Facebook needs to be reined in. Lawmakers and everyday users are mad, having heard former Facebook employee Frances Haugen explain how Facebook valued growth and engagement over everything else, even health and safety. But Congress’s latest effort—to regulate algorithms that reco … | Continue reading
Vendors of surveillance technology can make big money on the global market, frequently by enabling authoritarian governments to spy on journalists and activists. That’s why, for years, EFF has called for more accountability against technology companies that facilitate human right … | Continue reading
EFF’s Certbot tool helps to automate TLS/SSL certificates for web servers—and we believe that should be a global right. Certbot is a free, open source software tool for automatically using Let’s Encrypt certificates, and is part of EFF’s larger effort to encrypt the entire Intern … | Continue reading
The EU's Digital Services Act is a chance to preserve what works and to fix what is broken. EFF and other civil society groups have advocated for new rules that protect fundamental rights online, while formulating a bold vision to address today's most pressing challenges. However … | Continue reading
In the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, a location data broker called Veraset offered officials in Washington, DC full access to its proprietary database of “highly sensitive” device-level GPS data, collected from cell phones, for the entire DC metro area.The officials accep … | Continue reading
This post is the second of two analyzing the risks of approving dangerous and disproportionate surveillance obligations in the Brazilian Fake News bill. You can read our first article here.Following a series of public hearings in Brazil's Chamber of Deputies after the Senate's ap … | Continue reading
This post is the first of two analyzing the risks of approving dangerous and disproportionate surveillance obligations in the Brazilian Fake News bill. You can read our second article here.The revised text of Brazil’s so-called Fake News bill (draft bill 2630), aimed at counterin … | Continue reading
Led by a group of senators that spent much of 2019 trying to change U.S. patent law for the worse, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has agreed to study the “current state of patent jurisprudence.” The details of the study make it clear that its proposers believe in a na … | Continue reading
Facebook announced it is, for now, shutting down its face recognition program, which created face prints of users and automatically recognized them in uploaded photos. The decision to end the program comes at a time when face recognition technology is receiving push back, critici … | Continue reading
The Electronic Frontier Alliance is made up of more than seventy groups of concerned community members, often including workers in the tech industry who see issues of the industry from the inside. One of the Alliance’s most active members is PDX Privacy, a Portland-based privacy … | Continue reading
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has interfered with a staggering array of speech and innovation, from security research to accessibility for those with disabilities to remix and even repair. By forbidding unauthorized access to a copyrighted work—even for purposes tha … | Continue reading
It goes by many names, but no matter how you cut it, the new "Inclusive Access" model for college course materials is a bad deal for students. Educators are moving increasingly towards digital textbooks, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. This has left publishers scrambling … | Continue reading
In honor of Open Access Week, and particularly this year’s theme of structural equity, we wanted to highlight a project from the Internet Archive that is doing extraordinary work promoting access to knowledge. The bad news: that project is also under legal threat. The good news: … | Continue reading
Last year, the EU introduced the Digital Services Act (DSA), an ambitious and thoughtful project to rein in the power of Big Tech and give European internet users more control over their digital lives. It was an exciting moment, as the world’s largest trading bloc seemed poised t … | Continue reading
Being a full participant in the world will eventually depend on access to gigabits of broadband capacity. That capacity will depend on fiber optics. Over the years, EFF has researched and advocated for policy changes at the local, state, and federal levels—all towards the goal of … | Continue reading
San Francisco—Public investments in open access fiber networks, instead of more subsidies for broadband carriers, will bring high-speed internet on a more cost-efficient basis to millions of Americans and create an infrastructure that can handle internet growth for decades, accor … | Continue reading
Face recognition technology is a special menace to privacy, racial justice, free expression, and information security. Our faces are unique identifiers, and most of us expose them everywhere we go. And unlike our passwords and identification numbers, we can’t get a new face. So, … | Continue reading
It is with heavy hearts that we mourn and celebrate our friend and colleague Elliot Harmon, who passed away peacefully on Saturday morning following a lengthy battle with melanoma. We will deeply miss Elliot’s clever mind, powerful pen, generous heart, and expansive kindness. We … | Continue reading
Antitrust has not had its moment since the 1911 breakup of Standard Oil. But this past year, policymakers and government leaders around the globe have been taking a hard look at the technology markets. ‘Break up Big Tech’ is the newest antitrust catchphrase. On both sides of the … | Continue reading
Since he helped found EFF 31 years ago, John Gilmore has provided leadership and guidance on many of the most important digital rights issues we advocate for today. But in recent years, we have not seen eye-to-eye on how to best communicate and work together, and we have been una … | Continue reading
The Utah Supreme Court is the latest stop in EFF’s roving campaign to establish your Fifth Amendment right to refuse to provide your password to law enforcement. Yesterday, along with the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in State v. Valdez, arguing that the constitutional privilege … | Continue reading
Oakland residents shared the stories of their personal experience; a broad coalition of advocates, civil society organizations, and local internet service providers (ISPs) lifted their voices; and now the Oakland City Council has unanimously passed Oakland’s Communications Servic … | Continue reading
We get a lot of requests for help here at EFF, with our tireless intake coordinator being the first point of contact for many. All too often, however, the help needed isn’t legal or technical. Instead, users just need an answer to a simple question: what does this company want me … | Continue reading
Technology rarely invents new societal problems. Instead, it digitizes them, supersizes them, and allows them to balloon and duplicate at the speed of light. That’s exactly the problem we’ve seen with location-based, crowd-sourced “public safety” apps like Citizen.These apps come … | Continue reading
At EFF, we talk a lot about strong encryption. It’s critical for our privacy and security online. That’s why we litigate in courts to protect the right to encrypt, build technologies to encrypt the web, and it’s why we lead the fight against anti-encryption legislation like last … | Continue reading
The European Parliament’s regulations and policy-making decisions on technology and the internet have unique influence across the globe. With great influence comes great responsibility. We believe the European Parliament (EP) has a duty to set an example with the Digital Services … | Continue reading
Users are understandably frustrated and perplexed by many big tech companies’ content moderation practices. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms make many questionable, confounding, and often downright incorrect decisions affecting speakers of all political stripes … | Continue reading
This blog post is part of a series, looking at the public interest internet—the parts of the internet that don’t garner the headlines of Facebook or Google, but quietly provide public goods and useful services without requiring the scale or the business practices of the tech gian … | Continue reading
The Marin County Sheriff illegally shares the sensitive location information of millions of drivers with out-of-state and federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The Sheriff uses automated license plate reader … | Continue reading
For over two years EFF has been following the case of Swedish computer security expert Ola Bini, who was arrested in April, 2019, in Ecuador, following Julian Assange's ejection from that country’s London Embassy. Bini’s pre-trial hearing, which was suspended and rescheduled at l … | Continue reading
EFF has joined a coalition of press freedom, civil liberties, and human rights groups that sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland urging the Department of Justice to drop its efforts to extradite and prosecute Julian Assange.The renewed request comes after a Yahoo News … | Continue reading
This blog post was written by Kenny Gutierrez, EFF Bridge Fellow.The City Council of Concord, California, is tone deaf to community concerns regarding a proposed police Unmanned Aerial Surveillance (UAS) system – commonly referred to as drones. In a city where the police departme … | Continue reading
San Francisco—Community activists in Northern California today sued Marin County Sheriff Robert Doyle for illegally sharing millions of local drivers’ license plates and location data, captured by a network of cameras his office uses, with hundreds of federal and out-of-state age … | Continue reading
The pledge period for the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) is underway and EFF needs your help! Last year, U.S. government employees raised over $38,000 for EFF through the CFC, helping us fight for privacy, free speech, and security on the internet so that we can help create a be … | Continue reading
We do not lose our constitutional rights at the border. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), however, believes you do. In fiscal year 2019 alone (before the pandemic curbed international travel), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers conducted nearly 41,000 … | Continue reading
Today EFF and other internet and digital rights organizations are announcing the Alliance for Encryption in Latin America and the Caribbean (AC-LAC). The Alliance is a platform for collective capacity building and information, based on the principle that encryption is an essentia … | Continue reading
Within a day of Twitter fact-checking President Donald Trump’s May 2020 false tweets about mail-in voting, federal officials began trying to find out how much government agencies spent to advertise on social media. This inquiry was likely part of a planned effort to cut that fund … | Continue reading
For many years, Palestinian rights defenders have championed the cause of Palestinians in the occupied territories, who are denied access to PayPal, while Israeli settlers have full access to PayPal products. A recent campaign, led by Palestinian digital rights group 7amleh, call … | Continue reading
EFF filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in support of public school students’ right to speak while off school grounds or after school hours, including on social media. We argued that Supreme Court precedent makes clear that the First Amendment … | Continue reading
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is thrilled to announce that the Coalition Against Stalkerware, co-founded by Cybersecurity Director Eva Galperin and leading antivirus companies and victim support groups, has received the J.D. Falk Award for its work raisin … | Continue reading
Through her leaks and Congressional testimony, Frances Haugen, the “Facebook Whistleblower,” revealed a lot about Facebook's operation. Many of these revelations are things we've long suspected but now have proof of: Facebook focuses on growth—of users and time spent on its platf … | Continue reading
San Francisco—On Tuesday, October 12, at 12 pm PT, EFF Senior Staff Attorney Mitch Stoltz will speak at an online workshop convened by the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law... | Continue reading
San Francisco—On Tuesday, October 12, at 8 am PT, EFF Senior Staff Technologist Erica Portnoy and representatives from more than 10 human, digital, and children’s rights organizations will hold a livestreamed panel discussion about the ramifications of Apple’s plans to add scanni … | Continue reading
As face recognition technology evolves at a dizzying speed, new uses and terminologies seem to develop daily. On this page, we attempt to define and disambiguate some of the most commonly used terms. For more information on government use of face recognition and how to end it in … | Continue reading
Governments and corporations are tracking how we go about our lives with a unique marker that most of us cannot hide or change: our own faces. Across the country, communities are pushing back with laws that restrain this dangerous technology. In response, some governments and cor … | Continue reading
On September 16, EFF held the 30th Annual Pioneer Award Ceremony, a yearly celebration of our digital heroes. The Barlows this year went to a selection of individuals who have worked to protect privacy in unique, impressive, and successful ways, from the streets of Harlem and Bos … | Continue reading
In a disastrous ruling for online expression, innovation and competition, a federal appeals court has held that internet intermediaries are on the hook for expensive litigation and potential damages for violating a person’s “right of publicity,” (i.e., the right to control the co … | Continue reading
In a win for freedom of speech, the U.S. Supreme Court held that public high school officials violated a student’s First Amendment rights when they suspended her from cheerleading for posting a vulgar Snapchat selfie over the weekend and off school grounds. EFF filed an amicus br … | Continue reading