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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

We spent the last few days in the middle of the exciting whirlwind of the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival in Austin, Texas. The festival is one of the largest and most influential gatherings of technology and new media players in the world, and we thought that it would be an important and receptive audience for our online privacy message.Were we ever right!In addition to presenting... Read More

Many people are surprised to learn that it costs more to sentence someone to execution than permanent imprisonment, also known as life without parole. This page highlights key findings from the ACLU-NC's report The Hidden Death Tax: The Secret Cost of Seeking Executions in California to answer some frequently asked questions about the costs of California's death penalty system.Click to v... Read More

Remember hairspray and side ponytails, walkmen and Atari, stirrup pants and legwarmers? They all made a comeback Wednesday night at the ACLU of Northern California's dotRights "Party Like It's 1986" bash.80s fashion and music like Bon Jovi's 1986 hit "Livin' on a Prayer" underscored just how outdated electronic privacy law is, and that it's high time for better privacy protection.The Electronic Co... Read More

On a crisp Saturday in March 2009, Lily Haskell set out to join a peace rally in San Francisco to oppose the Iraq war. What she didn't know at the time was that by the end of the day, she would be forced to turn a DNA sample over to be placed in a national databank. During the demonstration, Haskell was arrested on suspicion of trying to help another protester held by police–a felony. She was h... Read More

Today, Google and the authors and publishers who sued Google are hoping that United States District Court Judge Denny Chin will approve their settlement and allow Google to launch the world's largest digital library and bookstore combined.While the ACLU strongly supports increased access to books, we have filed an objection to this Settlement on behalf of authors and publisher members of the class... Read More

Groups And Prominent Authors Say Settlement Doesn't Protect Free Speech Or User PrivacyNew York – The American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law are in federal court today urging a judge to reject the proposed settlement in a lawsuit over Google Book Search bec... Read More

Facebook recently announced that it was rolling out tools that would give users more granular control over content posted via third-party applications. More flexible privacy controls are always a welcome step, but this move does not address the privacy flaws with Facebook's third party application platform that are highlighted by our Facebook Privacy Quiz. Please demand that Facebook protect your ... Read More

Google's new Buzz service triggered a wave of criticism last week when it launched with serious privacy holes. While the company has moved to address some of those concerns, CEO Eric Schmidt seems to be missing the point, stating that the problem was that Google "did not understand how to communicate Google Buzz and its privacy. ... There was a lot of confusion when it came out on Tuesday, and peo... Read More

Earlier this week, Google released Buzz, a social networking extension to its Gmail and Gchat services. But the biggest buzz about this new service concerned its privacy problems. Fortunately, Google showed once again that when you Demand Your dotRights and tell companies to respect your privacy, they will respond. Keep up the pressure and tell Google that Buzz still has some problems to fix!Not t... Read More