Artificial Intelligence (AI) grabs headlines with new tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, but it is already here and having major impacts on our lives. Increasingly we see law enforcement, medical care, schools and workplaces all turning to the black box of AI to make life altering … | Continue reading
It's a new year! There's no better time to keep up with the latest updates on your digital rights. Version 35, issue 1 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 a col … | Continue reading
We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what's at stake, and what we nee … | Continue reading
We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what's at stake, and what we nee … | Continue reading
Longtime EFFer and Deputy Executive Director and General Counsel Kurt Opsahl will be moving on from the Electronic Frontier Foundation after nearly 20 years, on February 1. But we aren’t going to let him go too far: Kurt will continue on as a Special Counsel of EFF. Kurt will be … | Continue reading
According to leaks reported last week, the company that owns Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is planning to revoke the open license that has, since the year 2000, applied to a wide range of unofficial, commercial products that build on the mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons. The report … | Continue reading
EFF is attending this week and next a new round of negotiations over the proposed UN Cybercrime Treaty to raise concerns that draft provisions now on the table include a long list of content-related crimes that pose serious threats to free expression, privacy, and the legitimate … | Continue reading
Calling all U.S. federal employees and retirees: the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) pledge period is closing on January 14, 2023. Be sure to make a pledge for EFF now to support digital freedoms for every internet user. It's easy to donate to EFF through the CFC! Here are the s … | Continue reading
In the wake of this year’s Supreme Court decision in Dobbs overruling Roe v. Wade, sheriffs and bounty hunters in anti-abortion states will try to investigate and punish abortion seekers based on their internet browsing, private messaging, and phone app location data. We can expe … | Continue reading
This year, we have seen an array of different ways governments around the world have tried to alter basic security on the web for users. Much of this was attempted through legislation, direct network interference, or as a request directly from a government to internet governance … | Continue reading
Since the new UN cybercrime treaty began to take shape in 2022, EFF has been fighting on behalf of users to make sure robust human rights safeguards and rule of law standards are the basis of any final product. There’s a lot at stake—the proposed UN cybercrime treaty has the pote … | Continue reading
Informed citizens need comprehensive libraries that meet people where they are. Today, that means online spaces that welcome everyone to use their resources, invite them to create new and truthful works, and respect the interests of both authors and readers. EFF client Internet … | Continue reading
The internet can be a powerful tool for communicating, collaborating, and finding community. But lawsuits and threats from patent trolls have been an obstacle to the dream of a free and open internet. That’s why EFF has been fighting back against them for more than 15 years. Pat … | Continue reading
Reproductive justice and safe access to abortion, like so many other aspects of managing our healthcare, is fundamentally tied to our digital lives. And since it is part of our healthcare, we should have the ability to keep it private and access information about it, even when it … | Continue reading
In 2022, student privacy gets a solid “C” grade. The trend of schools engaging in student surveillance did not let up in 2022. There were, however, some small wins indicative of a growing movement to push back against this encroachment. Unfortunately, more schools than ever are … | Continue reading
EFF’s first ask for the incoming Biden Administration on broadband policy was to ban digital redlining by regulating broadband as a public good instead of a private luxury. EFF has extensively researched the state of fiber broadband infrastructure in the United States for years. … | Continue reading
2022 has been a big year for enforcement of the antitrust laws against tech companies, with the five largest (Apple, Google, Meta/Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft) all facing lawsuits or investigations in the US. Government scrutiny of tech company mergers is on the rise too: the … | Continue reading
We love San Francisco. It’s EFF’s home. It’s often an example for other cities in regards to technology use and civil liberties. We helped make San Francisco the first city in the United States to ban government use of facial recognition, and one of the first to require communit … | Continue reading
EFF worked on bills in more than a dozen states this year, fighting for strong digital rights at the state level. Across the country, legislators focused on issues including medical privacy, biometric privacy, and the right to repair. In California, EFF was proud to support thre … | Continue reading
Walled gardens can be great: we all like it when Stuff Just Works because a single company oversees all its elements. Walled gardens can be terrible: when all of our data, our social relations and our educational, romantic, professional and family ties are trapped inside a com … | Continue reading
The online conversations that bring us closer together can help build a world that’s more free, fair, and creative. But talking to each other only works when the people talking have their human rights respected, including their right to speak privately. The best tool to defend th … | Continue reading
It’s been a tumultuous year for free expression globally. From internet shutdowns, crackdowns on expression and closed-door partnerships to attempts to restrict anonymity and end to end encryption, in many places, digital rights are under threat. And while the European Union has … | Continue reading
The rising tide of policing by robots and drones may seem relentless or even inevitable. But activism, legislative advocacy, and public outrage can do a lot to protect our safety and freedom from these technologies. This year began with a report that elucidated what police are do … | Continue reading
EFF and our supporters have fought off numerous wrongheaded attempts by Congress to regulate online speech, including several that we wrote about last December. The bevy of bad internet regulation proposals coming out of Congress hasn’t stopped. In 2022, the EARN IT Act was re-in … | Continue reading
EFF continued to expand our work on technology issues in the workplace in 2022. We first renewed our attention to worker privacy when the specter of “bossware”—tracking software on work devices—reared its ugly head at the start of the pandemic. Since then, EFF has joined with tho … | Continue reading
2022 marked an important year for digital rights across the European Union as the landmark Digital Services Act (DSA) came into force on 16 November seeking to foster a safer and more competitive digital space. The DSA overhauls the EU’s core platform regulation, the e-Commerce D … | Continue reading
Over the past few years, just like the rest of the world, EFF has had to adapt to change and face new challenges. We’ve even had to relearn how we did things before most of the world shut down for over a year. Even through all this, EFF members have shown that the fight for digit … | Continue reading
Neal Stephenson’s classic 1992 dystopian novel Snow Crash inspired today’s tech industry in many ways. Google Earth is said to have been inspired by the novel’s “Earth” software, which lets people interactively visualize the whole world. Snow Crash is also the origin of an immers … | Continue reading
EFF’s Threat Lab is dedicated to deep-dive investigations that examine technology-enforced power imbalances in society. In 2022 we’ve sharpened our knives and honed our skills in an effort to bring down the stalkerware industry, taken aim at invasive surveillance by police, raise … | Continue reading
Your right to repair matters. When you repair a device, you can keep using it, rather than needing to throw it away—creating waste—and purchasing a new one, which uses even more resources. A right to repair creates a market for independent repair shops, encouraging competition be … | Continue reading
Earlier this year, a cross-team group of EFF technologists, researchers, activists, and lawyers broke the story of Fog Data Science, a secretive data broker that sells cops access to huge quantities of people's precise location data. The data they use is harvested from our phone … | Continue reading
No year that includes tech-enabled abuse can be said to be a good year. But 2022 has certainly been an eventful year for the technologies used as instruments of coercive control domestic abuse situations, ranging from stalkerware to physical trackers. In February, EFF called for … | Continue reading
Social movements, businesses, and your own household depend on technology to succeed. That’s become a fact of modern life and it's why EFF has defended your online privacy, security, and free speech for over 30 years. Will you donate so EFF can keep on fighting? Give Today Every … | Continue reading
Last year, several parents at EFF enrolled kids into daycare and were instantly told to download an application for managing their children’s care. These applications frequently include notifications of feedings, diaper changes, pictures, activities, and who picked-up/dropped-off … | Continue reading
This year has been a roller coaster for the movement to decentralize the services and tools that we rely on every day. Decentralizing internet services may help remedy concerns ranging from traditional big business competition to online privacy. In order to devote closer attentio … | Continue reading
EFF believes we can create a future where our rights not only follow us online, but are enhanced by new technology. The activists, lawyers, and technologists on EFF’s staff fight for that better future and against the kinds of dystopias best left to speculative fiction. In courts … | Continue reading
If our legal rights to data privacy aren’t enforceable, they are just empty promises. One of the best ways to enforce them is to let people sue the companies that violate their data privacy. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court has been chipping away at private enforcement by re … | Continue reading
And what we can do about it. With this year’s passage of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), very large online platforms - those with EU revenues of €75 billion or more and at least 45 million EU users - will have to open up their devices to rival app stores. While this has im … | Continue reading
A growing number of people are experimenting with federated alternatives to social media like Mastodon, either by joining an “instance” hosted by someone else or creating their own instance by running the free, open-source software on a server they control. (See more about this m … | Continue reading
The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) was a bad bill to begin with and somehow just got worse and worse with each iteration. Its best chance was being slipped into unrelated legislation that no one in Congress could afford to block. Earlier this month, it seemed … | Continue reading
Essential internet infrastructure should be content-neutral. These services should not make editorial decisions that remove content beyond the scope of the law. This is in part because history shows that any new censorship methods will eventually be abused and that those abuses … | Continue reading
EFF has received a $250,000 grant from Craig Newmark Philanthropies to support its programs to teach and protect journalists, advocate against abusive “stalkerware” technology, and maintain its cybersecurity Threat Lab. This generous support will help EFF educate journalists abou … | Continue reading
Most nude content is legal, and engaging with such material online provides individuals with a safe and open framework to explore their identities, build communities, and discover new interests. However, social networks and payment processors are intervening to become the arbiter … | Continue reading
California’s legislators took their oaths of office for a fresh two-year session last week. As we prepared for a new session, it’s worth looking back at the past session—in which, with your help, EFF was able to advocate successfully for digital rights victories. California is of … | Continue reading
In 2022, cyber-attacks on government databases and systems broke into headlines in several Latin American countries. These attacks have exposed government systems’ vulnerabilities—including sometimes basic ones, like failing to keep software updated with critical patches—and show … | Continue reading
The majority of federal agencies — including law enforcement agencies like Customs and Border Protection — are refusing to release some of the most basic guidance materials used by their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) offices: procedures for how they do their jobs. Government … | Continue reading
Every year, Congress must follow through on an enormous and complicated task: agreeing on how to fund the government for the following year. The wrangling over spending often comes down to the wire, and this year, some Senators are considering shoehorning a controversial and unco … | Continue reading
The Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) is the world's largest and most successful annual charity campaign for U.S. federal employees and retirees. The pledge period for this year's campaign ends on January 14, 2023, and you can donate to support EFF's mission in fighting for digital … | Continue reading