Life is busy. Add spouses, children, grandchildren, friends, work and play and it all gets even busier. Who has time to keep track of what’s happening to those pesky First Amendment rights?

Ever since 9/11/01 the feds have (rightly) become much more concerned about keeping us safe in an increasingly violent world. Sometimes that leads to overreach by government agencies hoping to grab information, violating your right to privacy and mine.

That’s why we owe a large thank you to organizations that are watching out for our privacy rights. One of these is called “EPIC” which stands for the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Others are the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

These organizations carefully watch the thin line between one small step for individual rights and one giant leap for the government. They do so largely through the courts and in testimony before lawmakers, providing a point of view that might not have been previously considered. And some of them watch what’s happening around the world.

Here is just a small sampling of the recent work done by these organizations:

- In an upcoming court case, a brief has been filed with the court saying that government agencies have a ‘constitutional obligation’ to protect our personal data when it has been collected.

- After a lawsuit filed against Google because it shared individual search histories with a third party, one of the privacy organizations asked the court to require Google to change its business practices.

- Another provided comments to the Ohio state legislature that a loophole created by a recent bill will leave residents unprotected in the event of data breaches.

- Courts in Massachusetts and Maine were urged to recognize that law enforcement must have a warrant to access personal cell phone information.

- In another brief, a court was urged to decide that government may not block a user from social media simply because it disagrees with them.

- A number of privacy organizations have called attention to the “privacy invasive” practices of Facebook in which users were secretly tracked on the web despite believing they had logged out of their Facebook page.

- A lawsuit was filed by one of the organizations when it learned that the Department of Homeland Security was looking to compile a database of journalists, including their location, contact information, publications and "sentiment."

There are many more examples like these and the privacy watchdogs monitor them daily, with small staffs devoted to making sure that our first amendment rights and our privacy aren’t eroded.

While you and I are busy living our lives, every now and then it’s good to check out what others are doing on our behalf. If you’d like more information about some of these organizations, here are their websites:

Electronic Privacy Information Center: https://www.epic.org/

Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://www.eff.org/

Center for Democracy and Technology: https://cdt.org/

Privacy Rights Clearinghouse: https://www.privacyrights.org/

 The International Association of Privacy Professionals: https://iapp.org/