In November 2019, Boston Public Library’s (BPL) Teen Central hosted a digital privacy instruction workshop for teens that centered on facial recognition technology. Titled “Drag vs. AI,” the workshop partnered BPL with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts (ACLU-MA) and Joy “Poet of Code” Buolamwini, artificial intelligence (AI) scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology … Continue reading Dragging AI
“The librarian profession cares a great deal about the public’s right to privacy, and this is a very serious erosion of that,” says Alison Macrina. Macrina is director of Library Freedom Project, an organization that educates librarians about privacy-related rights and tools. “It means that whatever ISP we use in the library is now privy … Continue reading How to Protect Patrons’ Digital Privacy
In 2005, an original section of the Patriot Act allowed the FBI to compel anyone they presented with a National Security Letter (NSL) to hand over detailed personal information, including library borrowing and internet search records, about any individual being investigated. The law also allowed the FBI to accompany NSLs with gag orders forbidding their recipients from disclosing that … Continue reading Connecticut Four Reunite Against FBI Overreach
That’s not what the applicable federal law—the long-outdated 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA)—says, however. Rather, once your electronic records are more than six months old, the authorities don’t actually have to get a judge-issued search warrant to compel your phone company or internet service provider, for example, to hand them over. The American Library … Continue reading ACLU to Privacy Advocates: #TakeCTRL of Your Statehouses Now
