Blog of Rights
Nicole
Ozer
12/09/2009

Facebook Privacy in Transition - But Where is it Heading?

By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 2:43pm

(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

The next time you log onto Facebook, you'll be thinking about privacy: how private are your photos, friends, status updates, and personal details, and how public do you actually want them to be?

In response to pressure about its privacy practices, including an ACLU petition signed by over 43,000 concerned Internet users, Facebook has released a new privacy policy, modified its profile and publication privacy controls, and rolled out a "Transition Tool" to guide all 350 million Facebook users through the process of choosing new privacy settings.

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11/18/2009

Your Life, Your Data. Or Is It?

By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 12:01pm

(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

When we update our status on Facebook, post those photos on Flickr, or shop for holiday gifts on Amazon, a whole lot happens behind the scenes. The more we do online, the more digital footprints we leave behind. Many sites we visit collect detailed information about us—our politics, hobbies, relationships and more.

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11/17/2009
Google

Amended Google Book Settlement: Doesn't Deal with Privacy Problems

By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 2:14pm

(Originally posted on the ACLU of Northern California's Bytes & Pieces blog.)

The Amended Google Book Search Settlement, filed with the Court on Friday, November 13, does not resolve the privacy concerns.

The ACLU, along with EFF and the Samuelson Clinic, have been working to ensure that Google Book Search does not become a one-stop shop for government surveillance into the reading habits of millions of Americans and pushing for robust privacy and free speech safeguards to be included in the settlement provisions.

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09/11/2009
Google

ACLU Submits Statement to House Judiciary Committee on Google Books

By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 3:16pm

The ACLU submitted a statement to the House Judiciary Committee for yesterday's hearing on Google Book Search:

The failure of the Settlement to include protections for book records and limitations on data collection, retention, use, and disclosure should be of great concern to this Committee, particularly given the tremendous breadth of the Google Book Search services that will emerge from the Settlement and the likely impact they will have on future authors, readers, libraries, the book market, and broader competition in the online services market.

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09/08/2009
Google

Please Join Authors, ACLU in Opposing Google Book Search Deal

By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 4:25pm

(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

A coalition of authors and publishers, represented by the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, filed an objection this morning in the Google Book Search case. The objection urges the federal judge to reject the proposed settlement because it lacks critical privacy rights for readers and writers.

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09/04/2009
Google

Google Books Privacy Policy: Good Start, Much More Needed

By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 8:15pm

Late yesterday afternoon, September 3, 2009, Google finally issued a privacy policy for Google Books, both the current service and the extensive new book-related services they hope to have a federal court approve in October.

While there are some good things in the policy many that the ACLU of Northern California and its coalition partners the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California Berkeley Law School have long been urging Google to do, it is still falls well short of the privacy protections that readers need, both substantively and in whether it will be permanent and readily enforceable by readers. Our coalition on behalf of authors and publishers seeking to protect reader privacy will still be filing an Objection to the Settlement in Court on Tuesday, September 8.

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08/25/2008
Guantánamo

Online Service Providers and Content Owners Must Protect Political Speech

By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 1:03pm

On blogs, personal and political websites, and through user-generated content sites, ordinary citizens in extraordinary numbers are recreating a public sphere and reinvigorating the democratic debate at the core of our political system. Forty-six percent of Americans have already used the Internet in connection with a political campaign — more than during all of 2004. User-generated content is playing a particularly integral role, with 35 percent of Americans watching online videos and 10 percent using social networking sites to engage in political activity.

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06/24/2008
TSA

TSA: "Every Voter Counts" (At the Airport)

By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 6:22pm

Originally posted at the ACLU of Northern California's blog, Bytes and Pieces

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) set off a minor firestorm in the blogosphere over its new ID policy, which went into effect this past Saturday. At least one passenger has reported that he was asked which political party he is registered to vote for, as part of TSA's new authentication process.

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06/10/2008

The Spy in Your Pocket

By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 2:08pm

What do your cell phone and the current trial of 26 Americans, many CIA agents, in an Italian court for the 2003 kidnapping of Muslim cleric Abu Omar have to do with each other? Both your phone and the phones of undercover CIA agents act as silent trackers, constantly transmitting physical location. Italian police combed through 2,000 cell phone calls made over a 2 1/2-hour period around the spot where the cleric was abducted. Those records revealed that calls were made to an undercover CIA officer at the U.S. Embassy in Rome. This cell phone evidence is being used to link the CIA to the kidnapping.

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08/15/2007

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Hears Important NSA Spy Case Today

By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 8:43pm
The public overflowed the courtroom and late-comers filed into an adjoining video room, members of the press hovered around the courthouse, and oral argument lasted an hour and forty five minutes- that was the scene this afternoon as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard the government's appeal in Hepting v. AT&T.

Hepting is one of several cases, i
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