Partnering with the ACLU and numerous other public interest advocates, businesses and educators, EFF has filed an amicus brief urging the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold a district court’s decision not to block enforcement of SB 822, a law that ensures that that all Cali … | Continue reading
Technology users around the world are increasingly concerned, and rightly so, about protecting their data. But many are unaware of exactly how their data is being collected and would be shocked to learn of the scope and implications of mass consumer data collection by technology … | Continue reading
fire_and_eff_letter_to_dartmouth_college_march_30_2021.pdf | Continue reading
October 2003 Introduction Computer security is undeniably important, and as new vulnerabilities are discovered and exploited, the perceived need for new security solutions grows. "Trusted computing" initiatives propose to solve some of today's security problems through hardware c … | Continue reading
This is the second in our blog series on the public interest internet: past, present and future.In our previous blog post, we discussed how in the early days of the internet, regulators feared that without strict copyright enforcement and pre-packaged entertainment, the new digit … | Continue reading
This is the second in our blog series on the public interest internet: past, present and future.It’s hard to believe now, but in the early days of the public internet, the greatest worry of some of its most high-powered advocates was that it would be empty. As the Clinton adminis … | Continue reading
Say the word “internet” these days, and most people will call to mind images of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, of Google and Twitter: sprawling, intrusive, unaccountable. This tiny handful of vast tech corporations and their distant CEOs demand our online attention and dominate … | Continue reading
We are launching a new Privacy Breakdown of Mobile Phones "playlist" on Surveillance Self-Defense, EFF's online guide to defending yourself and your friends from surveillance by using secure technology and developing careful practices. This guided tour walks through the ways your … | Continue reading
As someone once said, “the Founders did not fight a revolution to gain the right to government agency protocols.” Well it was not just someone, it was Chief Justice John Roberts. He flatly rejected the government’s claim that agency protocols could solve the Fourth Amendment viol … | Continue reading
As someone once said, “the Founders did not fight a revolution to gain the right to government agency protocols.” Well it was not just someone, it was Chief Justice John Roberts. He flatly rejected the government’s claim that agency protocols could solve the Fourth Amendment viol … | Continue reading
Last week, the Florida Legislature passed a bill prohibiting social media platforms from “knowingly deplatforming” a candidate (the Transparency in Technology Act, SB 7072), on pain of a fine of up to $250k per day, unless, I kid you not, the platform owns a sufficiently large th … | Continue reading
Today’s decision from the Facebook Oversight Board regarding the suspension of President Trump’s account -- to extend the suspension for six months and require Facebook to reevaluate in light of the platform’s stated policies -- may be frustrating to those who had hoped for a def … | Continue reading
As debate continues in the U.S. and Europe over how to regulate social media, a number of countries—such as India and Turkey—have imposed stringent rules that threaten free speech, while others, such as Indonesia, are considering them. Now, a new proposal to amend Mauritius’ Info … | Continue reading
Everyday, your personal information is being harvested by your smart phone applications, sold to data brokers, and used by advertisers hoping to sell you things. But what safeguards prevent the government from shopping in that same data marketplace? Mobile data regularly bought a … | Continue reading
The Brazilian Chamber of Deputies is on track to approve a law that threatens freedom of expression and the right to assemble and protest, with the stated aim of defending the democratic constitutional state. Bill 6764/02 repeals the Brazilian National Security Law (Lei de Segura … | 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
EFF in partnership with Stanford Libraries' Systemic Racism Tracker project has released a data set with links to 458 policy manuals from California law enforcement agencies, including most police departments and sheriff offices and some district attorney offices, school district … | Continue reading
Apple’s long-awaited privacy update for iOS is out, and it’s a solid step in the right direction. With the launch of iOS 14.5, hundreds of millions of iPhone users will now interact with Apple’s new AppTrackingTransparency feature. Allowing users to choose what third-party tracki … | Continue reading
Last week, EFF, ACLU, and ACLU of Minnesota filed an amicus brief in State v. Pauli, a case in the Minnesota Supreme Court, where we argue that cloud storage providers’ terms of service (TOS) can’t take away your Fourth Amendment rights. This is the first case on this important i … | Continue reading
Washington, D.C. —The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union, and the ACLU of Massachusetts today filed a petition for a writ of certiorari, asking the Supreme Court to hear a challenge to the Department of Homeland Security’s policy and practice … | Continue reading
We don’t need government minders in our private conversations. That’s because private conversations, whether they happen offline or online, aren’t a public safety menace. They’re not an invitation to criminality, or terrorism, or a threat to children, no matter how many times tho … | Continue reading
EFF has released Data Driven 2: California Dragnet, a new public records collection and data set that shines light on the massive amount of vehicle surveillance conducted by police in California using automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—and how very little of this surveillanc … | Continue reading
The U.S. is distributing more vaccines and the population is gradually becoming vaccinated. Returning to regular means of activity and movement has become the main focus for many Americans who want to travel or see family. An increasingly common proposal to get there is digital p … | Continue reading
Phoenix, Arizona—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit today against Proctorio Inc. on behalf of college student Erik Johnson, seeking a judgment that he didn’t infringe the company’s copyrights when he linked to excerpts of its software code in tweets criticiz … | Continue reading
Are tech giants really damned if they do and damned if they don’t (protect our privacy)?That’s a damned good question that’s been occasioned by Google’s announcement that they’re killing the invasive, tracking third-party cookie (yay!) and replacing it with FLoC, an alternative t … | Continue reading
While Turkey hit the headlines last week with a ban on paying for items with cryptocurrency, the government of India appears to be moving towards outlawing cryptocurrency completely. An unnamed senior government official told Reuters last month that a forthcoming bill this parlia … | Continue reading
While Turkey hit the headlines last week with a ban on paying for items with cryptocurrency, the government of India appears to be moving towards outlawing cryptocurrency completely. An unnamed senior government official told Reuters last month that a forthcoming bill this parlia … | Continue reading
Predictive policing is dangerous and yet its use among law enforcement agencies is growing. Predictive policing advocates, and companies that make millions selling technology to police departments, like to say the technology is based on “data” and therefore it cannot be racially … | Continue reading
San Francisco—On Tuesday, April 20, and Wednesday, April 21, experts from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) fighting copyright abuse will testify at virtual hearings held by the Copyright Office in favor of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) so peopl … | Continue reading
Like many schools, Dartmouth College has increasingly turned to technology to monitor students taking exams at home. And while many universities have used proctoring tools that purport to help educators prevent cheating, Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine has gone dangerously … | Continue reading
San Francisco, California—Boosting protection of Internet users’ personal data from snooping advertisers and third-party trackers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today announced it has enhanced its groundbreaking HTTPS Everywhere browser extension by incorporating rules … | Continue reading
Over the last few months the HTTPS Everywhere project has been deciding what to do with the new landscape of HTTPS in major browsers. Encrypted web traffic has increased in the last few years and major browsers have made strides in seeing that HTTPS becomes the default. This proj … | Continue reading
For the first time an American president has proposed a plan that wouldn’t just make a dent in the digital divide, it will end it. By deploying federal resources at the level and scale this country has not seen since electrification nearly 100 years ago, the U.S. will again conne … | Continue reading
Location data generated from our cell phones paint an incredibly detailed picture of our movements and private lives. Despite the sensitive nature of this data and a federal law prohibiting cellphone carriers from disclosing it, repeated unauthorized disclosures over the last sev … | Continue reading
From the pandemic to the Frontier bankruptcy to the ongoing failures in remote learning, we’ve seen now more than ever how current broadband infrastructure fails to meet the needs of the people. This pain is particularly felt in already under-served communities—urban and rural—wh … | Continue reading
Our digital rights are only as strong as our power to enforce them. But when we sue government officials for violating our digital rights, they often get away with it because of a dangerous legal doctrine called “qualified immunity.”Do you think you have a First Amendment right t … | Continue reading
Cookies are dying, and the tracking industry is scrambling to replace them. Google has proposed Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), TURTLEDOVE, and other bird-themed tech that would have browsers do some of the behavioral profiling that third-party trackers do today. But a coal … | Continue reading
Last week, the New York Times highlighted the Trump 2020 campaign’s use of deceptive web designs to deceive supporters into donating far more money than they had intended. The campaign’s digital donation portal hid an unassuming but unfair method for siphoning funds: a pre-checke … | Continue reading
Last week, EFF, along with the ACLU and the ACLU of Iowa, filed an amicus brief in the Iowa Supreme Court challenging the surreptitious collection of DNA without a warrant. We argued this practice violates the Fourth Amendment and Article I, Section 8 of the Iowa state constituti … | Continue reading
Today we’re launching Am I FLoCed, a new site that will tell you whether your Chrome browser has been turned into a guinea pig for Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC, Google’s latest targeted advertising experiment. If you are a subject, we will tell you how your browser is de … | Continue reading
The longer we live in the new digital world, the more we are seeing it replicate systemic issues we’ve been fighting for decades. In the case of movie studios, what we’ve seen in the last few years in streaming mirrors what happened in the 1930s and ‘40s, when a small group of mo … | Continue reading
President Joe Biden should rescind a dangerous and unconstitutional Executive Order issued by President Trump that continues to threaten internet users’ ability to obtain accurate and truthful information online, six organizations wrote in a letter sent to the president on Wednes … | Continue reading
India has introduced draconian changes to its rules for online intermediaries, tightening government control over the information ecosystem and what can be said online. It has created rules that seek to restrict social media companies and other content hosts from coming up with t … | Continue reading
On 12 September 2018, the European Commission presented a proposal for a regulation on preventing the dissemination of terrorist content online—dubbed the Terrorism Regulation, or TERREG for short—that contained some alarming ideas. In particular, the proposal included an obligat … | Continue reading
In a win for innovation, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that Google’s use of certain Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is a lawful fair use. In doing so, the Court reversed the previous rulings by the Federal Circuit and recognized that copyright only promotes innov … | Continue reading
Another day, another horrific Facebook privacy scandal. We know what comes next: Facebook will argue that losing a lot of our data means bad third-party actors are the real problem that we should trust Facebook to make more decisions about our data to protect against them. If his … | Continue reading
EFF applauds the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit for holding that the First Amendment protects individuals when they secretly audio record on-duty police officers. EFF filed an amicus brief in the case, Martin v. Rollins, which was brought by the ACLU of Massachusetts … | Continue reading