asked again and again and again if I want that shared with everyone nea... Read More

Following Facebook's announcement today about its new location-based product, Places, here's what the ACLU of Northern California has to say on the privacy front:Facebook made some changes to its regular privacy practices to protect sensitive location-based information, such as limiting the default visibility of check-ins on your feed to "Friends Only." But it has failed to build in some other imp... Read More

Last Friday, the district court in the Western District of Washington granted the motion to intervene that the ACLU filed on behalf of our clients in the lawsuit challenging the North Carolina Department of Revenue's (DOR) repeated requests for Amazon's customer records in the course of its tax audit of Amazon. These customer records reveal highly personal and intimate details of people's lives th... Read More

Through an interim policy released to the ACLU of Northern California on August 11, 2010, the Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE") has weighed in on a lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Northern California against the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department and the federal immigration agency concerning the County's participation in immigration enforcement. Read More

Got a cell phone? Use Facebook? What about Gmail? Read books on your shiny new iPad? Did you buy that new iPad online?Since you're reading this on some kind of electronic device, we're guessing that you can answer "yes" to at least a few of those questions.Which is why it's crucial that you drop everything you're doing right now and take our Privacy Quiz!It's fun, it's short, and unlike pop quizze... Read More

Earlier today, Facebook announced the rollout of privacy settings for mobile users. Providing privacy controls for mobile users is important and we hope that more companies will take this step. We were also pleased to see that these new Facebook mobile controls are even better than the normal web interface in some ways.But on the flip side, they are missing a few key elements that are crucial for ... Read More

In a landmark decision on August 4, a federal judge ruled that Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that excluded same-sex couples from marriage in the state, violates the United States Constitution. The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) and Lambda Legal filed two friend-of-the-court briefs in the case supporting the argument that Proposition ... Read More

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California will join thirty one other ACLU affiliates around the country today in asking the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to make public the details of a new FBI program created to collect and "map" information about racial and ethnic demographics, "behaviors," cultural traditions, and "life style characteristics" in local communities with co... Read More