
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.
Californians Should Vote No on Prop 24
Oct 16, 2020
Proposition 24 won’t strengthen privacy rights for Californians. Instead, it will undermine protections in current law and increase the burden on people to protect themselves—in ways that will disproportionately harm poor people and people of color. Please vote NO on Prop 24.
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ACLU Calls On Tech Companies to End Their Alliance with ICE and CBP
Sep 09, 2020
Tech companies provide access to the sensitive personal information used to destroy communities and undermine the rights that we work every day to protect. Join the #NoTechforICE campaign.
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Banning Dangerous Surveillance Tech is One Step Towards Wider Police Reform in Santa Cruz
Jun 22, 2020
Facial recognition and predictive policing technology fuel the exact type of intrusive and racially discriminatory policing that people are protesting against.
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Microsoft Says it Supports Racial Justice. Will it Refuse to Power Discriminatory Police Surveillance?
Jun 10, 2020
As major tech companies rush to claim solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, they’re being rightfully called out for the ways their products and workplace conditions actively undermine the rights and safety of Black people. IBM has listened and stopped development of face recognition, a technology that supercharges police surveillance and has repeatedly been shown to disproportionately m...
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Hey Clearview, Your Misleading PR Campaign Doesn’t Make Your Face Surveillance Product Any Less Dystopian
Feb 10, 2020
In the last few weeks, a company called Clearview has been in the news for marketing a reckless and invasive facial recognition tool to law enforcement. The company claims the tool can identify people in billions of photos nearly instantaneously. And Exhibit A in support of their claim to law enforcement that their app is accurate? An “accuracy test” that Clearview boasts was modeled on the ACLU’s...
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California Just Blocked Police Body Cam Use of Face Recognition
Oct 11, 2019
The state of California just made it clear: Face recognition surveillance isn’t inevitable. We can — and should — fight hard to protect our communities from this dystopian technology.
Building on San Francisco’s first-of-its-kind ban on government face recognition, California this week enacted a landmark law that blocks police from using body cameras for spying on the public. The state-wide law...
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Records Reveal ICE Agents Run Thousands of License Plate Queries a Month in Massive Location Database
Jun 05, 2019
On February 27, 2018, at 4:54 p.m., a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent typed a query into a database of driver locations collected by automated license plate readers across the United States. The license plate database returned nine results. As an explanation for why ICE was searching the database, the agent gave the following reason:
"ADMINISTRATIVE SPOUSE OF TARGET"
This was ...
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Your Personal Information is Yours, Not the Raw Material for Surveillance Technology
May 09, 2019
The information that you share with a company should not be repurposed or sold without your consent. But companies are building algorithms from massive repositories of personal information, collected from people who are not told about how the company will use their information.
A recent report revealed a troubling example of this invasive practice. A Silicon Valley-based company called Ever app...
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No One Should Have to Travel in Fear
Apr 02, 2019
I’ve worked for Silicon Valley companies for more than a decade and international travel is a necessary part of my job. I’ve had my fair share of delays and missed connections, but one thing I’ve never experienced while traveling in airports is fear. That changed last December when I returned from a business trip to Europe.
Going through customs is usually routine for me. I signed up for the Gl...
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Will California lawmakers vote to protect Californians’ privacy or tech industry profits?
Mar 27, 2019
Last year, California lawmakers passed the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), a new law to strengthen consumer privacy protections. A few weeks ago, newly-elected Oakland Assemblymember Buffy Wicks introduced AB 1760: Privacy for All, to add critical improvements to current law and ensure privacy is a right we can all exercise in California – and pave the way for other states to do the same –...
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The FBI Won’t Hand Over Its Surveillance Records on ‘Black Identity Extremists,’ so the ACLU and CMJ are Suing
Mar 21, 2019
At a time when violence by white supremacists is on the rise, the FBI appears to be targeting Black people in a secret intelligence program concerning so-called “Black Identity Extremists”— an inflammatory term for a group that doesn’t even exist. The bureau’s practice echoes earlier, shameful government surveillance programs that sought to discredit civil rights and Black power activists who were...
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Facebook Settles Civil Rights Cases by Making Sweeping Changes to Its Online Ad Platform
Mar 19, 2019
The ACLU, along with our client Communications Workers of America and other civil rights groups, announced a historic settlement agreement with Facebook that will result in major changes to Facebook’s advertising platform. Advertisers will no longer be able to exclude users from learning about opportunities for housing, employment, or credit based on gender, age, or other protected characteristics...
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