EFF has joined European Digital Rights (EDRi), the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy... | Continue reading
This month, Apple announced several new features under the auspices of expanding its protections for young people, at least two of which seriously walk back the company’s longstanding commitment to protecting user privacy. One of the plans—scanning photos sent to and from child a … | Continue reading
When the FTC filed its amended antitrust complaint against Facebook in mid-August, we read it with interest. FTC Chair Lina Khan rose to fame with a seminal analysis of the monopolistic tactics of Amazon, another Big Tech giant, when she was just a law student, and we anticipated … | Continue reading
Want the latest news on your digital rights? Then you're in luck! Version 33, issue 5 of EFFector, our monthly-ish email newsletter, is out now! Catch up on rising issues in online security, privacy, and free expression with EFF by reading our newsletter or listening to the new a … | Continue reading
A knife was stuck in antitrust in the 1980s and it bled out for the next 40 years. By the 1990s, the orthodox view of antitrust went like this: horizontal monopolies are bad, but vertical monopolies are efficient. In other words, it was bad for consumers when one company was the … | Continue reading
Vaccine mandates are becoming increasingly urgent from public health officials and various governments. As they roll out, we must protect users of vaccine passports and those who do not want to use—or cannot use—a digitally scannable means to prove vaccination. We cannot let the … | Continue reading
ˀThe Chicago Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has released a highly critical report on the Chicago Police Department’s use of ShotSpotter, a surveillance technology that relies on a combination of artificial intelligence and human “acoustic experts” to purportedly identify a … | Continue reading
OnlyFans recently announced it would ban sexually explicit content, citing pressure from “banking partners and payout providers.” This is the latest example of a troubling pattern of financial intermediaries censoring constitutionally protected legal speech by shutting down accou … | Continue reading
San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce that Kade Crockford, Director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, Pam Dixon, executive director and founder of World Privacy Forum, and Matt Mitchell, founder of Crypto … | Continue reading
Calling all writers! If you are passionate about civil liberties and technology, we have an awesome opportunity for you. We are hiring for a newly-created role of Associate Director of Institutional Support. This senior role will manage the messaging and strategy behind EFF’s fou … | Continue reading
EFF has joined the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and more than 90 other organizations to send a letter urging Apple CEO Tim Cook to stop the company’s plans to weaken privacy and security on Apple’s iPhones and other products.SIGN THE PETITIONTELL APPLE: DON'T SCAN OU … | Continue reading
The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) purchased access to precise geolocation data about over 40% of the state’s population from Safegraph, the controversial data broker recently banned from Google’s app store. The details of this transaction are described in publicly- … | Continue reading
With little explanation, the Ninth Circuit today affirmed the district court’s decision dismissing our landmark challenge to the US government’s mass communications surveillance, Jewel v. NSA. Needless to say, we are extremely disappointed. Today’s decision renders government mas … | Continue reading
Mass surveillance is not an acceptable crime-fighting strategy, no matter how well-intentioned the spying. If you’re upset about Apple’s recent announcement that the next version of iOS will install surveillance software in every iPhone, we need you to speak out about it.SIGN THE … | Continue reading
Facebook recently banned the accounts of several New York University (NYU) researchers who run Ad Observer, an accountability project that tracks paid disinformation, from its platform. This has major implications: not just for transparency, but for user autonomy and the fight fo … | Continue reading
President Biden’s July 9 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy is a highly technical, 72-part, fine-grained memo on how to address the ways market concentration harms our lives as workers, citizens, consumers, and beyond. To a casual reader, this may se … | Continue reading
Congress’s recent efforts on antitrust and competition in the tech space have been focused on today’s biggest tech companies, not on setting policy for the sector as a whole. Although Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (and perhaps Microsoft) are the largest companies and theref … | Continue reading
The tech companies behind the so-called “sharing economy” have drawn the ire of brick-and-mortar businesses and local governments across the country. For example, take-out apps such as GrubHub and UberEats have grown into a hundred-billion-dollar industry over the past decade, an … | Continue reading
EFF would like to thank former intern Haley Amster for drafting this post, and former legal fellow Nathan Sobel for his assistance in editing it.The Fourth Amendment requires authorities to target search warrants at particular places or things—like a home, a bank deposit box, or … | Continue reading
Apple’s new program for scanning images sent on iMessage steps back from the company’s prior support for the privacy and security of encrypted messages. The program, initially limited to the United States, narrows the understanding of end-to-end encryption to allow for client-sid … | Continue reading
Policymakers around the world are contemplating a wide variety of proposals to address “harmful” online expression. Many of these proposals are dangerously misguided and will inevitably result in the censorship of all kinds of lawful and valuable expression. And one of the most d … | Continue reading
Over the past few months, students from all over the country have reached out to EFF and other advocacy organizations because their schools—including teachers and administrators—have made flimsy claims about cheating based on digital logs from online learning platforms that don’t … | Continue reading
Canvas is an online learning platform created by the Utah-based education technology company Instructure. In the past year, the platform has also been turned into a disciplinary technology, as more and more schools have come to rely on Canvas to drive allegations of cheating—desp … | Continue reading
Doordash workers are embroiled in a bitter labor dispute with the company: at issue, the tips that “Dashers” depend on to make the difference between a living wage and the poorhouse. Doordash has a long history of abusing its workers’ tips; including a particularly ugly case brou … | Continue reading
The giant record labels, their association, and their lobbyists have succeeded in getting a number of members of the U.S. House of Representatives to pressure Twitter to pay money it does not owe, to labels who have no claim to it, against the interests of its users. This is a pl … | Continue reading
Stupid Patent of the MonthA newly formed patent troll is looking for big money from small business websites, just for using free, off-the-shelf login verification tools. Defenders of the American Dream, LLC (DAD ), is sending out its demand letters to websites that use Google’s r … | Continue reading
Apple has announced impending changes to its operating systems that include new “protections for children” features in iCloud and iMessage. If you’ve spent any time following the Crypto Wars, you know what this means: Apple is planning to build a backdoor into its data storage sy … | Continue reading
The Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas will be giving a DEF CON keynote address this year. Those attending this weekend’s hybrid event will have a unique opportunity to “engage” with the man who heads the department responsible for surveillance of immigrants, Musli … | Continue reading
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Defending Rights and Dissent and 13 other organizations sent a letter to Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and other members of Congress asking them to act swiftly to amend the vague and dangerous di … | Continue reading
Believe the hypeAfter decades of hype, it’s only natural for your eyes to skate over corporate mission-statements without stopping to take note of them, but when it comes to ending your relationship with them, tech giants’ stated goals take on a sinister cast.Whether it’s “bringi … | Continue reading
Just as a good hacker sees worlds of possibility in plastic, metal, and pixels, we must all envision and work for a future that’s better than what we’re given. EFF is celebrating this week's Las Vegas hacker cons virtually and making our annual mystery-filled DEF CON t-shirt avai … | Continue reading
The forthcoming Senate draft of Biden's infrastructure bill—a 2,000+ page bill designed to update the United States’ roads, highways, and digital infrastructure—contains a poorly crafted provision that could create new surveillance requirements for many within the blockchain ecos … | Continue reading
Click the "Tor" button to see what data is visible to eavesdroppers when you're using Tor. The button will turn green to indicate that Tor is on. Click the "HTTPS" button to see what data is visible to eavesdroppers when you're using HTTPS. The button will turn green to indicate … | Continue reading
Digital identification can invade our privacy and aggravate existing social inequities. Designed wrong, it might be a big step towards national identification, in which every time we walk through a door or buy coffee, a record of the event is collected and aggregated. Also, any s … | Continue reading
In an amicus brief filed July 23, EFF, along with the Center for Democracy and Technology and other partner organizations, urged the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to apply longstanding First Amendment law and protect Twitter from a retaliatory investigation by Texas Attorney Gen … | Continue reading
The U.S. Senate is on the cusp of approving an infrastructure package, which passed a critical first vote last night by 67-32. Negotiations on the final bill are ongoing, but late yesterday NBC News had the draft broadband provisions. There is a lot to like in it, a lot that will … | Continue reading
Court documents recently reviewed by VICE have revealed that ShotSpotter, a company that makes and sells audio gunshot detection to cities and police departments, may not be as accurate or reliable as the company claims. In fact, the documents reveal that employees at ShotSpotter … | Continue reading
Body bags claiming that “disinformation kills” line the streets today in front of Facebook’s Washington, D.C. headquarters. A group of protesters, affiliated with “The Real Facebook Oversight Board” (an organization that is, confusingly, not affiliated with Facebook or its Oversi … | Continue reading
All of us deserve basic protection against government searches and seizures that the Constitution provides, including requiring law enforcement to get a warrant before it can access our communications. But currently, the FBI has a backdoor into our communications, a loophole, tha … | Continue reading
To celebrate 30 years of defending online freedom, EFF held a candid live discussion with net neutrality pioneer and EFF board member Gigi Sohn, who served as Counselor to the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and co-founder of leading advocacy organization Public … | Continue reading
Washington D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Postal Service and its inspection agency seeking records about a covert program to secretly comb through online posts of social media users before street pr … | Continue reading
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of Northern and Southern California today asked a federal appeals court to reinstate a lawsuit they filed on behalf of electric scooter riders challenging the constitutionality of Los Angeles’ highly privacy-invasive c … | Continue reading
Why should you care about data brokers? Reporting this week about a Substack publication outing a priest with location data from Grindr shows once again how easy it is for anyone to take advantage of data brokers’ stores to cause real harm. This is not the first time Grindr has b … | Continue reading
As the Council of Europe’s flawed cross border surveillance treaty moves through its final phases of approval, time is running out to ensure cross-border investigations occur with robust privacy and human rights safeguards in place. The innocuously named “Second Additional Protoc … | Continue reading
As part of a larger redesign, the payment app Venmo has discontinued its public “global” feed. That means the Venmo app will no longer show you strangers’ transactions—or show strangers your transactions—all in one place. This is a big step in the right direction. But, as the red … | Continue reading
On June 17th, the best legal minds in the Bay Area gathered together for a night filled with tech law trivia—but there was a twist! With in-person events still on the horizon, EFF's 13th Annual Cyberlaw Trivia Night moved to a new browser-based virtual space, custom built in Gath … | Continue reading
The Indian government’s new Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code (“2021 Rules”) pose huge problems for free expression and Internet users’ privacy. They include dangerous requirements for platforms to identify the origins of messages and pre-screen content, which … | Continue reading
Today, Governor Newsom signed into law one of the largest state investments in public fiber in the history of the United States. No longer will the state of California simply defer to the whims of AT&T and cable for broadband access, now every community is being given their shot … | Continue reading