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.
Webmail: You're Writing - Who's Watching?
Apr 09, 2012
An Online Privacy Fact Sheet from the ACLU
The more email you send, the more digital footprints you leave behind.
The information in your email messages is valuable. Online email services make it easy to keep in touch with friends and family. But all those emails say a lot about your interests, habits, beliefs, and concerns. And outdated privacy laws, written before the I...
Read More
An Open Letter to Wireless Carriers from the ACLU
Apr 09, 2012
November 9, 2011
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is writing to ask that you make a greater commitment to protecting very personal information about your customers. In particular, we are writing to ask that you stop routinely retaining data about your customers' location history that you happen to collect as a byproduct of how mobile technology works.
Documents t...
Read More
Court Says No GPS Tracking? How About Cell Phone Tracking?
Apr 06, 2012
By Sarah RobertsACLU National OfficeIn January, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in U.S. v. Jones, ruling unanimously that when the D.C. police and the FBI attached a GPS device to Antoine Jones's car and tracked him for 28 days, they violated the Fourth Amendment. But now the government — instead of fixing the way it conducts this kind of invasive surveillance — has simply set its sig...
Read More
ACLU-NC and ALC Help Teach Free Speech Civics Lesson to Local H.S. Principal
Apr 05, 2012
With the help of the ACLU of Northern California and the Asian Law Caucus, three high school seniors in San Francisco recently gave their principal a basic civics lesson: students have free speech rights, online and off.In March, after students at a San Francisco high school posted parodies and irreverent memes from their home computers about teachers and school administrators on a Tumblr blog ("T...
Read More
A Primer for the Online Privacy Multistakeholder Process
Apr 03, 2012
By Chris CalabreseACLU Washington Legislative OfficeWhat the heck is a multistakeholder process (MSP)? The word multistakeholder is so obscure that my computer's spell check doesn't even recognize it, yet it's come to dominate the online privacy conversation in recent weeks. That discussion will begin in earnest today with a filing deadline for comments to the National Telecommunications and Infor...
Read More
The Results From Our Nationwide Cell Phone Tracking Records Requests
Apr 02, 2012
By Allie BohmACLU National Office Ten. That's the number of law enforcement agencies that responded to our coordinated public records requests on cell phone location tracking and reported that they, in fact, do not track cell phones. The number of agencies queried: 383. The number that responded (so far): some 200.We've just released the documents those law enforcement agencies turned ov...
Read More
Resources to Download
Mar 27, 2012
Technology and Civil Liberties Resources - Demand Your dotRights!
Downloadable One-Page Information Sheets
Demand Your dotRights: An Online Privacy Fact Sheet from the ACLU [also in Spanish]
Search Engines: Who's Searching For You?
Location Information: Do You Know Where Your Privacy Is?
Social Networking: Do You Know Who Your Friend...
Read More
FTC Report: A Roadmap for Future Success?
Mar 23, 2012
By Chris CalabreseACLU Washington Legislative OfficeThe FTC's newly released privacy report is a roadmap to success on consumer privacy — now it's up to Congress to follow the directionsThe Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a helpful new privacy report yesterday. While no one has a crystal ball, the FTC provides one of the best previews of where privacy regulation is going in the near future. ...
Read More
New Examples of Facebook Password Demands, Facebook's Response, and the Need for a New Law
Mar 23, 2012
By Ateqah KhakiACLU National OfficeToday Facebook weighed in on the recently reported problem of employers demanding job applicants to share their username and passwords during the application process. In a note on their Facebook and privacy page, Chief Privacy Officer (Policy) Erin Egan wrote:We don't think employers should be asking prospective employees to provide their private information and ...
Read More
Status Update: Employers Asking For Your Facebook Passwords Violates Your Privacy and the Privacy of All Your Friends, Too
Mar 22, 2012
Earlier this week, we told you about some employers asking job applicants for their Facebook usernames and passwords. The ACLU believes that this is a gross violation of personal privacy because people are entitled to their private lives online just as they are offline.
And, as many of you commented on Facebook, employer demands to share login information is a violation of Facebook's own legal ...
Read More
Your Facebook Password Should Be None of Your Boss' Business
Mar 20, 2012
By Ateqah KhakiACLU National OfficeToday, the Associated Press reports that some employers are asking applicants for their Facebook usernames and passwords. According to the article:Since the rise of social networking, it has become common for managers to review publically available Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts and other sites to learn more about job candidates. But many users, especially o...
Read More
PayPal Changes Its Digital Book Policy
Mar 14, 2012
You spoke, PayPal listened, and now erotic authors and booksellers appear likely to continue to enjoy the freedom to publish their works without threat of censorship.After hearing from the ACLU of California and its members and other free expression suporters, PayPal has revised its plans to cut off booksellers who sell certain types of erotic content, stating that it will only request that bookse...
Read More