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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

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

As the United States moves away from death sentences to permanent imprisonment, California – particularly Los Angeles County – lags behind, according to a new report on the death penalty by the ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC). In 2009, the number of new death sentences nationwide reached the lowest level since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The Golden State, however, sent more peo... 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

On April 6, 2010, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California sent a letter to U.C. Berkeley, criticizing its handling of discipline against students involved in on-campus protests on December 11, 2009.Students were issued overbroad suspensions that limited even their off-campus communications with members of the University community, in violation of the rights to free association and speech, and t... Read More

On April 8, 2010, the ACLU of Northern California and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area filed an amicus brief with the Alameda County Superior Court opposing a proposed gang injunction in Oakland. If granted, the gang injunction would give the Oakland Police Department wide discretion to label people gang members without having to present any evidence to a judge... 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

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

Download the ACLU-NC 2009 Year in Review.

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Download the Spring 2010 ACLU-NC Newsletter and read about our latest events and initiatives. Read More