News & Commentary

In early June, the popular location based service foursquare overhauled its mobile app. As a result of these changes, users can now see all of their friends' check-ins from the last two weeks. Many users may not understand how much of their location history is visible to their friends, and even those users aware of the details have no practical way to opt out. And while forcing users to share that sensitive information might be popular with hitmen, it might not be popular with foursquare users who now broadcast location history to their friends (and maybe soon to their friends' intensely curious apps?) without expecting or intending to. Help us tell foursquare to give you the tools to control your own location history.

This month, California quietly shed an unwanted title, going from the largest prison system in the country to the second-largest after the state of Texas.

As Facebook has grown from a dorm room project to a publicly-traded company, its users have repeatedly challenged the service on privacy issues, drawing attention from the media and governments as a result. And while Facebook is often perceived as acting like some constitution-less nation doing whatever it wants without regard to user concerns, its very existence as a social networking site depends on users uploading information and trusting the site with that information. Facebook may not be a nation, but it does have a social contract with its users, albeit one driven by revenue and functionality rather than governance. And while user efforts to renegotiate this contract haven't always succeeded, even failed attempts provide some insight into how users might effectively achieve their aims when their wishes conflict with Facebook's actions.

Daniel Galindo reflects on the similarities between DREAM Act youth and the LGBT community – especially where "coming out" is concerned.

ACLU of Northern California's Associate Director tells the story of how she responded when her 8-year-old daughter asked if lesbians were going to be banned and what would happen to their family.

Today Oakland released a report it commissioned from the Frazier Group that reviewed police tactics in response to Occupy Oakland demonstrations. (The ACLU of Northern California widely criticized OPD for excessive force and violence against protesters, and along with the National Lawyers Guild, sued OPD. That lawsuit is ongoing.) The report is widely critical of the Oakland Police Department's tactics.

A commentator on my recent post about the DEA installing license plate scanners on the nation's interstate highways asks, "If you aren't doing anything illegal why would you care if someone captures your license plate number?"

When a number of bars in San Francisco agreed to install facial detection cameras to collect and broadcast demographic information about the bar's patrons, the local community lashed out – not only at SceneTap, the developer of the service, but also at the bars who agreed to use it. Outraged patrons wrote scathing reviews on sites like Yelp and threatened to boycott bars that installed the service. By installing a camera that captured "user data" without giving customers any way to control that data or choose not to participate, the bars left their patrons with only one real choice to protect their privacy: skip SceneTap bars entirely.