Consumer Online Privacy

10/10/2012

Newest Video Analytics Technique “Product Recognition” Aims to Judge You By What You Wear

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:56pm

I blogged recently about video analytics, the attempt to build intelligence into video surveillance so that cameras can not only record our every move in public, but also in some respects understand what they are seeing. Now comes word of the latest twist in this effort: “product recognition.” As Technology Review reports, a startup called Graymatics

10/04/2012

Consumer Online Privacy

Corporate America: We Want to Track You

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:44pm

On Monday an extraordinary letter went out from a who’s who of major corporations claiming a mandate to track all of us on the internet. In tone and substance, it is an amazing, over-the-top screed against efforts to give consumers even modest controls over who watches us as we surf online.

The letter was triggered by Microsoft’s announcement in May that when it ships its new browser, IE 10, the browser’s default setting will be Do Not Track. Microsoft heard the vast preference of its users and is giving them the default setting they want—no tracking of their movements and habits online. Consumers who want to get targeted ads will still be able to do so—and in fact will get a chance to turn that preference on when the program loads. As we said at the time, this is exactly the right decision, a powerful tool for giving back American’s their privacy online.

09/21/2012

Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

Lie Detection, Special Treatment at the Airport, and Recursive Cameras (Friday Links Roundup)

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:26pm

Salon has a nice piece on how research shows the difficulty of detecting lies—the impossibility, really—and how people consistently overestimate their ability to do so. And, how people consistently misidentify signs of stress (from a variety of causes) as proof of lying. Of course, an entire TSA program has been built on the premise that people can be trained to detect lies with a reasonable level of certainty.

09/13/2012

Consumer Online Privacy

Is the ACLU Inconsistent on Regulation of Speech and Privacy?

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:02pm

Adam Thierer of the libertarian Mercatus Center posted a thoughtful critique of my recent piece on online tracking and consumer “choice.” I wrote about a new paper on behavioral advertising and how it “demonstrates the absurdity of the position that individuals who desire privacy must attempt to win a technological arms race with the multi-billion dollar internet-advertising industry.”

07/17/2012

Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

A Modest Proposal For Protecting Our Privacy

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:38pm

One of the biggest problems with protecting privacy in the United States is that, almost alone in the advanced-industrial world, we do not have an overarching privacy law that codifies the basic privacy principles that are accepted around the world as the gold standard for protecting this human right.

Instead, the United States pursues a sector-by-sector approach to privacy. The result is that our privacy protections vary wildly according to area. We have some (inadequate) protections for our health and financial data, very few protections for our commercial transactions, and very rigorous protections for our video rental records.

07/10/2012

Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

What’s Wrong With the Pauls’ Internet Manifesto

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:36pm

Ron and Rand Paul’s manifesto on “The Technology Revolution,” released the other day, is unexpectedly incomplete, focusing most of its animus not on government security and police agencies, but on what they call “collectivists,” by which they mean those who advance attempts to “regulate competition, infrastructure, privacy and intellectual property.” I think they mean us.

07/02/2012

Online Privacy

New York Court Denies Twitter Motion to Quash Occupy Protester Subpoena

By Aden Fine, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:07pm

A New York criminal court judge has issued a decision denying Twitter’s motion to quash a court order requiring it to produce information about one of its users pursuant to a subpoena that the District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan issued in connection with the prosecution of an Occupy Wall Street protester.

02/13/2013

Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

The ACLU’s Pizza Video: 10 Years Later

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:48pm

In 2004, the ACLU produced a satiric video called “Ordering Pizza in 2015” that has become the single most-downloaded piece of content we’ve ever produced (at least we believe in the absence of complete stats). I won’t describe it—you can watch it here if you haven’t seen it—but like many successful viral products, it combined humor with a biting commentary on an all-too-real set of trends.

01/18/2013

Online Privacy

Instagram, Jetliners, and Human Computation Engines (Friday links)

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:20pm

Instagram has lost half its daily users in just one month as a result of all the bad publicity over its new terms of service, according to a story in the International Business Times. That is a stunning report—perhaps the most surprising indication of mass rebellion over an online policy issue since the defeat of SOPA. Perhaps I am overly conditioned to thinking that these kinds of seemingly obscure issues about the distribution of power on the internet—privacy, openness, intellectual property, etc.—are the provenance of geeks and policy nerds and reporters looking for stories. But losing half their daily users in one month? I think that’s a reminder that for all the assaults on our privacy by internet advertisers and others, people do still want and demand a sense of control when it comes to their online lives. Especially when it comes to services that people have made a part of their daily existence—which they feel they have a relationship with. Many privacy and other internet issues seem abstract and removed, and may not trigger a passionate backlash, but sometimes (as with this story, SOPA, and Facebook Beacon) they do.

01/09/2013

Philosophy of privacy

Is Privacy a Modern Phenomenon?

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 1:02pm

I recently came across this piece by the author William Deresiewicz (from his consistently insightful “All Points” blog), in which he comments on the observation that privacy and solitude are privileges of the modern era that are “rare both historically and globally,” with most people in the world today and in the past being “too poor to even have the space to be alone.” Members of the medieval household, for example,

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