There’s a lot to like in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeal’s ruling that much of Florida’s social media law—the parts which would prohibit internet platforms from removing or moderating any speech by or about political candidates or by “journalistic enterprises”—likely violate the … | Continue reading
The state of California is primed to bring 21st-century fiber access at affordable rates to every Californian. Last year’s unanimous passage of S.B. 156, a historic multi-billion investment in broadband, means every California community has the resources available to chart a long … | Continue reading
This is the second installment in a four-part blog series surveying global intermediary liability laws. The web of global intermediary liability laws has grown increasingly vast and complex as policymakers around the world move to adopt stricter legal frameworks for platform regu … | Continue reading
Note: HTTPS Everywhere will sunset in January 2023. Read more here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/09/https-actually-everywhereYou no longer need HTTPS Everywhere to set HTTPS by default! Major browsers now offer native support for an HTTPS only mode.FirefoxThe steps below ap … | Continue reading
U.S. democracy is at an inflection point, and how we administer and verify our elections is more important than ever. From hanging chads to glitchy touchscreens to partisan disinformation, too many Americans worry that their votes won’t count and that election results aren’t trus … | Continue reading
2000 Mules is a movie which claims to expose election fraud with phone app location data. While these claims have already been thoroughly debunked, the movie also deserves condemnation for performing wildly invasive research on thousands of people’s location data without their co … | Continue reading
2000 Mules is a movie which claims to expose election fraud with phone app location data. While these claims have already been thoroughly debunked, the movie also deserves condemnation for performing wildly invasive research on thousands of people’s location data without their co … | Continue reading
Moderated platforms often struggle to draw workable lines between content that is permitted, and content that's not. Every online forum for user speech struggles with this problem, not just the dominant social media platforms. Laws protecting companies’ ability to moderate their … | Continue reading
California taxpayers are funding the creation of rural fiber infrastructure and should be guaranteed affordable access to 21st century broadband infrastructure.SACRAMENTO, CA – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) opposes legislation sponsored by AT&T, AB 2749 (Quirk-Silva), … | Continue reading
The Cybertiger has escaped his Zoom meetings, yes! YES! The Cybertiger is out!After over two years of virtual meetings, EFF's Cooper "Cybertiger" Quintin returned to the stage, live and in-person! Friends reunited, suspicions that all our coworkers were actually holograms were as … | Continue reading
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the notoriously vague anti-hacking law, is long overdue for major reform. Among many problems, the CFAA has been used to target security researchers whose work uncovering software vulnerabilities frequently irritates corporations (and U.S. … | Continue reading
Peru’s top two telecom operators Movistar (Telefónica) and Claro (América Móvil), both part of global companies, continued to earn high marks for being transparent about government requests for user data, while competitors Bitel and Entel slightly improved practices promoting hum … | Continue reading
This is the first installment in a four-part blog series surveying global intermediary liability laws. The vast majority of internet users around the world interact with online intermediaries—including internet service providers (ISPs), search engines, and social media platforms— … | Continue reading
There is a lot to appreciate in the recently published “Notice of Funding Opportunity” (NOFO) by the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA). It is arguably the first federal government proposal that seeks to promote infrastructure p … | Continue reading
Users Should Be Able to Choose Among Platforms With Different Moderation PoliciesWASHINGTON, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today urged the U.S. Supreme Court to halt enforcement of Texas’ constitutionally questionable social media law, which allows the state to di … | Continue reading
It often feels like machine learning experts are running around with a hammer, looking at everything as a potential nail - they have a system that does cool things and is fun to work on, and they go in search of things to use it for. But what if we flip that around and start by w … | Continue reading
Egyptian blogger, coder, and free speech activist Alaa Abd El Fattah is on day 45 of a hunger strike in protest of his mistreatment in an Egyptian prison. Alaa was sentenced, without due process, late last year, after spending two years at a maximum-security prison in Tora, 12 mi … | Continue reading
Latin American countries have a choice to make in the coming months—whether to accede to a new set of rules for coordinating and cooperating with each other and nations around the world on criminal investigations. Opened for signature on May 12, the Protocol has already more than … | Continue reading
Geofence and reverse keyword warrants are some of the most dangerous, civil-liberties-infringing and reviled tools in law enforcement agencies’ digital toolbox. It turns out that these warrants are so invasive of user privacy that big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Ya … | Continue reading
California residents finally have a law designed to dismantle some of the secrecy around domestic acquisitions of warzone surveillance equipment. The weapons of the United States military—drones, mobile command centers, sound cannons, and more—have been handed off to local law en … | Continue reading
A constitutionally problematic Texas law limiting social media companies exercising their First Amendment rights to curate the content they carry can go into effect after a federal appeals court lifted a lower court’s injunction blocking it. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court … | Continue reading
The executive body of the European Union published today a legislative proposal (text) that, if it became law, would be a disaster for online privacy in the EU and throughout the world. In the name of fighting crimes against children, the EU Commission has suggested new rules tha … | Continue reading
Copyright law and free expression have always been in tension, with the courts protecting speech from overzealous copyright claims using legal doctrines such as fair use. But in 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and since then courts have interpreted its … | Continue reading
The ad identifier - aka “IDFA” on iOS, or “AAID” on Android - is the key that enables most third-party tracking on mobile devices. Disabling it will make it substantially harder for advertisers and data brokers to track and profile you, and will limit the amount of your personal … | Continue reading
The increasing risk that the Supreme Court will overturn federal constitutional abortion protections has refocused attention on the role digital service providers of all kinds play in facilitating access to health information, education, and care—and the data they collect in retu … | Continue reading
EFF supports data privacy for all, and that includes people seeking reproductive health care. Even before the Supreme Court draft decision regarding Roe v. Wade leaked, EFF was engaged with reproductive justice advocates on how to better protect data privacy for people seeking ca … | Continue reading
EFF members have joined forces to fight for civil liberties and human rights online for over 30 years. Our movement has never been an easy one, but the future of technology depends on our determination. EFF members power EFF’s attorneys, activists, and technologists every day. To … | Continue reading
In preparation for what may be the final days of the trial of Ola Bini, an open source and free software developer arrested shortly after Julian Assange's ejection from Ecuador’s London Embassy, civil society organizations observing the case have issued a report citing due proces … | Continue reading
EFF, along with many other organizations, has loudly sounded the alarm about data brokers and the myriad ways they can collect data on unsuspecting users, as well as the numerous dangers of public-private surveillance partnerships. One of the companies that has sometimes flown un … | Continue reading
On Tuesday, Motherboard reported that data broker SafeGraph was selling location information “related to visits to clinics that provide abortions including Planned Parenthood facilities.” This included where people came from and where they went afterwards. In response, SafeGraph … | Continue reading
In the hands of police and other government agencies, face recognition technology presents an inherent threat to our privacy, free expression, information security, and social justice. Our faces are unique identifiers that can’t be left at home, or replaced like a stolen ID or co … | Continue reading
Legislation deputizing people to find, sue, and collect damages from anyone who tries to help people seeking abortion care creates serious digital privacy and security risks for those involved in abortion access. Patients, their family members and friends, doctors, nurses, clinic … | Continue reading
The Court of Justice of the European Union has issued a long-awaited judgment on the compatibility of the EU Copyright Directive’s filtering requirements with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. The ruling recognizes the tension between copyright filters and … | Continue reading
Want the latest news on your digital rights? Well, you're in luck! Version 34, issue 3 of our EFFector newsletter is out now. Catch up on the latest EFF news by reading our newsletter or listening to the new audio version below. This issue includes Google's willingness to give U. … | Continue reading
Too many young people – particularly young people of color – lack enough familiarity or experience with emerging technologies to recognize how artificial intelligence can impact their lives, in either a harmful or an empowering way. Educator Ora Tanner saw this and rededicated he … | Continue reading
Imagine if your boss made up hundreds of petty rules and refused to disclose them, but every week, your pay was docked based on how many of those rules you broke. When you’re an online creator and your “boss” is a giant social media platform, that’s exactly how your compensation … | Continue reading
The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a proposal for bringing competition and fairness back to online platform markets. It just cleared a major hurdle on the way to becoming law in the EU as the European Parliament and the Council, representing the member states, reac … | Continue reading
The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) allows new messaging services to demand interoperability (the ability to exchange messages) from the internet's largest messaging services (like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage). Interoperability is an important tool to pr … | Continue reading
Computer scientists often build algorithms with a keen focus on “solving the problem,” without considering the larger implications and potential misuses of the technology they’re creating. That’s how we wind up with machine learning that prevents qualified job applicants from adv … | Continue reading
The White House announced today that sixty one countries have signed the Declaration for the Future of the Internet. The high-level vision and principles expressed in the Declaration—to have a single, global network that is truly open, fosters competition, respects privacy and in … | Continue reading
School digital environments are increasingly locked down, increasingly invasive, and increasingly used for disciplinary action. This has never been more troubling than during the pandemic, with schools adopting remote proctoring and surveillance tools at alarming rates and enteri … | Continue reading
Courts and legislatures around the globe are hotly debating to what degree online intermediaries—the chain of entities that facilitate or support speech on the internet—are liable for the content they help publish. One thing they should not be doing is holding social media users … | Continue reading
When the massive, bipartisan infrastructure package passed Congress, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was tasked with ensuring equal access to broadband access services. That provision is called “Digital Discrimination” and it states, for the first time in federal law, … | Continue reading
The European Union reached another milestone late last week in its journey to pass the Digital Services Act (DSA) and revamp regulation of digital platforms to address a myriad of problems users face—from overbroad content takedown rules to weak personal data privacy safeguards. … | Continue reading
Two human rights organizations, a digital library, a sex worker activist, and a certified massage therapist on Monday appealed a ruling that denied their constitutional challenge to FOSTA (Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act), an overbroad and censorious … | Continue reading
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter highlights the risks to human rights and personal safety when any single person has complete control over policies affecting almost 400 million users. And in this case, that person has repeatedly demonstrated that they do not understand the realiti … | Continue reading
The public has a right to know what happens when companies litigate in publicly funded courts. Unfortunately, when it comes to patent cases, companies routinely ignore the public’s rights—for example, by filing entire documents under seal without making any attempt to justify tha … | Continue reading
Maryland's legislature has unanimously passed a bill that will require law enforcement agencies to learn, as part of their standard training, to recognize the common tactics of electronic surveillance and the laws around such activities. This victory that will help provide surviv … | Continue reading