Blog

We have written numerous posts discussing how companies want to know who you are, what you do, and where you go online because this information can translate into big advertising revenue. Your photos may be the new frontier.Gmail, the popular email service, already "reads" your email to display relevant sponsored links. Why not your pictures? New technology can analyze photos at an amazing level o... Read More

Charter Communications, one of the nation's largest cable Internet providers, plans to begin monitoring the online activities of its high- speed Internet customers and then sell the data for targeted advertising.The announcement is already drawing criticism from activists, academics, and bipartisan members of Congressdue to privacy concerns.Charter is in the position to observe and analyze nearly ... Read More

A coalition of privacy and consumer organizations from California to Washington, D.C. have sent a letter today urging Google to post a prominent link on its homepage to its privacy policy in accordance with the California Online Privacy Protection Act (OPPA) and the widespread practice of commercial web sites.The organizations include EPIC, the California-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the Wo... Read More

Issues of free speech, censorship, and harassment took center stage last week at Twitter, the very popular online messaging and "micro blogging" site. Twitter has become an Internet craze. Users rely on the site to publish brief messages which typically describe what that person is doing or other things that don't warrant a separate blog post or email. The short version of the recent free sp... Read More

The blogosphere has been bubbling over the past few weeks over the subject of laptop searches and seizures at international borders. The source of the buzz? A couple of recent court cases. Read More

A federal grand jury on Thursday issued an indictment against a Missouri woman accused of creating a fake MySpace page to bully a 13-year old girl who later committed suicide. The high profile, and emotionally charged case, has drawn media attention from around the world.Unfortunately, the prosecutors have relied on a novel and troubling interpretation of the law in order to go after the MySpace b... Read More

Statement on In re Marriage Cases decisionToday is the day we’ve been working for—a watershed for basic fairness and human dignity. The California Supreme Court has recognized that equality means that everyone must be free to marry the person they love.Profound social change starts in California, and does not end here.  It influences the rest of the nation. Today’s decision means th... Read More

When the ACLU of Northern California learned in October of 2006 that the City of Fresno was violating the constitutional rights of its homeless residents by seizing and immediately destroying their possessions, we, along with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and the law firm of HellerEhrman LLP, filed a class-action lawsuit in federal district court.The following are excerpts from declarati... Read More

The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation can today reveal their participation in a long fight with the FBI over free speech and government-imposed secrecy.In November 2007, the FBI delivered a National Security Letter to the Internet Archive, which ordered them to hand over detailed usage logs on several users.Both the ACLU and EFF fought the legal request, which we argued was unconstitutional.... Read More

The FBI has withdrawn an unconstitutional national security letter issued to the Internet Archive after a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As the result of a settlement agreement, the FBI withdrew the NSL and agreed to the unsealing of the case, finally allowing the Archive's founder to speak out for the first time about his battle aga... Read More

The Internet Archive is a digital library, founded in 1996 with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Internet Archive's collections includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages. To fulfill its mission, the Archive works with national libraries, muse... Read More

The government uses National Security Letters (NSLs) to demand access to sensitive records in the custody of Internet service providers, financial institutions, credit reporting agencies, and many other kinds of organizations. In almost all cases, recipients of the NSLs are served with gag orders that prohibit them from disclosing that they have received the letters. The NSL statute v... Read More