Blog

YouTube has been making news this week, mostly about its recently-announced policy that makes "sexually suggestive" or "profane" content harder to access on the site. These new censorship policies which impact access to protected speech have triggered significant backlash among the YouTube user community as well as concerns that YouTube is suppressing some forms of content simply in order to "clea... Read More

By Rachel MyersACLU NationwideThe ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation have received several batches of Justice Department documents in response to our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request (and subsequent lawsuit) for records relating to the government's use of cell phones as tracking devices. What they tell us is that the government doesn't even need the help of a cell phone service provi... Read More

Microsoft recently announced the Windows Sensor and Location Platform, a component of the next release of the Windows operating system that allows applications to access sensors, including location sensors. Tracking a user's location, and sharing that information with any application that requests it, carries serious privacy concerns. Other tools, such as Mozilla Geode, allay some of these concern... Read More

Search users trust companies like Google to keep the contents of their search private. Recently, Google threatened that trust in using search queries to track flu outbreaks. Even though the motivation for this use may be wholly altruistic, and the information may be entirely aggregate without any personal identifiers, this still demonstrates that Google considers search queries Google property to ... Read More

Recently, Mozilla introduced Geode, an extension for the Firefox browser that can determine where you are and share that information with Web sites and other services. This allows Web sites to deliver location-based services, which, as we recently discussed, carry serious privacy concerns. Geode's privacy policy mitigates some of these concerns, but ultimately our ability to control location infor... Read More

Cyberspace is no longer a separate world. Instead, more and more online applications and networked devices know exactly where you are in the real world and put that information to use. Knowing where you are can reveal details of your life that you may well wish to keep private – details about where and when you work, which clubs and groups you join, and who your friends are. You deserve the right ... Read More

The University of Washington and RSA today released a report on the significant privacy and security vulnerabilities of RFID-embedded Enhanced Drivers' Licenses and Passport cards. Read More

A broad coalition of public interest groups released two letters today calling on television networks and YouTube to protect online political speech in the final days of this election.These letters follow-up on an ACLU of Northern California and EFF blog post in August highlighting the importance of the Internet as a forum for political speech and calling on service providers and content owners to... Read More

Congress and the Bush White House overstepped their constitutional authority and violated the rights of millions of customers when they passed and approved legislation granting sweeping immunity to telecoms that collaborated in illegal spying.That assertion is contained in a court filing today by three California affiliates and the Illinois affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union and the E... Read More

In case you missed it on our National ACLU blog, here is an entry written by the ACLU's Amanda Simon about a report sponsored by DHS concluding that data mining is entirely ineffective in preventing terrorism:Yesterday, a report on data mining was released by the Committee on Technical and Privacy Dimensions of Information for Terrorism Prevention and Other National Goals (a.k.a.: CTPDITPONG). The... Read More

Already king of the U.S. search engine hill, Google branched out into browser software with the recent release of Chrome. Unfortunately, Chrome's improvements, while alluring, come at a considerable cost in private information. Two data collection mechanisms, "Google Suggest" and usage statistics gathering, will collect massive amounts of data whenever we use the browser.Chrome does provide some o... Read More

Governor Schwarzenegger took an important first step to protect the privacy, personal safety, and financial security of millions of Californians by signing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) anti-skimming legislation into law this week.SB 31, authored by Senator Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and the Electronic Frontier... Read More