News & Commentary

Facebook and other online services evolve at a breathtaking pace. But these new tools and technologies can make it harder than ever to control our own information. We need to understand how our personal information is collected, used, and shared, and we need real control over that information—especially when it might be shared with many different parties.

Seattle – A federal judge ruled late Monday that government requests for detailed information about Amazon.com customers violate Internet users' rights to free speech, anonymity and privacy. The ruling came in a lawsuit originally brought by Amazon to stop the North Carolina Department of Revenue (NCDOR) from collecting personally identifiable information about customers that could be linked to their specific purchases on Amazon. The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of North Carolina Legal Foundation and ACLU of Washington intervened in the lawsuit on behalf of several Amazon.com customers whose information was at stake.

This past weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the most popular Facebook apps consistently share information about you and your friends with advertisers and other third parties, no matter what your privacy settings are. This isn't the first time a significant and ongoing privacy invasion and violation of Facebook's own rules has been uncovered not by internal Facebook oversight but by an outside investigation. Facebook needs to stop addressing this problem with secret "policy enforcement" and start putting choices and control back where it belongs: in your hands.

If you have an Android phone, you've probably downloaded a few apps. And when you installed those apps, you were told a bit about what information those apps might access about you, things like your location information, phone number, contact and call lists, and more. That's a good start towards transparency… but wouldn't you also like to know what information your apps are actually accessing, how often, and most importantly what they're doing with it?

Today, the ACLU will be in a federal court in Seattle arguing that the North Carolina Department of Revenue's (NCDOR) demands for detailed purchase information made by Amazon.com customers is an unconstitutional violation of those customers' rights to free speech, anonymity and privacy.

On Wednesday, Facebook announced a set of changes to its user experience. Overall, these changes are clearly positive, addressing some of the issue we raised in an Open Letter to Facebook in June and re-emphasizing the company's principles of giving users control of their own information. We hope that Facebook will extend these changes to help address the "app gap" and further improve privacy and user control.

The Social Network biopic that opened in theaters last week chronicles Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the beginnings of Facebook. The social network behemoth and its young and oft-embroiled founder and CEO are ripe fodder for Hollywood. But looking beyond the manufactured drama and snappy dialogue, we are right to be concerned about this company that knows and collects so much information about our personal lives: pictures, list of friends, location, religious and political preferences, sexual orientation, interests, and more.

Did you hear about this? The Obama administration is seeking to expand the U.S. government's ability to conduct invasive surveillance online.1

Washington – The Obama administration is seeking to expand the government's ability to conduct invasive surveillance online, according to a report in The New York Times today. According to the report, the administration is expected to submit legislation to Congress early next year that would mandate that all online communications services use technologies that would make it easier for the government to collect private communications and decode encrypted messages that Americans send over texting platforms, BlackBerries, social networking sites and other "peer to peer" communications software.The administration has argued that it is simply hoping to emulate