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If you are interested in dotRights online privacy issues and are interested in a more detailed analysis of the Fourth Amendment and the state of privacy today, check out The Crisis in Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence, the new issue brief written by Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst at the National ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Program.The issue brief delves into how rapid advancements in tech... Read More

Today, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties is holding its first hearing to discuss the woefully outdated Electronic Communications Privacy Act. (Did we mention that it was written in 1986?!)The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution was designed to protect the privacy of our personal information. Unfortunately, innovation has far outpaced electroni... Read More

The ACLU of Northern California's Santa Clara Valley Chapter is holding an essay contest for high school students residing in or attending school in Campbell, Cupertino, Gilroy, Los Gatos, Milpitas, Monte Serano, Morgan Hill, San Jose, Santa Clara, Saratoga, or Sunnyvale.Find out more here. Please note, the deadline has been extended to May 15, 2010.You rely on the Internet to learn, share, shop, ... Read More

Two surveys caught our eye today. The surveys are on two different Internet privacy topics–location information and cloud computing–but both reveal how important it is that we reform electronic privacy law to clearly cover useful digital services. Updating electronic privacy law is necessary both to protect the users of these services and for the businesses who hope to encourage Americans that the... Read More

The very first sentence on Facebook's privacy guide page states: "You should have control over what you share."

That seems fairly simple, doesn't it?

But many of Facebook's recent actions, such as its much-criticized "privacy transition," have made it harder for users to retain control over their information. Is this week more of the same?

Earlier this week, following up on its , Facebook announced its plans to create more dynamic profiles using "Connections." What exactly counts as a connection wasn't clearly defined either time, but seems to include things like friends lists, likes and interests, events, groups, and activities. (Today's announcement of the Social Graph API includes News Feed, Wall, Notes, Photos, and Videos as "connections" too, but Facebook may be overusing the word to mean different things.)

More importantly, it also isn't clear whether users will have real control over how their connections are shared. Both Facebook's Monday announcement and its have suggested that users cannot prevent applications, pages, and other third parties from accessing these connections. (They may be able to "hide" them from other Facebook users, but not from the government, advertisers, or anyone else with the ability and incentive to create apps or pages.) However, today's new documents for developers point to the Extended Permissions page that requires that applications and pages to explicitly ask the user before accessing various "connections," including interests, events, groups, and location.

If Facebook believes that you "should have control over what you share," it should resolve this by giving users real control over whether their connections can be accessed by apps and pages. Doing so still won't resolve other issues, like the "app gap" that allows your friends' applications to view your personal information without your knowledge or consent, but it would be one step in the right direction.

Otherwise, the only way you can keep control of your information is to refuse to use Facebook to share or connect at all. And that's not what we mean by control.

So don't let Facebook take away control over your personal information! Tell Facebook that you want to have control over your friends, groups, events, and interests so that you – and not Facebook, the government, or anyone else – chooses how and when they are shared!

Demand control of your personal information – Demand Your dotRights!

Chris Conley is the Technology and Civil Liberties Fellow with the ACLU of Northern California.

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We've known for a long time that electronic privacy law is woefully outdated. But what we haven't known is how often the government is taking advantage of this fact to engage in a shopping spree in the treasure trove of personal information being collected by companies like Google.So we're happy to see Google's just-released Government Requests tool, which is the company's attempt to shine some li... Read More

Washington – The American Civil Liberties Union today welcomed a new tool launched by Google to track and display the number of government requests the company receives worldwide, country by country. The Government Request Transparency Tool differentiates between requests for removal of particular content and requests for private user data. According to the company, there is no way yet to distingu... Read More

The ACLU has recently been making a lot of noise about modernizing the laws that protect our online privacy. We believe that law enforcement should have to go to a judge and get a warrant that says it has probable cause to believe you've committed a crime before it can read your email, browse through your social networking account, or track your location. Right now, that's not the case. Digital in... Read More

In a blog post Monday evening, Facebook stated that it would be moving ahead with the privacy policy changes it proposed on March 26th without any suggestion that it will make any changes to those proposals, despite extensive criticism of the proposals and a recent web poll showing that 95% of respondents think that the changes are a bad idea.Facebook's proposed changes affect user privacy in many... Read More

In 1986, there was no World Wide Web, nobody carried a cell phone, and the president was a man born in 1911. That was the year that the statute that protects the privacy of your electronic life – email, search terms, cloud computing, cell phone location records, postings to Facebook – was passed into law. Even then, Congress recognized that computerized record-keeping would pose privacy issues as ... Read More

Today, Facebook released proposed changes to its privacy policy and its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Facebook's newest changes seem to be designed to encourage users to share more information with applications and sites that they visit and use, which fits in with the string of other changes that have been happening on Facebook and with Mark Zuckerberg's world view on changing social n... Read More

The ACLU filed an amicus brief yesterday to the Supreme Court in the case of City of Ontario v. Quon. At stake in this case is whether public employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy for the text messages they send on devices owned by their employers. But at stake more broadly is the balance between employer access and employee privacy in a world where communications via computers, email... Read More