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Washington – The American Civil Liberties Union today welcomed a new tool launched by Google to track and display the number of government requests the company receives worldwide, country by country. The Government Request Transparency Tool differentiates between requests for removal of particular content and requests for private user data. According to the company, there is no way yet to distingu... Read More

We've known for a long time that electronic privacy law is woefully outdated. But what we haven't known is how often the government is taking advantage of this fact to engage in a shopping spree in the treasure trove of personal information being collected by companies like Google.So we're happy to see Google's just-released Government Requests tool, which is the company's attempt to shine some li... 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

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

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