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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

On January 28, the Federal Trade Commission held its second "Exploring Privacy" roundtable to discuss privacy concerns raised by technology. In anticipation, we blogged about it generally, and explored two of the panel topics in detail (cloud computing and social networking).Privacy and consumer choice—whether through privacy enhancing technologies, consumer education, FTC regulation, improved not... Read More

Google and the NSA. It is hard to imagine a more potent–or frightening–combination when it comes to the collection and safety of Americans' private information.But just such an alliance is underway. As reported by the Washington Post, Google–the world's largest search engine company with access to intimate details of our lives–is negotiating an electronic surveillance deal with the National Securi... Read More

Reposted from ACLU National Votes on re-authorizing key parts of the Patriot Act will happen in Congress any day now. And, once again, fear-mongering and scare tactics are being used to block genuine Patriot Act reforms. This time, opponents of reform are seizing on the attempted Christmas Day airplane bombing to insist that we don't need to bring the Patriot Act in line with the Constitution. S... Read More

Facebook is once again rolling out changes to its user interface, including new Applications and Games Dashboards that it says will "mak[e] it easier for you to find and interact with applications." And, once again, these changes affect your privacy: now other users can easily find out which applications you use, whether that's a popular game, a dating app, or our Facebook quiz. Just like the chan... Read More

Recently I wrote about the allegedly Chinese cyber attack on Google and how it highlighted a point that the ACLU and security experts have been making for years – that creating government backdoors into our communications network for the purpose of surveillance creates security problems.Security expert Bruce Schneier subsequently wrote about the same issue at greater length in this excellent CNN p... Read More

We've already blogged generally about the Federal Trade Commission's "Exploring Privacy" roundtable, and asked you to sign onto the ACLU of Northern California's petition demanding more transparency about when and why companies share our information with the government and others. In this blog post we're going to focus on the privacy implications of social networking sites and the ways that third ... Read More