Do Privacy Settings Work?

Facebook reportedly receives over 100 requests a week from law enforcement officers seeking information about its users. Amazon once received a request from a U.S. Attorney for purchasing histories for 24,000 of its users. Google battled a Department of Justice request for user search queries. Verizon gets thousands of these requests. And a 17-page Yahoo document outlining company surveillance capabilities recently leaked to the Net. 

Against this background, the ACLU of Northern California (ALCU-NC) recently launched a “Know Your dotRights” campaign – an online privacy initiative dedicated to encouraging Internet users to protect their personal data. According to ACLU-NC, our laws need to catch up to technology. For example, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a federal law designed to protect digital privacy rights “provides questionable protection at best for Internet users” according to ACLU-NC. Worse, as the New York Times reports,  many people don’t even know that their personal information and online behavior is being tracked and harvested. (The Times also recently continued the conversation here.) Read more »

Privacy Groups Propose Behavioral Advertising Guidelines

Ten privacy advocacy groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Digital Democracy, have released a series of guidelines for American legislators considering regulating behavioral advertising, and calling for greater transparency and giving Web users greater control over how the data is used.  A copy of the guidelines are available here.