The Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine has ended its months-long dragnet investigation into supposed student cheating, dropping all charges against students and clearing all transcripts of any violations. This affirms what EFF, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education ( … | Continue reading
This blog post was written by Kenny Gutierrez, EFF Bridge Fellow.Recently proposed modifications to the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) would invade your most personal and intimate health data. The Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which is part of … | Continue reading
Imagine this: a limited liability company (LLC) is formed, for the sole purpose of acquiring patents, including what are likely to be low-quality patents of suspect validity. Patents in hand, the LLC starts approaching high-tech companies and demanding licensing fees. If they don … | Continue reading
As the world stays home to slow the spread of COVID-19, communities are rapidly transitioning to digital meeting spaces. This highlights a trend EFF has tracked for years: discussions in virtual spaces shape and reflect societal freedoms, and censorship online replicates repressi … | Continue reading
This week, EFF joined with several prominent right-to-repair groups to file an amicus brief in the United States District Court of Massachusetts defending the state’s recent right-to-repair law. This law, which gives users and independent repair shops access to critical informati … | Continue reading
Atlanta, Georgia—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Free Speech for People (FSPF) urged a federal appeals court today to hold that a group of Georgia voters and the organization that supports them have standing to sue the Georgia Secretary of State over the implementati … | Continue reading
“Black lives matter on the streets. Black lives matter on the internet.” A year ago, EFF’s Executive Director, Cindy Cohn, shared these words in EFF's statement about the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Cindy spoke for all of us in committing EFF to redouble i … | Continue reading
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), European Digital Rights (EDRi), and 40 other civil society organizations urged the Council of Europe’s Parliament Assembly and Committee of Ministers to allow more time for them to provide much-needed analysis and feedback on the flawed cross … | Continue reading
It took two and a half years and one national security incident, but Venmo did it, folks: users now have privacy settings to hide their friends lists.EFF first pointed out the problem with Venmo friends lists in early 2019. While Venmo offered a setting to make your payments and … | Continue reading
Last week, Maryland and Montana passed laws requiring judicial authorization to search consumer DNA databases in criminal investigations. These are welcome and important restrictions on forensic genetic genealogy searching (FGGS)—a law enforcement technique that has become increa … | Continue reading
Dating is risky. Aside from the typical worries of possible rejection or lack of romantic chemistry, LGBTQIA people often have added safety considerations to keep in mind. Sometimes staying in the proverbial closet is a matter of personal security. Even if someone is open with th … | Continue reading
Amazon Ring has announced that it will change the way police can request footage from millions of doorbell cameras in communities across the country. Rather than the current system, in which police can send automatic bulk email requests to individual Ring users in an area of inte … | Continue reading
We are happy to see the news that Facebook is putting an end to a policy that has long privileged the speech of politicians over that of ordinary users. The policy change, which was announced on Friday by The Verge, is something that EFF has been pushing for since as early as 201 … | Continue reading
The Council of Europe Cybercrime Committee's (T-CY) recent decision to approve new international rules for law enforcement access to user data without strong privacy protections is a blow for global human rights in the digital age. The final version of the draft Second Additional … | Continue reading
This post was co-written by EFF Legal Intern Lara EllenbergIn going after internet service providers (ISPs) for the actions of just a few of their users, Sony Music, other major record labels, and music publishing companies have found a way to cut people off of the internet based … | Continue reading
Our friends at Access Now are once again hosting RightsCon online next week, June 7-11th. This summit provides an opportunity for human rights experts, technologists, government representatives, and activists to discuss pressing human rights challenges and their potential solutio … | Continue reading
We all know that, in the 21st century, it is difficult to lead a life without a cell phone. It is also difficult to change your number—the one all your friends, family, doctors, children’s schools, and so on—have for you. It’s especially difficult to do these things if you are tr … | Continue reading
The Supreme Court’s Van Buren decision today overturned a dangerous precedent and clarified the notoriously ambiguous meaning of “exceeding authorized access” in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the federal computer crime law that’s been misused to prosecute beneficial and impor … | Continue reading
It’s hard to believe that when Governor Newsom identifies a total of $7 billion for California’s legislature to spend on broadband access—coming from a mix of state surplus dollars and federal rescue money to invest in broadband infrastructure— that the legislature would do nothi … | 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
This post was co-written by EFF Legal Intern Lara EllenbergIn going after internet service providers (ISPs) for the actions of just a few of their users, Sony Music, other major record labels, and music publishing companies have found a way to cut people off of the internet based … | Continue reading
EFF has long fought to reform vague, dangerous computer crime laws like the CFAA. We're gratified that the Supreme Court today acknowledged that overbroad application of the CFAA risks turning nearly any user of the Internet into a criminal based on arbitrary terms of service. We … | Continue reading
The EU copyright directive has caused controversy than any other proposal in recent EU history - and for good reason. In abandoning traditional legal mechanisms to tackle copyright infringement online, Article 17 (formerly Article 13) of the directive introduced a new liability r … | Continue reading
End-to-end encryption is under attack in India. The Indian government’s new and dangerous online intermediary rules forcing messaging applications to track—and be able to identify—the originator of any message, which is fundamentally incompatible with the privacy and security pro … | Continue reading
Virtual worlds are increasingly providing sophisticated, realistic, and often immersive experiences that are the stuff of fantasy. You can enter them by generating an avatar - a representation of the user that could take the form of an animal, a superhero, a historic figure, each … | Continue reading
Virtual worlds are increasingly providing sophisticated, realistic, and often immersive experiences that are the stuff of fantasy. You can enter them by generating an avatar - a representation of the user that could take the form of an animal, a superhero, a historic figure, each … | Continue reading
To commemorate the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s 30th anniversary, we present EFF30 Fireside Chats. This limited series of livestreamed conversations looks back at some of the biggest issues in internet history and their effects on the modern web.To celebrate 30 years of defen … | Continue reading
Larry Brandt, a long-time supporter of internet freedom, used his nearly 20-year-old PayPal account to put his money where his mouth is. His primary use of the payment system was to fund servers to run Tor nodes, routing internet traffic in order to safeguard privacy and avoid co … | Continue reading
A year ago today, President Trump issued an Executive Order that deputized federal agencies to retaliate against online social media services on his behalf, a disturbing and unconstitutional attack on internet free expression.To mark this ignoble anniversary, EFF and the Center f … | Continue reading
Derechos Digitales’ fourth ¿Quien Defiende Tus Datos? (Who Defends Your Data?) report on Chilean ISPs' data privacy practices launched today, showing that companies must keep improving their commitments to user rights if they want to hold their leading positions. Although Claro ( … | Continue reading
The Strasbourg highest human rights court this week affirmed what we’ve long known, that the United Kingdom’s mass surveillance regime, which involved the indiscriminate and suspicionless interception of people’s communications, violated basic human rights to privacy and free exp … | Continue reading
Over the past few weeks, as protests in—and in solidarity with—Palestine have grown, so too have violations of the freedom of expression of Palestinians and their allies by major social media companies. From posts incorrectly flagged by Facebook as incitement to violence, to fina … | Continue reading
Major publishers want to censor research-sharing resource Sci-Hub from the internet, but archivists quickly respond to make that impossible. More than half of academic publishing is controlled by major publishers using burdensome paywalls. One project in particular, Sci-Hub, has … | Continue reading
Woodland, California—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) to obtain materials showing how police are trained in the use of force, after the organization cited third-party copyright interests to ille … | Continue reading
Landmark Technology, a patent troll that has spent 20 years threatening and suing small businesses over bogus patents, and received EFF’s Stupid Patent of the Month award in 2019, has been sued by the State of Washington.Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson has filed a lawsui … | Continue reading
An expanding category of software, apps, and devices is normalizing cradle-to-grave surveillance in more and more aspects of everyday life. At EFF we call them “disciplinary technologies.” They typically show up in the areas of life where surveillance is most accepted and where p … | Continue reading
In the wake of Colombia’s tax reform proposal, which came as more Colombians fell into poverty as a result of the pandemic, demonstrations spread over the country in late April, reviving social unrest and socio-economic demands that led people to the streets in 2019.The governmen … | Continue reading
All too often, police and other government agencies unleash invasive surveillance technologies on the streets of our communities, based on the unilateral and secret decisions of agency executives, after hearing from no one except corporate sales agents. This spy tech causes false … | Continue reading
On social media, shopping sites, and even childrens’ apps, companies are using deceptive user experience design techniques to trick us into giving away our data, sharing our phone numbers and contact lists, and submitting to fees and subscriptions. Everyday, we’re exploited for p … | Continue reading
San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has joined Consumer Reports, Access Now, PEN America, and DarkPatterns.org in launching the “Dark Patterns Tip Line”—a project for the public to submit examples of deceptive design patterns they see in technology products a … | Continue reading
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has allowed a civil lawsuit to move forward against Snapchat, a smartphone social media app, brought by the parents of three teenage boys who died tragically in a car accident after reaching a maximum speed of 123 miles per hour. We … | Continue reading
Last week, EFF filed an amicus brief in State v. Alvin Davis in California, in support of Mr. Davis's right to inspect the source code of STRMix, the forensic DNA software used at his trial. This is the most recent in a string of cases in which EFF has argued that a defendant has … | Continue reading
President Joe Biden on Friday rescinded a dangerous and unconstitutional Executive Order issued by President Trump that threatened internet users’ ability to obtain truthful information online and retaliated against services that fact-checked the former president. The Executive O … | Continue reading
The City of Fullerton, California has abandoned a lawsuit against two bloggers and a local website. The suit dangerously sought to expand California’s computer crime law in a way that threatened investigative reporting and everyday internet use.The city’s lawsuit against the blog … | Continue reading
This morning, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced his plans for the state’s multi-billion dollar surplus and federal recovery dollars, including a massive, welcome $7 billion investment in public broadband infrastructure. It's a plan that would give California one of the l … | Continue reading
Stupid Patent of the MonthPatent trolls are everyone’s problem. A study from 2019 showed that 32% of patent troll lawsuits are directed at small and medium-sized businesses. We told the stories of some of those small businesses in our Saved by Alice project.But some patent trolls … | Continue reading
Although DNA is individual to you—a “fingerprint” of your genetic code—DNA samples don’t always tell a complete story. The DNA samples used in criminal prosecutions are generally of low quality, making them particularly complicated to analyze. They are not very concentrated, not … | Continue reading
With the attack on Colonial Pipeline by a ransomware group causing panic buying and shortages of gasoline on the US East Coast, many are left with more questions than answers to what exactly is going on. We have provided a short FAQ to the most common technical questions that are … | Continue reading