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Catherine CrumpACLU National OfficeToday the Supreme Court announced it will consider whether the government may plant GPS devices on vehicles to track people without judicial supervision. In the case, United States v. Jones, the FBI and Washington, D.C., police attached a GPS device to Antoine Jones's car and tracked his movements continuously for a month. This case provides an excellent opportun... Read More

Yesterday, California lawmakers took an important step towards updating reader privacy for the digital age. The California Assembly Judiciary Committee passed the Reader Privacy Act of 2011 (SB 602) with a bipartisan vote of 8-2.The Reader Privacy Act is authored by Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco/San Mateo), co-sponsored by the ACLU of California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and su... Read More

Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old U.S.-born citizen, found a strange device attached to his car. When he posted a photo of it online, the FBI showed up at his home and wanted their GPS tracking device back. The FBI had been tracking Afifi's movements without a warrant. Read More

Catherine CrumpACLU National OfficeOn Friday, the ACLU of Delaware filed a brief with the Delaware Supreme Court arguing that law enforcement agents should not be permitted to attach a GPS device to a car without getting a search warrant. The brief explains that because GPS tracking is an invasive form of surveillance capable of revealing many private facts about a person, a lower court was correc... Read More

By Christopher CalabreseWashington Legislative OfficeToday Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) took an important step toward giving all of us who live our lives online a measure of true digital privacy. He announced (via Twitter — not bad for one of the senior members of the Senate!) that he was filing the Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act of 2011. It may not roll off the tongue, bu... Read More

Students have a right to be free from unreasonable searches, and a right to keep their personal information private. This means that school officials rarely, if ever, have a right to search the contents of a student's cell phone or other electronic device.But that's just what happened at the Saint Lawrence Academy in Santa Clara. A student at the academy was recently suspended and placed on discip... Read More

Today, California lawmakers took an important step towards updating reader privacy for the digital age. The California Senate passed the Reader Privacy Act of 2011 (SB 602) with a unanimous bipartisan vote of 40-0.The Reader Privacy Act is authored by Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco/San Mateo), co-sponsored by the ACLU of California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and supported by dive... Read More

By Christopher CalabreseACLU Washington Legislative OfficeIn light of the recent disclosures about iPhone and Android location tracking, Sen. Al Franken and the Senate Judiciary Committee are taking the very welcome step of shedding light on privacy and smart phones with a hearing tomorrow. The senators will undoubtedly quiz Apple and Android's parent company Google about their practices of s... Read More

[Update: Sony has stated that they did not "understand the scope of the breach" until April 25. It remains unclear at what point they became aware that at least some user data had been compromised.]Less than a week after the revelation that Apple's iPhones and iPads keep location data logs, Sony announced a doozy of a privacy snafu of its own: a recent security breach on its PlayStation Network re... Read More

Jay StanleyACLU National OfficeApple has finally responded to the revelation that iPhone and iPads keep records of their users' whereabouts. We're glad that Apple has promised to change this practice. At the same time, nobody should think of this dust-up as some overblown quirk or mere bug, as Apple has portrayed it. This incident should be a wakeup call to Americans that we need to demand greater... Read More

Apple (and, to a lesser extent, Google) has dominated the recent headlines after news broke that iPhones and iPads keep a massive log of your location history in a hidden but unencrypted file on the device. It's a good reminder that technology can certainly pose a threat to privacy by making it hard for you to control and protect your own personal information.But that's not always the case. There ... Read More

We recently announced that it's time for a privacy check-in for location-based services and mobile devices. Apparently Apple didn't get the memo, as its latest iPhone and iPad regularly record your location in a hidden file. Join us and tell Apple that you demand control over your sensitive location information!As we discussed at our panel yesterday at Where 2.0, user trust is critical for a compa... Read More