There is a loud debate raging over what companies should and shouldn’t be doing about the things people say on their platforms. What people often seem to forget is that we already know the dangers of providing a quick way for people to remove criticism of themselves from the inte … | Continue reading
A.B. 793, a bill authored by Assemblymember Mia Bonta to protect people seeking abortion and gender-affirming care from dragnet-style digital surveillance, has passed two key committees in the California Assembly. EFF is a proud co-sponsor of A.B. 793, along with ACLU California … | Continue reading
The California Court of Appeal has held that a geofence warrant seeking information on all devices located within several densely-populated areas in Los Angeles violated the Fourth Amendment. This is the first time an appellate court in the United States has reviewed a geofence w … | Continue reading
EFF Intern Reema Moussa authored this post. EFF recently submitted comments in partnership with the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL) in response to the Oversight Board’s request for input on the moderation of the Arabic word “shaheed.” The Oversight Board was created … | Continue reading
Californians: It's time to speak out against government use of face surveillance. While several California cities have banned government use of face recognition technology, state lawmakers haven't taken the same approach. A new bill this session, A.B. 642—authored by Assemblymemb … | Continue reading
A new U.S. Senate bill introduced this week threatens security and free speech on the internet. EFF urges Congress to reject the STOP CSAM Act of 2023, which would undermine the viability of services offering end-to-end encryption, and force internet companies to take down lawful … | Continue reading
In a free society, people should not have their private correspondence constantly examined. U.S. lawmakers, we would hope, understand that individuals have the right to a private conversation without the government looking over their shoulder. So it’s dismaying to see a group of … | Continue reading
Keeping up on the latest in digital freedoms can be quite a challenge, but we're here to help catch you up to speed! The latest issue of our EFFector newsletter is out now, and you can learn more about our position on the U.N Cybercrime Treaty, the RESTRICT Act, privacy issues re … | Continue reading
VIENA-El martes 18 de abril, a las 10:00 am hora del Pacífico (1:00 pm hora del Este), expertos de Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) y tres aliados latinoamericanos de derechos digitales informarán a los reporteros sobre las amenazas únicas a la privacidad que plantea la propu … | Continue reading
EFF and international allies Access Now, Article 19, Epicenter, and Global Partners Digital are in Vienna this week and next for the fifth round of negotiations on the proposed UN Cybercrime Treaty, along with the over 100 representatives of Member States hashing out a new draft … | Continue reading
Proposals for Broad Surveillance Powers Could Authorize Government Spyware, Which is Already Being Used to Target Human Rights Defenders, Journalists in the RegionVIENNA—On Tuesday, April 18, at 10:00 am Pacific Time (1:00 pm Eastern Time), experts from Electronic Frontier Founda … | Continue reading
Every few years, an unsourced report circulates that “the FBI says plugging into public charging kiosks is dangerous.” Here’s why you should ignore the freakout and install software updates regularly. Your phone is designed to communicate safely with lots of things – chargers , … | Continue reading
Every few years, an unsourced report circulates that “the FBI says plugging into public charging kiosks is dangerous.” Here’s why you should ignore the freakout and install software updates regularly. Your phone is designed to communicate safely with lots of things – chargers , … | Continue reading
Join us in San Francisco on April 27th for EFF's 7th annual Tech Trivia Night! Explore the obscure minutiae of digital security, online rights, and internet culture.Enjoy delicious tacos, churros, and complimentary adult beverages and soft drinks as you and your team battle throu … | Continue reading
U.S. President Joe Biden has signed an executive order that limits U.S. government agencies from using commercially available spyware – but that doesn’t mean there will be no government use of spyware in the United States. Spyware is a type of malicious software (or malware) whic … | Continue reading
As many will remember, in August of 2022 the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) placed what it called “Tornado Cash” along with a list of Ethereum digital wallet addresses, on its “Specially Designated Nationals” (SDN) sanctions list. The goal was to pr … | Continue reading
Figuring out the correct boundaries of software copyright protection is a difficult task. As several judges have put it, “applying copyright law to computer programs is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces do not quite fit.” Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fe … | Continue reading
October 2017The Russian Federation presents a letter to the UN General Assembly containing a draft of the United Nations Convention on Cooperation in Combating Cybercrime, intended for circulation to Member States. November 2019A resolution, sponsored by Russia—along with Belaru … | Continue reading
Negotiations for a proposed U.N.Cybercrime Treaty commenced in 2017 but began to take shape in 2022—and there’s a lot at stake. The draft treaty has the potential to rewrite criminal laws around the world, possibly adding over 30 criminal offenses and new expansive police powers … | Continue reading
Time and time again, we have said–and courts have ruled–that social media platforms have the First Amendment right to ban users. We have argued that banned users cannot successfully sue platforms for acting as government censors without showing that the platforms willfully and fu … | Continue reading
Proposals for Broad Surveillance Powers and Criminalization of Speech Put Journalists, Human Rights Defenders, and Dissidents at RiskSan Francisco—On Thursday, April 13, at 10:00 am Pacific Time (1:00 pm Eastern Time, 7 pm CEST), experts with Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) … | Continue reading
New York City is in the process of dismantling low-cost community broadband infrastructure in public housing that, if supported, could provide quality access to the internet for hundreds of thousands of families. It’s being replaced by a $90 million, three-year government subsidy … | Continue reading
Cities and counties across the country have banned government use of face surveillance technology, and many more are weighing proposals to do so. From Boston to San Francisco, Jackson, Mississippi to Minneapolis, elected officials and activists know that face surveillance gives p … | Continue reading
The growing deployment of smart locks in apartments, often installed without tenants’ permission, has created a new stream of sensitive location data for law enforcement, landlords, and private companies. Tenants should not be forced to submit to tracking just to enter their home … | Continue reading
The recently introduced RESTRICT Act (S. 686, Sen. Warner and Sen. Thune) rightfully is causing a lot of concern. This bill is being called a “TikTok ban,” but it’s more complicated than that. As we wrote in our initial review of the bill, the RESTRICT Act would authorize the exe … | Continue reading
When a science-fiction villain is defeated, we often see the heroes take their victory lap and then everyone lives happily ever after. But that’s not how real struggles work: In real life, victories are followed by repairs, rebuilding, and reparations, by analysis and introspecti … | Continue reading
Artists are understandably concerned about the possibility that automatic image generators like Stable Diffusion will undercut the market for their work. We live in a society that does not support people who are automated out of a job, and being a visual artist is an already prec … | Continue reading
Now that computer-generated imaging is accessible to anyone with a weird idea and an internet connection, the creation of “AI art” is raising questions—and lawsuits. The key questions seem to be 1) how does it actually work, 2) what work can it replace, and 3) how can the labor o … | Continue reading
This week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing titled “Preserving Free Speech and Reining in Big Tech Censorship.” Lawmakers at the hearing trotted out the usual misunderstandings of these concepts, and placed the blame on Section 230, the law that actually pro … | Continue reading
If someone loses a patent lawsuit very badly—to the point where they face orders to pay attorneys' fees—you wouldn’t think they would be eager to come back to court with a nearly identical lawsuit. But that’s what has happened with this month’s patent. What’s more, the lawyer rep … | Continue reading
Elon Musk's Twitter fundamentally misunderstands what made Twitter useful in the first place. In an attempt to wring blood from a stone, Twitter’s announced that all the original "blue checks"—initially created as a way to verify that someone was who they said they were—will disa … | Continue reading
In a preliminary victory in the continuing fight against privacy-invasive software that “watches” students taking tests remotely, a French administrative court outside Paris suspended a university’s use of the e-proctoring platform TestWe, which monitors students through facial r … | Continue reading
We've got you covered with a collection of updates on your digital rights! Version 35, issue 4 of our EFFector newsletter is out now. Catch up on the latest EFF news by reading our newsletter or listening to the audio version below. This issue covers our recent work mapping surve … | Continue reading
Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit held that Twitter did not act as the government by banning a user months after a government agency flagged for Twitter one of his tweets on alleged election fraud. O’Handley v. Weber is the latest decision rejecting social media users’ attemp … | Continue reading
Intern Katie Farr contributed to this blog post. Late last year, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed Dustin Dyer’s lawsuit against Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers who ordered him to stop recording their pat-down search of his husband. The officers … | Continue reading
Intern Taylor Fox contributed to this blog post. At the height of the George Floyd protests in 2020, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) spied on thousands of demonstrators in real time by using a business district’s network of over 300 cameras. The SFPD targeted protests … | Continue reading
The promise of the internet was that it would be a tool to melt barriers and aid truth-seekers everywhere. But it feels like polarization has worsened in recent years, and more internet users are being misled into embracing conspiracies and cults. %3Ciframe%20scrolling%3D … | Continue reading
The European Parliament is debating a proposal that, if it passes, could be disastrous for privacy worldwide. Every message, photo, or hosted file could be scanned, with the results sent to government agencies. We don’t need “bugs in our pockets.” A private and secure internet s … | Continue reading
To provide researchers with the tools they need to analyze the impact of U.S. border security policy, EFF is releasing a new map and dataset of more than 290 surveillance towers installed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) along the border with Mexico. Compiled using public r … | Continue reading
The Supreme Court just heard two cases - Twitter v. Taamneh and Gonzalez v. Google - that could dramatically affect users’ speech rights online. Last week, EFF hosted a panel in Washington D.C. to discuss what legislators need to know about these cases, the history of Section 230 … | Continue reading
Freedom of speech and association include the right to choose one’s communication technologies. Politicians shouldn’t be able to tell you what to say, where to say it, or who to say it to. So we are troubled by growing demands in the United States for restrictions on TikTok, a te … | Continue reading
With Ghana's 'Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill, 2021' set to undergo its second reading in the Ghanaian Parliament, EFF and other civil society partners are calling on the government of Ghana to immediately reject this draconian bill and com … | Continue reading
On January 31, the Swedish free software developer and computer security expert Ola Bini was declared innocent in a unanimous verdict by a three-judge tribunal in Ecuador—the Court of Criminal Guarantees of Pichincha. After almost four years of a criminal prosecution plagued with … | Continue reading
Private communication is a basic, universal right. In the online world, the best tool we have to defend this right is end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption ensures that governments, tech companies, social media platforms, and other groups cannot view or access our private … | Continue reading
New month, new digital rights updates! Version 35, issue 3 of our EFFector newsletter is out now. Catch up on the latest EFF news by reading our newsletter or listening to the audio version below. This issue covers our new Coded Resistance comic as well as our co-sponsorship of n … | Continue reading
Argentinian telecommunications providers have made strides in their commitments to protecting users’ data privacy, but the gains are uneven—they are doing a better job at informing about data processing and users' data rights, but still a poor job at disclosing how they handle go … | Continue reading
In a stunning revelation, a sitting U.S. Congressman has publicly identified himself as the subject of likely illegal surveillance by the NSA and FBI. During a hearing on the question of renewal the controversial mass NSA spying authorities known as FISA Amendments Act section 70 … | Continue reading
Texas State Representative Steve Toth recently introduced a bill that targets the most viable form of safe and effective abortion access today—medication abortion. House Bill (HB) 2690 seeks to prevent the sale and distribution of abortion pills like Mifepristone and misoprostol, … | Continue reading