Content moderation has become a critical topic across the globe. Unfortunately, it can still be difficult for the average person to understand the processes that go into content moderation, much less how to appeal decisions that those platforms make to censor content or accounts. … | Continue reading
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today launched Tracking Global Online Censorship, a website project that provides comprehensive, in-depth information about how and why social media platforms remove users’ posts, how users can appeal these take down decision … | Continue reading
Podcast Episode 109As humans, we’re constantly changing and evolving, always trying to become our best selves. But the internet will never forget about us at our lowest. One simple search or purchase online can cause the internet, specifically advertisements, to haunt you with pr … | Continue reading
This week, the U.K. government launched an unprecedented and deceptive effort to kill off end-to-end encryption. They’ve hired a fancy ad agency to convince people that encrypted messages are dangerous to children.The explicit goal of the “No Place to Hide” campaign, launched on … | Continue reading
Start the new year right by keeping up with the latest news on your digital rights! Version 34, issue 1 of our EFFector newsletter is out now. Catch up on the latest EFF news, from our celebration of Copyright Week to Google releasing a "disable 2g" feature for new Android smartp … | Continue reading
The European Parliament had an important decision to make this week about the Digital Services Act (DSA). After months of considering amendments, members oscillated between several policy options on how to regulate online platforms, including the dystopian idea of mandating domin … | Continue reading
There has been a notable, and long overdue flurry, of antitrust actions targeting Big Tech, launched by users, entrepreneurs, and governments alike. And in the US and abroad, policymakers are working to revamp our antitrust laws so they can be more effective at promoting user cho … | Continue reading
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, authoritative research and publications have been critical in gaining better knowledge of the virus and how to combat it. However, unlike previous pandemics, this one has been further exacerbated by a massive wave of misinformation and disinforma … | Continue reading
If you bought it, you own it and you can do what you want with it. That should be the end of the story—whether we’re talking about a car, a tractor, a smartphone, a computer, or really anything you buy. | Continue reading
Podcast Episode 108Your friends, your medical concerns, your political ideology— financial transactions tell the story of your life in intimate details. But U.S. law has failed to protect this sensitive data from prying eyes. Join EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they talk t … | Continue reading
Podcast Episode 108Your friends, your medical concerns, your political ideology— financial transactions tell the story of your life in intimate details. But U.S. law has failed to protect this sensitive data from prying eyes. Join EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they talk t … | Continue reading
In 2019, for the first time in 20 years, U.S. copyright law allowed formerly copyrighted works to join the public domain. Works in the public domain are no longer under copyright, and anyone can republish or use those works in whatever way they want. The public domain is the defa … | Continue reading
Ten years ago, a diverse coalition of internet users, non-profit groups, and internet companies defeated the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), bills that would have forced internet companies to blacklist and block websites accused of hosting copyright-i … | Continue reading
In September, we introduced EFF Threat Lab’s very own APK Downloader, apkeep. It is a tool that allows us to make the job of tracking state-sponsored malware and combatting the stalkerware of abusive partners easier. Since that time, we’ve added some additional functionality that … | Continue reading
By Hope Williams, Nathan Sheard, and Nestor ReyesThe authors are community activists who helped organize and participated in protests against police violence in San Francisco after the murder of George Floyd. A hearing in their lawsuit against the San Francisco Police Department … | Continue reading
EFF and Human Rights Watch, along with nearly 130 organizations and academics working in 56 countries, regions, or globally, urged members of the Ad Hoc Committee responsible for drafting a potential United Nations Cybercrime Treaty to ensure human rights protections are embedded … | Continue reading
Last year Google quietly pushed a new feature to its Android operating system allowing users to optionally disable 2G at the modem level in their phones. This is a fantastic feature that will provide some protection from cell site simulators, an invasive police surveillance techn … | Continue reading
Update: The hearing has been moved to January 21.San Francisco—On Friday, Jan. 21, at 9:30 am, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU of Northern California will ask a California state court to find that the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) violated city law … | Continue reading
The public should get to see whether a court that authorized the FBI to track someone’s air travels in real time for six months also analyzed whether the surveillance implicated the Fourth Amendment, EFF argued in a brief filed this week.In Forbes Media LLC v. United States, the … | Continue reading
New York’s legislature is open for business in the new year, and we’re jumping in to renew our support for two crucial bills that protect New Yorkers’ privacy rights. While very different, both pieces of legislation would uphold a principle we hold dear: people should not worry t … | Continue reading
Episode 107 of EFF’s How to Fix the InternetModern life means leaving digital traces wherever we go. But those digital footprints can translate to real-world harms: the websites you visit can impact the mortgage offers, car loans and job options you see advertised. This surveilla … | Continue reading
Las Vegas—On Friday, January 7, at 9:30 am PT, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Executive Director Cindy Cohn and EFF Special Advisor and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow will present the creepiest, most privacy-invasive, and unsecure consumer tech devices debuting at this year’s … | Continue reading
Across the country, police departments are using myriad means and resources at their disposal to stock up on drones. According to the most recent tally on the Atlas of Surveillance (a project of EFF and the University of Nevada), at least 1,172 police departments nationwide are u … | Continue reading
EFF is deeply saddened and angered by the news that our friend, Egyptian blogger, coder, and free speech activist Alaa Abd El Fattah, long a target of oppression by Egypt's successive authoritarian regimes, was sentenced to five years in prison by an emergency state security cour … | Continue reading
Law enforcement around the world is apparently getting its holiday wish list, thanks to the Council of Europe’s adoption of a flawed new protocol to the Budapest Convention, a treaty governing procedures for accessing digital evidence across borders in criminal investigations. Th … | Continue reading
At EFF, we’ve always stood up for the freedom to tinker and innovate. Unfortunately, our patent system doesn’t promote those freedoms. In some areas, like software, it’s causing much more harm than good. And the system is rife with patent trolls: companies that are focused on lic … | Continue reading
EFF makes its presence known in statehouses across the country to advocate for strong privacy laws, broadband access, and to protect and advance your digital rights. The pandemic has changed a lot about how state legislators operate in 2021, but one thing has remained the same: E … | Continue reading
Decades ago, when imagining the practical uses of artificial intelligence, science fiction writers imagined autonomous digital minds that could serve humanity. Sure, sometimes a HAL 9000 or WOPR would subvert expectations and go rogue, but that was very much unintentional, right? … | Continue reading
EFF's small design team sometimes struggles to keep up with the frenetic pace of our activist, legal and development colleagues. Whenever EFF launches a new legal case, activism campaign, tech project, or development campaign, we try to create unique and inspiring graphics to pro … | Continue reading
With increasing frequency, law enforcement has been using unconstitutional, suspicionless digital dragnet searches in an attempt to identify unknown suspects in criminal cases. Whether these searches are for everyone who was near a building where a crime occurred or who searched … | Continue reading
This year’s passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA)—also known as the bipartisan infrastructure package—delivered on a goal EFF has sought for years. It finally creates a way for people to remedy a serious problem: a severe lack of fiber-to-the-home connectiv … | Continue reading
If you're accused of a crime based on an algorithm's analysis of the evidence, you should have a right to refute the assumptions, methods, and programming of that algorithm. Building on previous wins, EFF and its allies turned the tide this year on the use of these secret program … | Continue reading
It’s been a tough year for students - but a good one for resistance. As schools have shuffled students from in-person education to at-home learning and testing, then back again, the lines between “school” and “home” have been blurred. This has made it increasingly difficult for s … | Continue reading
When all is said and done—and there are some major steps to take in 2022—the United States will mark 2021 as the last year without net neutrality protections. This will undo the 2017 repeal and once again put the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) back work doing its job: pr … | Continue reading
Strong encryption provides privacy and security for everyone online. We can’t have private conversations, or safe transactions, without it. Encryption is critical to democratic politics and reliable economic transactions around the world. When a company rolls back its existing co … | Continue reading
Uncovering government surveillance and fighting for robust and effective legal safeguards and oversight is a continuous battle in Latin American countries. Surveillance capabilities and technologies are becoming more intrusive and prevalent, surrounded by a culture of secrecy and … | Continue reading
In 2010, EFF launched its campaign to encrypt the entire web—that is, move all websites from non-secure HTTP to the more secure HTTPS protocol. Over 10 years later, 2021 has brought us even closer to achieving that goal. With various measurement sources reporting over 90% of web … | Continue reading
2021 has been the year of vaccines, in light of the continuing worldwide pandemic. It has also been the year of vaccine passports. To fully tell this story, let’s go back to 2020, because the term vaccine passport as many people use it has changed since then. Early in the pandemi … | Continue reading
On the biggest internet platforms, content moderation is bad and getting worse. It’s difficult to get it right, and at the scale of millions or billions of users, it may be impossible. It’s hard enough for humans to sift between spam, illegal content, and offensive but legal spee … | Continue reading
Stalkerware—that is, commercially-available apps that can be covertly installed on another person’s device for the purpose of monitoring their activity without their knowledge or consent—is nothing new, but 2021 has underscored just how prevalent and dangerous these apps continue … | Continue reading
This past year, EFF's Atlas of Surveillance project mobilized hundreds of student journalists and volunteer researchers to turn the tables on police spying by building the largest ever public-facing database of police surveillance technology. As EFF has long documented, local law … | Continue reading
2021 was not a good year for Big Tech: a flaming cocktail of moderation failings, privacy breaches, leaked nefarious plans, illegal collusion and tone-deaf, arrogant pronouncements stoked public anger and fired up the political will to do something about the unaccountable power a … | Continue reading
A year after the police murder of George Floyd, Black-led protests against police violence continue, as does resistance to police departments across the country growing their surveillance toolbelts and unnecessarily amassing troves of personal data. EFF stands with protesters aga … | Continue reading
2021 ended up being a time where we dug into our new realities of distributed work and the ever-changing COVID news. At the same time, news continued to come fast and furious, with the events of one week often obliterating memories of the week before. So it’s helpful for all of u … | Continue reading
In another year of masking up, local communities have found enough footing to push back on surveillance tech and fight for our digital rights. Members of the Electronic Frontier Alliance have continued to innovate by organizing workshops and trainings for neighbors, overwhelmingl … | Continue reading
Digital privacy, security, and free speech lift up all the efforts to make the dark corners of the world a little brighter. Will you donate to EFF during our Year-End Challenge and help us work toward a better digital future for everyone? | Continue reading
Episode 106 of EFF’s How to Fix the InternetSurveillance is always problematic, but it isn’t neutral—it is more often deployed in communities of color than elsewhere. And surveillance technology isn’t objective, either—it often magnifies the biases of its users and creators, affe … | Continue reading
English version بورتلاند، أوريغون - رفعت مؤسسة الجبهة الإلكترونية (EFF) دعوى قضائية اليوم نيابة عن الناشطة السعودية البارزة في مجال حقوق الإنسان لجين الهذلول ضد شركة دارك ماتر لبرامج التجسس وثلاثة من مديريها التنفيذيين السابقين بتهمة اختراق جهاز آيفون الخاص بها بشكل سري غير قانون … | Continue reading