Archive

San Francisco – A lawsuit filed today by the ACLU of Northern California seeks to stop California's policy of mandating that DNA is collected from anyone arrested for a felony, whether or not they are ever charged or convicted. The ACLU opposes this law because it violates constitutional guarantees of privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and because of the rmful impact on comm... Read More

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California submitted an amicus brief in The People of the State of California vs. Norteño, urging the Solano County Superior Court to limit the overly broad scope of a gang injunction proposed by the City of Fairfield. The ACLU of Northern California brief expressed concerns with several aspects of the injunction, including the potential for racial profiling an... Read More

Dear Marriage Allies:We are writing as partners in the fight for LGBT equality because we believe that too much of the conversation about getting rid of Proposition 8 is focusing on the wrong question.As you probably know, the ACLU has been involved in the fight on virtually every important civil rights initiative at least since Proposition 14 in 1964. We fought against the death penalty, "three s... Read More

A coalition of authors and publishers, represented by the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law, filed an objection this morning in the Google Book Search case. The objection urges the federal judge to reject the proposed settlement because it lacks critical privacy rights for readers and writers.The objec... Read More

Ability To Track Readers Puts Privacy At Risk, Says ACLUA coalition of authors and publishers – including best-sellers Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, as well as leading security author Bruce Schneier – is urging a federal judge to reject the proposed settlement in a lawsuit over Google Book Search, arguing that the sweeping agreement to digitize millions of books ignores critical privacy and ... Read More

Late yesterday afternoon, September 3, 2009, Google finally issued a privacy policy for Google Books, both the current service and the extensive new book-related services they hope to have a federal court approve in October.While there are some good things in the policy – many that the ACLU of Northern California and its coalition partners the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Samuelson... Read More

Last week, in response to an inquiry by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Facebook announced plans to enhance user privacy over the next year. Some of these plans address third party applications, like quizzes and games, that have access to a lot of your personal information.Wondering what this is all about? Concerned about your privacy on Facebook?If you're a Facebook user, check out the ACLU o... Read More

Should the California Supreme Court apply the federal forum doctrine or the "incompatible use" test to evaluate solicitation restrictions at the Los Angeles International Airport under the California Constitution's Liberty of Speech Clause? In 1997, the International Society of Krishna Consciousness ("ISKCON") filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, challen... Read More

Did you know? Facebook apps can collect a lot of data about you and your friends. Take our quiz. Read More

On Nov. 5, 2008, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, along with the National Center for Lesbian Rights and Lambda Legal, filed a writ petition in the California Supreme Court challenging the validity of Proposition 8. Proposition 8, passed by a narrow majority of California voters in the November 2008 election, purports to amend California's Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex ... Read More