A federal court on Thursday blocked Montana’s effort to ban TikTok from the state, ruling that the law violated users’ First Amendment rights to speak and to access information online, and the company’s First Amendment rights to select and curate users’ content. Montana passed a … | Continue reading
U.S. Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts has sent a much-needed letter to car manufacturers asking them to clarify a surprisingly hard question to answer: what data cars collect? Who has the ability to access that data? Private companies can often be a black box of secrecy that ob … | Continue reading
A new draft of the controversial United Nations cybercrime treaty has only heightened concerns that the treaty will criminalize expression and dissent, create extensive surveillance powers, and facilitate cross-border repression. The proposed treaty, originally aimed at combatin … | Continue reading
Both congressional intelligence committees have now released proposals for reauthorizing the government's Section 702 spying powers, largely as-is, and in the face of repeated abuse. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) in the U.S. House of Representative … | Continue reading
On Tuesday, EFF urged the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the highest court in that state, to affirm that a witness who has no knowledge of the proprietary algorithm used in black box technology is not qualified to testify to its reliability. We filed this amicus brief in C … | Continue reading
Ron Deibert is a Canadian professor of political science, a philosopher, an author, and the founder of the renowned Citizen Lab, situated in the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. He is perhaps best known to readers for his research on targeted surveillan … | Continue reading
Power Up Your Donation Week is here! Right now, your contribution will have double the impact on digital privacy, security, and free speech rights for everyone. Power Up! Donate to EFF for an instant 2X match Thanks to a fund made by a group of dedicated EFF supporters, now throu … | Continue reading
With the holiday season upon us, it can be difficult to keep track of the latest digital rights news. Lucky for you, EFF's EFFector newsletter has you covered with the latest happenings, from a breakdown of our latest Privacy Badger update, an investigation into Android TV set-to … | Continue reading
Hello from the fundraising team at EFF! If you are reading this, you are probably already a donor to EFF (thank you!) or are considering supporting us and want to do your due diligence. We’d like to share some information with you about how EFF raises money for digital rights and … | Continue reading
EFF has signed on to the following letter alongside 33 other organizations in support of a submission to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD), first published here by English PEN. To learn more about Alaa's case, visit Offline. 23 November 2023 Dear Me … | Continue reading
Young people’s access to social media continues to be under attack by overreaching politicians. The latest effort, Senator Ted Cruz’s blunt “Eyes on the Board” Act, aims to end social media’s use entirely in schools. This heavy-handed plan to cut federal funding to any school tha … | Continue reading
Senators who believe that children and teens must be shielded from social media have updated the problematic Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, though it remains an unconstitutional bill that replaces parents’ choices about what their children can do online with a government-ma … | Continue reading
Today is the birthday of Alaa Abd El Fattah, a prominent Egyptian-British coder, blogger, activist, and one of the most high-profile political prisoners in the entire Arab world. This will be the tenth birthday that he will spend in prison. But we are newly optimistic for his rel … | Continue reading
Lower Court Ruling Undermining Protections Against Self Incrimination Should Be Reversed WASHINGTON, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today asked the Supreme Court to overturn a ruling undermining Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination and find that c … | Continue reading
Generative AI gained widespread attention earlier this year, but one group has had to reckon with it more quickly than most: educators. Teachers and school administrators have struggled with two big questions: should the use of generative AI be banned? And should a school impleme … | Continue reading
Agustina Del Campo is the Director at the Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information (CELE) at the University of Palermo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She holds a law degree from Universidad Catolica Argentina and an LL.M. in International Legal Studies f … | Continue reading
It’s easy to get Android devices from online vendors like Amazon at different price points. Unfortunately, it is also easy to end up with an Android device with malware at these lower budgets. There are several factors that contribute to this: multiple devices manufactured in the … | Continue reading
Regulators must step in to halt the sale to consumers of devices that are known to be compromised by malware. SAN FRANCISCO—The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) must act to halt sales by Amazon, AliExpress and other resellers of Android television set-top boxes and mobile devices m … | Continue reading
Every year, we encounter new, often ill-conceived, bills written by state, federal, and international regulators to tackle a broad set of digital topics ranging from child safety to artificial intelligence. These scattershot proposals to correct online harm are often based on cen … | Continue reading
Section 702 is the controversial and much-abused mass surveillance authority that expires in December unless Congress renews it. EFF and others have been working hard to get real reforms into the law and have opposed a renewal, and now, we’re hearing about a rushed attempt to tie … | Continue reading
Recently I got the chance to speak with longtime Electronic Frontier Alliance member Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.). They’ve got a new Advocacy Manager, Kat Phan, and exciting projects are coming down the pike! Kat took some time to share with EFF how things … | Continue reading
Today, almost everything about our lives is digitally recorded and stored somewhere. Each credit card purchase, personal medical diagnosis, and preference about music and books is recorded and then used to predict what we like and dislike, and—ultimately—who we are. This often h … | Continue reading
San Francisco Mayor London Breed has filed a ballot initiative on surveillance and policing that, if approved, would greatly erode our privacy rights, endanger marginalized communities, and roll back the incredible progress the city has made in creating democratic oversight of po … | Continue reading
David Kaye is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, the co-director of the university’s Fair Elections and Free Speech Center, and the independent board chair of the Global Network Initiative. He also served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Promotion … | Continue reading
Legal intern Muhammad Essa Fasih contributed to this post.Social media is a crucial means of communication in times of conflict—it’s where communities connect to share updates, find help, locate loved ones, and reach out to express grief, pain, and solidarity. Unjustified takedow … | Continue reading
Today we are introducing Badger Swarm, a new tool for Privacy Badger that runs distributed Badger Sett scans in the cloud. Badger Swarm helps us continue updating and growing Privacy Badger’s tracker knowledge, as well as continue adding new ways of catching trackers. Thanks to c … | Continue reading
A key European parliamentary committee has taken an important step to defend user privacy, including end-to-end encryption. The Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) has politically agreed on much-needed amendments to a proposed regulation that, in its ori … | Continue reading
Despite an Ecuadorian court’s unanimous acquittal of security expert Ola Bini in January this year due to complete lack of evidence, Ecuador’s attorney general's office has moved to appeal the decision, perpetuating several years of unjust attacks on Bini’s rights. In the contex … | Continue reading
The EU is poised to pass a sweeping new regulation, eIDAS 2.0. Buried deep in the text is Article 45, which returns us to the dark ages of 2011, when certificate authorities (CAs) could collaborate with governments to spy on encrypted traffic—and get away with it. Article 45 forb … | Continue reading
With Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) set to expire at the end of the year, Congress is considering whether to reauthorize the law and if so, whether to make any necessary amendments to the invasive surveillance authority. While Section 702 was fir … | Continue reading
EFF filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in a case that has serious implications for people’s First Amendment rights to engage in cross-border journalism and advocacy. In 2019, the local San Diego affiliate for NBC News broke a shocking story: … | Continue reading
There's been lots of news and updates recently in the realm of digital rights, from EFF's recent investigation (and quiz!) into the student monitoring tool GoGuardian, to a recent victory in California regarding law enforcement's sharing of ALPR data outside of the state. It can … | Continue reading
The U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property will debate a bill this week that would dramatically limit the public’s right to challenge bad granted patents. The PREVAIL Act, S. 2220 would bar most people from petitioning the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to re … | Continue reading
Ninth Circuit Ruling Gives Government Unilateral Power to Suppress SpeechWASHINGTON, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the Supreme Court today to review and reverse a dangerous ruling allowing the Justice Department to censor X’s ability to publish information a … | Continue reading
Generative AI has sparked a great deal of hype, fear, and speculation. Courts are just beginning to analyze how traditional copyright laws apply to the creation and use of these technologies. Into this breach has stepped the United States Copyright Office with a call for comments … | Continue reading
California Attorney General Rob Bonta has issued a legal interpretation and guidance for law enforcement agencies around the state that confirms what privacy advocates have been saying for years: It is against the law for police to share data collected from license plate readers … | Continue reading
The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has proposed a new “Personal Financial Data Rights” rule that will force your bank to make it easy for you to extract your financial data so that you can use it to comparison shop for a better offer, and switch to another bank with just a fe … | Continue reading
Over the last year, state and federal legislatures have tried to pass—and in some cases succeeded in passing—legislation that bars young people from digital spaces, censors what they are allowed to see and share online, and monitors and controls when and how they can do it. EFF … | Continue reading
This post was co-authored by legal intern Kate Prince.Jump to our detailed report about GoGuardian and student monitoring tools. GoGuardian is a student monitoring tool that watches over twenty-seven million students across ten thousand schools, but what it does exactly, and how … | Continue reading
This is part 2 of our series on passkeys. See part 1 here. In our previous article we described what a passkey is: a few hundred bytes of data stored in your password manager, security key, or elsewhere, which allows you to log in to a specific website without a password. The goo … | Continue reading
This is part 1 of our series on passkeys. Part 2, on privacy, is here. A new login technique is becoming available in 2023: the passkey. The passkey promises to solve phishing and prevent password reuse. But lots of smart and security-oriented folks are confused about what exactl … | Continue reading
This is part 1 of our series on passkeys. Part 2, on privacy, is here. A new login technique is becoming available in 2023: the passkey. The passkey promises to solve phishing and prevent password reuse. But lots of smart and security-oriented folks are confused about what exactl … | Continue reading
“It would be easy to see the world as all doom and gloom when you're tackling these issues… But we do this work because we CAN fix the internet. Our dream is that everyone in this room will not only stand up for their rights but find ten other friends to stand up with you.” - EFF … | Continue reading
It’s Open Access Week in the United States, which means it’s a chance to celebrate the accomplishments of the Open Access movement—and reinforce the need to keep fighting. We’ve come a long way, with governments, universities, and research funders all successfully pressuring publ … | Continue reading
Amidst the global wave of countries looking at Big Tech revenues and how they relate to the growing news media crisis, many are asking whether and how tech companies should compensate publishers for the journalism that circulates on their platforms. This has become another flash … | Continue reading
We at EFF are horrified by the events transpiring in the Middle East: Hamas’ deadly attack on southern Israel last weekend and Israel’s ongoing retributive military attack and siege on Gaza. While we are not experts in military strategy or international diplomacy, we do have expe … | Continue reading
In early October, a bad actor claimed they were selling account details from the genetic testing service, 23andMe, which included alleged data of one million users of Ashkenazi Jewish descent and another 100,000 users of Chinese descent. By mid-October this expanded out to anothe … | Continue reading
A digital form of identification should have the same privacy and security protections as physical ones. More so, because the standards governing them are so new and untested. This is at the heart of comments EFF and others submitted recently. Why now? Well, in 2021 the DHS submi … | Continue reading