By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 4:21pm
Yesterday, the Texas House of Representatives passed the first bill in the nation that would require law enforcement to obtain a probable cause warrant before tracking individuals’ location by collecting their cell phone location data. As Rebecca Robertson, legal and policy director for the ACLU of Texas put it, “By approving this amendment, our legislators would take a significant step to preserve the Fourth Amendment rights of Texas citizens, protecting them from potential unreasonable searches and seizures that could take place entirely outside judicial review.” They would also set a precedent that the rest of the country should be quick to follow.
By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 1:38pm
The ACLU has released the results of our public records requests to hundreds of police departments asking about their cell phone tracking policies. What we have learned is disturbing.
By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 1:24pm
Imagine you’re a principal confronted with these facts: according to a 2010 report, the dropout rates for Black and Latino males are well above 50 percent in most cities, and Black and Latino males are less likely than any other demographic to enroll in or graduate from college. What do you do? A) throw your hands up in disgust and frustration; B) institute single-sex classes; or C) research what actually works in improving student performance?
By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 3:11pm
So, you’ve done it all right. You’ve meticulously chosen your Facebook privacy settings so that only your closest friends can see the most personal information about you. No one else has access. Or so you think.
Turns out, it’s more like your designated closest friends and anyone who advertises on Facebook. (And, P.S., anyone *can* advertise on Facebook. Doesn’t have to be a business.) Sure, advertisers aren’t given the exact identities of the individuals who are served their ads, but given the precise way that advertisers can choose their target audience — by some combination of location, age, interests, employer, etc. — anyone with a few cents to spend on an ad can undoubtedly unmask your most personal details if he/she wants to. In fact, Stanford Computer Science researcher Aleksandra Korolova has done just that. (Don’t worry — she targeted a friend whose personal information she already knew and did it in order to prove a point to Facebook.)
By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 12:00am
In April, ACLU of Colorado filed public records requests seeking to learn about their local law enforcement agencies’ policies, procedures, and practices for tracking cell phones, bringing the total count of ACLU-filed cell phone location tracking public records requests to over 400. (We’ve written about what we’ve learned nationwide here, here, here, here, and here, and our findings were featured in a front page story in the New York Times in April). What Colorado learned is particularly interesting because a remarkable number of law enforcement agencies in Colorado are getting probable cause warrants before tracking cell phone location information—Arvada, Boulder, Colorado Springs, Denver, and El Paso County always get warrants in investigative circumstances—and because Denver’s practices pretty much follow existing legislative proposals, proving these bills totally workable.
