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By Amanda SimonACLU National OfficeThe Senate Judiciary Committee met this week to hear testimony from Obama administration officials on upcoming plans to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). You remember ECPA? That bill passed in 1986 — before we had the World Wide Web — to protect your electronic records and which hasn't been updated since?Well, at the hearing two government ... Read More

A new statewide poll released today finds that nearly three-quarters (72%) of California voters support reducing the penalty for possession of a small amount of illegal drugs for personal use from a felony to a misdemeanor, including a solid majority who support this reform strongly. The March 21-24 survey of 800 California general election voters was conducted by Lake Research Partners. Poll resu... Read More

Yesterday, California lawmakers took an important first step towards updating reader privacy for the digital age. The California Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Reader Privacy Act of 2011 (SB 602) with a strong bipartisan vote of 4-0.Authored by Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco/San Mateo), and co-sponsored by the ACLU California affiliates and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Reade... Read More

Yesterday we sent a letter to the San Francisco Entertainment Commission highlighting our concerns with proposed new rules for bars, clubs, and other venues that host various forms of live entertainment. The new rules would require the venue to use ID scanners and video cameras to monitor every performer and attendee. In doing so, they would constitute a massive invasion of the privacy rights that... Read More

Today the California Assembly Education Committee passed Seth's Law in a 7-3 vote. AB 9, also known as Seth's Law, is a comprehensive bill that addresses school bullying by providing California schools with specific tools to prevent and address the pervasive problem in order to create a safe school environment for all students. The bill is named "Seth's Law"' in memory of Seth Walsh, a 13 year-old... Read More

Download the Spring 2011 ACLU of Northern California Newsletter and read about our latest events and initiatives. Read More

We recently announced that it's time for a privacy check-in for location-based services and mobile devices. Apparently Apple didn't get the memo, as its latest iPhone and iPad regularly record your location in a hidden file. Join us and tell Apple that you demand control over your sensitive location information!As we discussed at our panel yesterday at Where 2.0, user trust is critical for a compa... Read More

Apple (and, to a lesser extent, Google) has dominated the recent headlines after news broke that iPhones and iPads keep a massive log of your location history in a hidden but unencrypted file on the device. It's a good reminder that technology can certainly pose a threat to privacy by making it hard for you to control and protect your own personal information.But that's not always the case. There ... Read More

Jay StanleyACLU National OfficeApple has finally responded to the revelation that iPhone and iPads keep records of their users' whereabouts. We're glad that Apple has promised to change this practice. At the same time, nobody should think of this dust-up as some overblown quirk or mere bug, as Apple has portrayed it. This incident should be a wakeup call to Americans that we need to demand greater... Read More

[Update: Sony has stated that they did not "understand the scope of the breach" until April 25. It remains unclear at what point they became aware that at least some user data had been compromised.]Less than a week after the revelation that Apple's iPhones and iPads keep location data logs, Sony announced a doozy of a privacy snafu of its own: a recent security breach on its PlayStation Network re... Read More