Today, Facebook released . Facebook's newest changes seem to be designed to encourage users to share more information with applications and sites that they visit and use, which fits in with the string of other and with .
There are some definite positives in these changes, including one we have called for before: greater control over the user's profile page, allowing the user to decide whether her friends list, fan pages, and everything but her name and profile picture are available on her own profile. The new privacy policy also provides clearer descriptions of some of the ways information is shared on the service, including a much better description of the information that applications and pages can see about you (including what happens when one of your friends runs the app or visits the page).
Unfortunately, this last change also highlights the “app gap” issue that we have written about , and the proposed changes would actually make that worse by allowing third party pages and applications to use and store more information without increasing users' ability to control or opt out of such access. Facebook needs to hear your voice demanding that it keep user privacy and control at the core of its service. Please visit Facebook's or and tell Facebook to give you full control over your personal information! And don't forget to join our new privacy campaign,
Today's Changes Highlight the "App Gap"
Under Facebook’s current policies, your data, including sensitive information such as your relationship status and photos you post, can be accessed not only by any application you run but also by any application or quiz that one of your friends runs. You can limit the information that applications and pages visited by your friends can see about you (for instructions, see our ), but you cannot prevent these applications from seeing “publicly available information” including your name, gender, and your friends list. That means that a lot of personal information about you can flow to third parties even if you never run an application.
Facebook’s current privacy policy does place some limits on how applications and websites could use the personal information they collected from you, however. It only allowed applications and partner web sites to “use the data you receive for your application, and . . . only use it in connection with Facebook.” Further, they were required to “delete all data [they] received from [Facebook] relating to any user who deauthorizes, disconnects, or otherwise disassociates from [their] application unless otherwise permitted in our .”
Unfortunately, both of these requirements have been eliminated in the proposed new . Instead, Facebook Platform applications and Facebook Connect web sites are now allowed to store data they gather from the Facebook users they interact with and use that data for their own purposes (though when they access information about that user's friends, they are only allowed to use this "friend data" in connection with the current user). The new policy does bar developers from transferring data to ad networks or data brokers and requires them to delete user data if specifically asked to do so by a user. However, it places the burden on the user to track or determine which sites and applications might store information about them rather than being certain that any application they stop using must delete their information.
Furthermore, Facebook appears to be defining a new category of personal information called “Connections.” This includes your connections to your friends (ie: your friends list) but also your links to “family members, the city you live in, and restaurants and bands you like.” It is not clear whether this new category includes things like events, groups, and other ways that Facebook users interact with each other, but it potentially could encompass almost anything that involves linking with another Facebook user, page, or application. And while the new privacy policy allows you to , it explicitly states that (with the single exception that your friends' applications cannot access your friends list).
Finally, Facebook has added a new category of partner sites, called "Facebook-Enhanced" sites, that can access your connections and other general information . Facebook has yet to unveil its full plan for these sites, but they could present another threat to privacy.
This means that, if these changes go into effect, you will be able to hide your connections from your friends but not from applications that your friends run or Facebook-enabled sites they visit! Your gender, your fan pages, and maybe even your groups and events will be available to any application your friends choose to use, and you will have no ability to control that (unless you want to have no friends at all, we suppose). Does that make sense to you?
Tell Facebook: More Sharing? Then More Control!
It doesn't to us. If Facebook wants to give Connect sites and Platform applications more freedom to collect and use information, it needs to ensure that user privacy is not left behind. In particular, Facebook needs to make sure that users have the ability to fully opt out of sharing information with applications and sites. This includes providing stronger default privacy settings and giving users the ability to prevent applications from accessing their own information instead of being forced to rely on their friends to make choices for them.
So please speak up and tell Facebook what you want! Visit Faceook's and tell them to allow you to control your own personal information, including preventing applications from seeing your “connections” and other data. And please and push Facebook to protect your privacy as it continues to evolve!
Demand a privacy upgrade!
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Press ReleaseDec 2024
Free Speech
National Security
ACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok BanACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok Ban
WASHINGTON — Today, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to block the enforcement of a law that would effectively ban people in America from using TikTok as soon as January 19, 2025. Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected TikTok’s challenge to the law. TikTok has asked the Supreme Court for a temporary injunction to prevent the app from being banned while the court considers whether to take the case, saying that unless the justices intervene, the law will “shutter one of America’s most popular speech platforms the day before a presidential inauguration.” “The Constitution imposes an extraordinarily high bar on this kind of mass censorship,”said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of ACLU’s National Security Project. “The Supreme Court should take up this important case and protect the rights of millions of Americans to freely express themselves and engage with others around the world.” The brief argues that the D.C. Circuit failed to fully address the law’s profound implications for the First Amendment rights of the 170 million Americans who use TikTok. While the lower court’s decision correctly recognized that the statute triggers First Amendment scrutiny, it barely addressed users’ First Amendment interests in speaking, sharing, and receiving information on the platform. The court also perplexingly attempted to cast the government’s ban on TikTok as a vindication of users’ First Amendment rights, which it is not. The rights groups also explain that the law was intended to suppress certain content and viewpoints that many legislators believe could be amplified on TikTok, including the risk of foreign “propaganda.” But under the First Amendment, the government must meet a very high bar to restrict speech based on concerns about its “motivating ideology” or “perspective,” and the government has not come close to meeting that bar here. “The government should not be able to restrict speech, especially to the extent here, based on guessing about the mere possibility of uncertain future harm,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at EFF. “The Supreme Court should put the TikTok ban on hold while it considers the DC Circuit’s erroneous ruling.” Finally, the brief underscores that the government can’t impose this type of sweeping ban unless it’s necessary to prevent extremely serious and imminent harm to national security. But the government has not provided evidence of impending harm, or evidence that banning TikTok is the only available way to address its concerns. As the brief explains, the D.C. Circuit improperly treated the government’s invocation of “national security” as a trump card and failed to hold the government to its burden. “Restricting citizens’ access to foreign media is a practice that has long been associated with repressive regimes, and we should be very wary of letting the practice take root here,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “It would do lasting damage to the First Amendment and our democracy if the Supreme Court let this ban go into effect even temporarily.” You can find the brief online here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A587/335380/20241217144322392_24A587%20TikTok%20v%20Garland%20Amicus%20Brief%20pdfa.pdf -
Press ReleaseDec 2024
National Security
Religious Liberty
ACLU Statement on New White House Strategy to Counter IslamophobiaACLU Statement on New White House Strategy to Counter Islamophobia
WASHINGTON – The Biden administration today released the first-ever national strategy to counter Islamophobia and related forms of bias and discrimination, including hate against Arab, Sikh, and South Asian Americans. In advance of the strategy, American Civil Liberties Union and its partners had urged the administration to overhaul government programs that reflect anti-Muslim discrimination. In particular, we have called for urgent action to constrain governmental agencies from continuing to exercise their authorities and technology to wrongly surveil and investigate, watchlist, and question and detain Muslims at the border, as well as deny immigration benefits to people from Muslim-majority countries. While the White House raised expectations that many of these issues would be addressed, the final strategy ended up falling far short. The following is a statement from Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project: “While this strategy acknowledges discrimination and its harms, it does little to end them and is a squandered opportunity. For decades, American officials have invoked national security to pass laws and implement programs that disproportionately harm Muslims and people perceived to be Muslim. A serious anti-discrimination strategy would concretely address multiple bias-infused government practices that deny our communities equal participation in civic life and our democracy, like federal watchlisting, surveillance, and investigation. We’re profoundly frustrated that the administration didn’t take even the basic, overdue step of recognizing that anti-Muslim discrimination is uniquely normalized and embedded in government policies.” -
VirginiaDec 2024
National Security
Trabelsi v. Crawford, et al. – Lawsuit Challenging Unlawful Detention and Inhumane Treatment of Acquitted ManTrabelsi v. Crawford, et al. – Lawsuit Challenging Unlawful Detention and Inhumane Treatment of Acquitted Man
Our client, Nizar Trabelsi, is in the United States against his will. The federal government brought him here from Belgium more than a decade ago and charged him with terrorism-related crimes. At trial, the government’s case failed: a federal jury found Mr. Trabelsi not guilty. But instead of allowing Mr. Trabelsi to return to Belgium after his acquittal, the United States placed him in highly restrictive immigration detention and began an ongoing effort to force him to Tunisia, where he was born and where he will very likely be tortured. Mr. Trabelsi’s detention violates the Constitution, immigration law, and the extradition treaty between the United States and Belgium. Through this lawsuit, he seeks to return to Belgium, and he demands an immediate improvement of his detention conditions. -
Press ReleaseDec 2024
National Security
Immigrants' Rights
Federal Judge Rejects Acquitted Man’s Argument That His Immigration Detention Is UnlawfulFederal Judge Rejects Acquitted Man’s Argument That His Immigration Detention Is Unlawful
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — This week, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that the court does not have jurisdiction to decide whether the government can continue to detain Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian national who was brought to the United States against his will for prosecution and was cleared of all charges last year. The ruling means the United States will be able to continue to detain Mr. Trabelsi while it attempts to deport him to Tunisia, where he was born and where, as an immigration judge ruled earlier this year, he will likely face torture. The court also concluded that even if it did have jurisdiction over Mr. Trabelsi’s case, his claims challenging the government’s detention of him would fail. “Reviewing claims that the government is holding someone unlawfully is at the core of the judicial function, and we’re heartbroken for our client that the court got this so wrong,” said Brett Max Kaufman, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Center for Democracy. “The government’s arguments in defense of Mr. Trabelsi’s detention makes a hash of the Constitution, immigration laws, and its own extradition treaty.” In 2013, the United States forcibly extradited Mr. Trabelsi from Belgium to face criminal charges in the United States. In July 2023, after almost 10 years of highly restrictive pretrial detention, a federal jury cleared Mr. Trabelsi of all charges. But instead of releasing Mr. Trabelsi or returning him to Belgium, the U.S. transferred him to immigration detention, wrongly treating him as an applicant for admission and placing him in the deportation process. Over the years, the Belgian government has issued multiple formal diplomatic requests asking the U.S. to facilitate his return, but the U.S. has refused to send him back. Mr. Trabelsi filed a lawsuit challenging the government's authority to detain him. He also sought immediate improvements to his detention conditions. Those claims were not part of the court’s ruling today, and will continue to be litigated on a separate track. “Mr. Trabelsi only wants to return to Belgium after being illegally extradited to the United States, held for ten years, and then acquitted by a jury of any crimes,” said Nicole Hallett, clinical professor of law and director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. “He cannot be held indefinitely and we will continue to fight to make sure that justice ultimately prevails.” Mr. Trabelsi is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the University of Chicago Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, the ACLU of Virginia, and Professor Jonathan Hafetz of Seton Hall Law School. The complaint in Trabelsi v. Crawford was filed against Jeffrey Crawford, warden of the Farmville Detention Center where Mr. Trabelsi is being held; Liana Castano, ICE field office director for the Washington Field Office; Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; and Merrick Garland, U.S. attorney general.