Just a few weeks after his interview with EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn, American hero Stephen Colbert has returned to the subject of digital rights. And in his show on Tuesday, he came up with a great solution to the problem of privacy and online social networks: Control-Self-Delete.
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Facebook is facing down another embarrassing episode of censorship this week after refusing to show ads submitted by the Just Say Now marijuana legalization campaign. The gag is an important reminder that social networks like Facebook — while useful, interesting, and pretty — are "walled gardens" with overseers whose...

Yesterday, Facebook introduced Places, a new location feature that competes with popular services like Foursquare, Google Latitude, Loopt, and Gowalla. Places allows Facebook users to 'check in' to real world locations and to tag their friends as present (similar to how Facebook allows tagging in photos). Everyone who is...

Recent news reports have presented somewhat contradictory analysis of government plans in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, and other countries to block the use of BlackBerry smart phones as a form of pressure on Research in Motion, BlackBerry's Canadian manufacturer. All the reports agree that these governments...

Coauthored by Seth Schoen
The White House recently released a draft of a troubling plan titled "National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace" (NSTIC). In previous iterations, the project was known as the "National Strategy for Secure Online Transactions" and emphasized, reasonably, the private sector's development...

In a landmark announcement issued today, the data protection officials across the European Union found that the way that EU Member States have implemented the data retention obligations in the 2006 EU Data Retention Directive is unlawful. The highly controversial 2006 EU Data Retention Directive compels all...

The Federal Trade Commission has some strong words for the former publishers of a defunct magazine and website for gay youth: don't sell or use personal information provided by your customers. It's probably illegal.
The warning came during a contentious bankruptcy proceeding filed by the publisher of XY Magazine,...

Ever since Google’s January 2010 decision to cease censorship of its Chinese-language search engine, the world has watched closely to see what would happen next. The ensuing cat-and-mouse game of information repression and dissemination represented a serious challenge to the ability of the Internet to remain free and open...

Gaming giant Blizzard announced yesterday that it would be making some major changes to its official discussion forums, including the forums for World of Warcraft, Diablo, and the upcoming Starcraft II. In the upcoming weeks and months, players who want to post to these boards will have to log...

In Henley v. DeVore, a federal court recently held that senatorial candidate Charles DeVore’s two political advertisements featuring the songs "The Hope of November" and "All She Wants to Do Is Tax" infringed Don Henley’s "The Boys of Summer" and "All She Wants to Do Is...