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Blog
We can be pretty sure that each new day will bring two things: new threats to our civil liberties, and new stories of people standing up for their rights and winning. Behind every court ruling is a person. Behind every landmark law is a movement. Read the stories and hear the voices that ground our work.
California Location Privacy Act is Heading toward the Governor's Desk
Aug 22, 2012
Today the Location Privacy Act of 2012 passed through the California Assembly with overwhelming bipartisan support. This is a critical step in protecting the privacy of all Californians in our modern world where a cell phone is closer to a necessity than a luxury.We shouldn't have to choose between using our smartphone and protecting our privacy. Unfortunately, outdated laws like the Electronic Co...
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Political Speech on Facebook: Like This
Aug 13, 2012
In a victory for free speech on the Internet, social network giant Facebook last week corrected a mistake that had the unfortunate consequence of blocking political speech and affirmed its commitment to serving as a neutral platform for political advocacy. The controversy erupted when the social network, which positions itself as a key platform for reaching "a huge potential voter pool," rejected ...
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Fighting for Transparency
Jul 31, 2012
Today, the ACLU of Northern California went to court in two separate cases with the same goal: shedding light on the government's use of controversial and arguably unconstitutional surveillance techniques. In the first, we filed a motion to unsealsecret court papers authorizing the government to use a device called a "stingray" to track an individual's location. In the second, we filed a...
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Carriers Face Increasing Demands for Information - California Can Lead the Way in Protecting Privacy
Jul 09, 2012
This morning's New York Times features a front-page story about an "uptick" in demands for information from cell carriers by law enforcement. As the ACLU's Chris Calabrese writes, the numbers are staggering: 1.3 million requests for information, possibly many times that many users affected, hundreds of full-time employees whose sole job is to process incoming demands, and reports that these demand...
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Foursquare's New App Needs New Privacy Controls
Jul 02, 2012
In early June, the popular location based service foursquare overhauled its mobile app. As a result of these changes, users can now see all of their friends' check-ins from the last two weeks. Many users may not understand how much of their location history is visible to their friends, and even those users aware of the details have no practical way to opt out. And while forcing users to share that...
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Making Your Privacy Vote Count on Facebook
Jun 20, 2012
As Facebook has grown from a dorm room project to a publicly-traded company, its users have repeatedly challenged the service on privacy issues, drawing attention from the media and governments as a result. And while Facebook is often perceived as acting like some constitution-less nation doing whatever it wants without regard to user concerns, its very existence as a social networking site depend...
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Plenty to Hide
Jun 07, 2012
A commentator on my recent post about the DEA installing license plate scanners on the nation's interstate highways asks, "If you aren't doing anything illegal why would you care if someone captures your license plate number?"Another commentator countered: "If I'm not doing anything illegal, why do the police need to record my license plate number?"It's a great response. In essence, it points to o...
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SceneTap Bars Tap Into Patron Outrage by Failing to Consider Privacy Concerns
Jun 04, 2012
When a number of bars in San Francisco agreed to install facial detection cameras to collect and broadcast demographic information about the bar's patrons, the local community lashed out – not only at SceneTap, the developer of the service, but also at the bars who agreed to use it. Outraged patrons wrote scathing reviews on sites like Yelp and threatened to boycott bars that installed the service...
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DEA Recording Americans’ Movements on Highways, Creating Central Repository of Plate Data
May 18, 2012
The DEA wants to capture the license plates of all vehicles traveling along Interstate 15 in Utah, and store that data for two years at their facility in Northern Virginia. And, as a DEA official told Utah legislators at a hearing this week (attended by ACLU of Utah staff and covered in local media), these scanners are already in place on “drug trafficking corridors” in California and Te...
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Facebook: $100 Billion IPO. Almost 1 Billion Users. You Do the Math.
May 16, 2012
The big news in the business world this week is Facebook's ongoing Initial Public Offering, where the company is selling shares to the public based on an estimated value of around one hundred billion dollars. [Or, as Dr. Evil would say: one hundred billion dollars.]Where does that kind of valuation come from?Certainly, some of it comes from Facebook's infrastructure and employees. But most of that...
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Twitter Stands Up for One of its Users
May 08, 2012
By Aden FineACLU National OfficeTwitter has filed a motion in state court in New York seeking to quash a court order requiring it to turn over information about one of its users and his communications on Twitter. This particular case involves a Twitter user, Malcolm Harris, who is being prosecuted by the District Attorney's Office in Manhattan for disorderly conduct in connection with the Occupy W...
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Shutting Down Cell Service During Protests: The Constitutional Dimension
May 01, 2012
BART has a serious public relations problem. BART Police have been involved in three fatal shootings of passengers in the past three years, including the Oscar Grant incident in 2009, in which an unarmed African-American New Year's Eve reveler was shot in the back while lying face-down on a BART platform by a white police officer who later testified that he meant to use his taser, not his pistol. ...
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