Blog
We can be pretty sure that each new day will bring two things: new threats to our civil liberties, and new stories of people standing up for their rights and winning. Behind every court ruling is a person. Behind every landmark law is a movement. Read the stories and hear the voices that ground our work.
ACLU, EFF And Others In Court Today To Challenge Google Book Search Settlement
Feb 18, 2010
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...
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Facebook Adds Application Publisher Controls, But Application Privacy Holes Remain
Feb 18, 2010
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 ...
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Google's CEO Doesn't Get It
Feb 18, 2010
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...
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Google Buzz Gets a Wake-Up Call
Feb 12, 2010
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...
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FTC Privacy Roundtable 2.0: Technology and Privacy
Feb 09, 2010
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...
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Tell Google: No Deal With the NSA
Feb 09, 2010
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...
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Patriot Act: Here We Go Again
Feb 05, 2010
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...
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Is Facebook's Application Dashboard Missing a Privacy Gauge?
Feb 05, 2010
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...
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Government Backdoors Letting in the Wrong People?
Feb 04, 2010
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...
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The FTC Explores the "App-Gap"
Jan 27, 2010
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 ...
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Don't Keep Your Head in the Clouds: Demand Protection for the Data You Store in the Cloud
Jan 27, 2010
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 cloud computing services and why it is so importa...
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The FTC's "Watershed Moment In Privacy" - Don't Let Your Privacy Wash Away
Jan 26, 2010
On Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will be in California for the second of its "Exploring Privacy" roundtables. The ACLU will be there sounding the alarm about privacy implications of social networking and cloud computing services. (Check back here for blog posts drilling down into each of these services, with specific recommendations for how the FTC can improve privacy in these areas...
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