By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 3:22pm
Last year was jam-packed with stories of companies making costly mistakes on user privacy and free speech. To help companies get a fresh start in 2013, the ACLU of California has just released the new edition of Privacy and Free Speech: It's Good for Business.
This primer (and companion website) is a practical, how-to guide illustrating how businesses can build privacy and free speech protections into their products and services – and what can happen if they don't.
By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 5:23pm
Want to keep your information private now that Google has started rolling out “Search, plus Your World,” a new search results format? For those signed-in with a Google account, the new feature combines search results from the public web plus private information and photos you have shared (or have been shared with you) through Google+ or Picasa.
By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 2:49pm
Yesterday, Congress had the chance to walk down digital memory lane and see just how far technology has advanced since our federal electronic privacy law was last updated in 1986.
By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 9:35am
Today, the House Judiciary Committee is voting whether to approve legislation that would create a sweeping new provision requiring Internet companies (email, cloud, social networking, and more) to collect and retain hundreds of millions of records about the identity of online users. The bill, HR 1981, the "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011," – if only it were that narrow! – is a direct assault on the privacy of Internet users and overlooks some key fixes that could actually help to address the very real problem of child exploitation.
By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 4:56pm
Your online activities say a lot about you: what you like, where you go and even who you know. And companies are often eager to collect this kind of detailed information about you. So we’re pleased that the FTC has joined the chorus calling for companies and lawmakers to give us all greater control over our own personal information.
One of the key elements of the FTC’s proposal is a “do not track” list. This would allow us to opt out of online tracking, preventing companies from collecting information about the web sites and pages we visit. It’s almost impossible for anyone to manage all of the different layers of controls on all of the different online sites. That’s why it’s important to have a single, easy-to-use control over whether information about the web sites we visit can be collected and used.
By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 4:56pm
Need to get directions when you are lost? Want to know if your friends are in the neighborhood? Location-based services—applications and websites that provide services based on your current location—can put this information and more in the palm of your hand. But navigating the complex web of privacy policies and settings for these services can be far more difficult.
That’s why the ACLU of Northern California has released Location Based Services: Time for a Privacy Check-In, a guide (PDF) outlining privacy considerations for mobile location-based services, and a side-by-side comparison of six popular social location-based services (Foursquare, Facebook Places, Yelp, Gowalla, Twitter and Loopt).
By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 2:02pm
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.
