News & Commentary

Raliegh – The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of North Carolina today sent a letter to North Carolina Secretary of Revenue Kenneth Lay reiterating concern over a recent request by the state Department of Revenue (NCDOR) for the private records of Amazon.com customers. The letter informs Lay that the ACLU will take legal action on behalf of North Carolina residents who are Amazon.com customers if NCDOR persists in its demand for their constitutionally protected private information. Specifically, the letter says the ACLU and its clients will intervene in an existing lawsuit brought by Amazon.com to stop NCDOR from collecting individually identifiable information that could be linked to specific purchases made on Amazon.com.

If you are interested in dotRights online privacy issues and are interested in a more detailed analysis of the Fourth Amendment and the state of privacy today, check out The Crisis in Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence, the new issue brief written by Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst at the National ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Program.

Today, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties is holding its first hearing to discuss the woefully outdated Electronic Communications Privacy Act. (Did we mention that it was written in 1986?!)

The ACLU of Northern California’s Santa Clara Valley Chapter is holding an essay contest for high school students residing in or attending school in Campbell, Cupertino, Gilroy, Los Gatos, Milpitas, Monte Serano, Morgan Hill, San Jose, Santa Clara, Saratoga, or Sunnyvale.

Two surveys caught our eye today. The surveys are on two different Internet privacy topics–location information and cloud computing–but both reveal how important it is that we reform electronic privacy law to clearly cover useful digital services. Updating electronic privacy law is necessary both to protect the users of these services and for the businesses who hope to encourage Americans that these services are safe.

The very first sentence on Facebook’s privacy guide page states: “You should have control over what you share.”

We’ve known for a long time that electronic privacy law is woefully outdated.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.

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 distinguish between the number of requests that Google did and did not comply with. The ACLU has been calling on Google and other corporations to disclose this kind of information for years and hopes it will provide momentum for reforming the out of date Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

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 information simply isn’t getting the protection it deserves and that the framers would have wanted (if they knew what digital information was). That’s why we’re working so hard to raise visibility of this issue.