By Nicole A. Ozer

Last year, the privacy and free speech mistakes of tech companies led to tons of embarrassing and costly stories. Often, these missteps would have been avoidable with good planning and processes in place, but many companies lack the resources to navigate this increasingly thorny terrain.

To help tech businesses of all sizes plan around these issues and implement strong practices, the ACLU of California is releasing a new edition of Privacy and Free Speech: It's Good for Business.

This business primer (and its companion website) is packed with more than 100 real-life case studies and cutting-edge recommendations on everything from privacy policies to security planning to community speech standards. Together, the principles and examples show the business value in making privacy and free speech part of a company’s DNA.

This third edition addresses new challenges facing businesses today and shows how to avoid missteps while building privacy and free speech into products and company culture. The lessons include:

• Respect your data. Avoid Magna Carta-level mistakes by collecting only the data you need for your product and making sure that your algorithms and data use protect users andavoid replicating real world biases. 

• Create a secure data ecosystem. Security isn’t just about outside threats – companies need to limit internal access to data to avoid Uber-embarrassment, incorporate encryption for data collection and storage to prevent disastrous breaches, and collaborate with security researchers to protect users.

• Be transparent about practices. Clear descriptions of privacy practices are essential to avoiding PR disasters, whether the product is a music streaming service, a useful app, or a connected “Internet of Things” device.

• Encourage speech by empowering users. Companies can create cohesive communities and avoid harmful, speech-chilling harassment by creating platforms with tools that empower users, account policies that respect user identities, and narrow rules focused on bad behavior rather than content censorship.

• Fight for your users. Companies that support user privacy and speech protections routinely receive praise, while those that seek to limit how products are used or that fold to legal demands lose the trust of users and public alike.

Regardless of company size, this guide helps take the guesswork out of protecting privacy and free speech by charting out the essential questions and providing practical tips for spotting issues in products and business models.

We look forward to tech companies using this resource to design and launch their products the right way. By following some pretty simple steps to incorporate privacy and free speech protections into products, businesses can make their services user friendly and avoid costly mistakes. As the primer illustrates, doing so is not just good on principle – it’s good for business, too.

View the primer online at https://www.itsgoodfor.biz or download a pdf copy.

Nicole A. Ozer is technology and civil liberties director for the ACLU of California. The ACLU of California is a collaboration of the ACLU of Northern California, ACLU of Southern California and the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties. 

The following article was first published in The Hill. 

By Christian Fialho and Tasha Hill

The federal government has designated the Santa Ana City Jail in California as the ideal site nationally to imprison transgender immigrant women. But if this is the best we can do, we’re in trouble.

Women in civil immigration detention are routinely strip searched at the Santa Ana City Jail. Asylum seekers are forced to undergo invasive searches that often revive traumatic moments of rape and abuse. Some are strip searched by officers of the opposite gender, violating federal law.

Consider Olivia, a transgender woman from Mexico who did not want her real name used for fear of reprisals. In early January, male officers locked down and strip-searched Olivia’s entire 64-person cellblock, telling the women that they were looking for a piece of a broken plastic plate. As they made the naked women bend over to expose their anuses, some of the male officers taunted them and called them offensive names. Olivia was further humiliated when a male guard made her physically lift her testicles so he could peer beneath them (ostensibly looking for the broken plate), while other male guards watched and mocked her. For someone already experiencing gender dysphoria, this type of public genital exposure and harassment can be incredibly horrifying and damaging, increasing dysphoric feelings. For someone who has already been sexually victimized, as a disproportionate number of trans women are, it can trigger serious trauma symptoms. And in violation of both the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) and U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) standards, the women were not given the option to have a female officer perform the strip searches nor was there a female officer present.

Law enforcement violence occurs not only on the streets but also in our prisons and immigration detention facilities, where this state-sanctioned violence against women of color and trans people of color is largely invisible.

Women civilly detained at the Santa Ana City Jail are strip searched after each in-person visit with an attorney, after each court hearing, and upon booking. Additionally, no special provisions are made for the elderly or women with chronic physical pain. No special provisions are made for women who are on their menstrual periods. Sometimes they bleed directly onto the floor and are forced to dress again in soiled clothing without the opportunity to use a restroom. This is unnecessary, unsanitary, and appalling.

These strip searches violate ICE standards, which require specific and articulable suspicion to perform a strip search after an attorney visit, and California law, which prohibits strip searches without reasonable suspicion that the person is concealing weapons or contraband. They also may violate the Fourth and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

This is why Olivia joined 13 transgender and 17 cisgender (non-transgender) women as party to a civil rights complaint filed last week against the City of Santa Ana and ICE.

Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC), who wrote the complaint, the ACLU of Southern California, and a coalition of other organizations are calling on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to investigate these illegal practices and force Santa Ana City Jail to follow the law.

These illegal strip searches, which do nothing to improve safety and much to encourage abuse, are particularly concerning for transgender women. In 2013, the Government Accountability Office found that transgender women accounted for one in five (20 percent) substantiated cases of sexual assault in ICE facilities, despite comprising roughly 1 in 500 (.002 percent) of the civilly detained population. The Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2014 reported that over 22 percent of transgender inmates were sexually abused by jail staff alone. This is why PREA generally prohibits cross-gender pat downs and strip searches.

Trans women are among the most vulnerable in our communities. Many have no family or friends close by precisely because they have been shipped to Santa Ana from all across the country. And trans women, facing discrimination from all facets of our society, often have few resources to try to protect themselves from abuse. Trans women should not be treated this way anywhere, but certainly not in a facility designated as the best site to detain transgender women in the entire country.

When we talk about law enforcement violence, let’s remember transgender immigrant women behind bars. We can end law enforcement violence against women of color, trans people of color, and our communities. Along with 35 Congressional representatives, we call on ICE to stop unnecessarily detaining vulnerable LGBTQ people. Until that day, we call on DHS to investigate the abuse of people in immigration detention at the Santa Ana City Jail.

If you are interested in helping, you can begin by signing this great petition.

Christina Fialho, is attorney and co-founder and executive director of Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC); Tasha Hill is LGBTQ Rights fellow and staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California.

Some California high school students were being sent home from school early or warehoused in the auditorium rather than being assigned meaningful academic classes. As hard as it may be to believe, last year countless students at Los Angeles’ Jefferson High School, for example, didn’t have a complete schedule more than six weeks into the school year.

Others had not been assigned classes they needed for graduation and were instead assigned to bogus classes with no educational content. Still others were simply sent home early.

Assemblymember Reginald Byron Jones-Sawyer, Sr., whose district sits in South Los Angeles, decided to do something to end these practices. He introduced AB 1012 to protect the fundamental right to equal educational opportunity. The bill was signed into law in October.

The new law creates a state-level backstop to protect students when there is such a fundamental breakdown at the school level. The ACLU of California was proud to support this important legislation and worked closely with Assemblymember Jones-Sawyer on the bill language.

We are pleased that state leaders recognized that schools serving almost exclusively low-income students of color should not be able to send kids home early or warehouse them in fake classes that have no educational content or value.

AB 1012 represents another step toward making the constitutional right to equal educational opportunity more real. We at the ACLU want to raise awareness about this important law and address questions about its scope.

This blog is an initial attempt to explain what the bill does and provide context for the intent that led to its enactment. The ACLU is also working with other stakeholders to provide more formal legal guidance later this spring.

AB 1012 limits the ability of schools to assign high school students to “a course without educational content” and to courses the student has taken and passed. Both situations have specific meanings defined within AB 1012:

• Course without educational content includes three distinct components and applies much more narrowly than what it might in casual conversation:
  • Sending a student home before the end of the school day, called “early release” or “home period” in some schools.
  • Assigning multiple students to be student aides/teacher assistants to one teacher during the same class period while that teacher was teaching a class.
  • Not assigning a student to a class during the school day, called “free period” in some schools.
• Course the student has taken and passed excludes classes that are designed to be taken multiple times because the course content varies from semester to semester. This definition is designed to exclude physical education, band, chorus, and art classes that students may take several times because they do not cover identical content each semester.

Notably, AB 1012 does not create an absolute ban on such courses. Rather, it provides that students can be assigned to such courses if they (or their parent/guardian) consent to the course assignment in writing and a school administrator makes an individualized determination, confirmed in writing, that the assignment will benefit the student.

Finally, AB 1012 creates a complaint process so that any student, parent/guardian, teacher or member of the public can correct a situation where a student is given a course that does not meet requirements of AB 1012.

This provision was intended to create a simple, accessible way for any issues to be raised and resolved quickly. It is not about playing “gotcha,” but about ensuring district and school staff can resolve any problems that may arise.

There has been some confusion about the “service course” component of the definition for “courses without educational content.” In developing this definition the intent was to ensure that multiple students were not assigned to assist the same teacher during a period when that teacher was teaching a curricular course. It prevents multiple students from being assigned as teacher aides for the same course period.

The language is not as clear as it could have been on this point. We are working on a fix through the budget process to ensure the language is as clear as possible before the bill goes into effect for the 2016-17 school year.

But, given our role in crafting the bill language, we wanted to provide this information about the underlying intent as we work to ensure the statutory language is as clear as possible.

Victor Leung is staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California.