News & Commentary

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 information that had formally resided in the home (and been protected by the Fourth Amendment) moved to the hands of businesses.

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 norms.

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, emails and text messages play a crucial and rapidly expanding role.

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.

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.

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.

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 people thought that somehow we were publishing their email addresses and private information, which was not true."

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 information from third party applications!