Not Just for COVID-19, But for the Next Crisis TooThe COVID-19 pandemic demands that governments, scientific researchers, and industry work together to bring life-saving technology to the public regardless of who can afford it. But even as we take steps to make medical technology … | Continue reading
For years EFF has been calling for U.S. companies that act as “repressions little helpers” to be held accountable, and now we’re telling the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite all the ways that technology has been used as a force for good–connecting people around the world, giving voice … | Continue reading
The European Union has made the first step towards a significant overhaul of its core platform regulation, the e-Commerce Directive. In order to inspire the European Commission, which is currently preparing a proposal for a Digital Services Act Package, the EU Parliament has vote … | Continue reading
Three members of Congress have joined the fight for the right to protest by sending a letter to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) to investigate federal surveillance against protesters. We commend these elected officials for doing what they can to help ensur … | Continue reading
San Francisco – On Wednesday, October 21 at 11 am ET/2 pm PT, voter advocacy organizations will ask a district court to block an unconstitutional Executive Order that retaliates against online services for fact-checking President Trump’s false posts about voting and the upcoming … | Continue reading
Last week, we celebrated the 29th Annual—and first ever online—Pioneer Award Ceremony, which EFF convenes for our digital heroes and the folks that help make the online world a better, safer, stronger, and more fun place. Like the many Pioneer Award Ceremonies before it, the all- … | Continue reading
Coinbase has released its first transparency report, and we’re encouraged to see the company take this first step and commit to issuing future reports that go even further to provide transparency for their customers. Last month, we renewed a call for Coinbase—one of the largest c … | Continue reading
Imagine walking down the street, looking for a good cup of coffee. In the distance, a storefront glows in green through your smart glasses, indicating a well-reviewed cafe with a sterling public health score. You follow the holographic arrows to the crosswalk, as your wearables s … | Continue reading
Right now the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Broadband Council are collecting public comment to create the California Broadband Plan, per Governor Newsom’s Executive Order 73-20. The order’s purpose is to get a means of delivering 100 mbps-capable Inter … | Continue reading
This post is the second in a series about our new State of Communications Privacy Laws report, a set of questions and answers about privacy and data protection in eight Latin American countries and Spain. The series’ first post was “A Look-Back and Ahead on Data Protection in Lat … | Continue reading
This week, open and equitable access to the law got a bit closer. For many years, EFF has defended Public.Resource.Org in its quest to improve public access to the law — including standards, like the National Electrical Code, that legislators and agencies have made into binding r … | Continue reading
Black, white, or indigenous; well-resourced or indigent; San Francisco residents should be free to assemble and protest without fear of police surveillance technology or retribution. That should include Black-led protesters of San Francisco who took to the streets in solidarity a … | Continue reading
Every major social media platform—from Facebook to Reddit, Instagram to YouTube—moderates and polices content shared by users. Platforms do so as a matter of self-interest, commercial or otherwise. But platforms also moderate user content in response to pressure from a variety of … | Continue reading
At issue in Oracle v. Google is whether Oracle can claim a copyright on Java APIs and, if so, whether Google infringes these copyrights. When it implemented the Android OS, Google wrote its own version of Java. But in order to allow developers to write their own programs for Andr … | Continue reading
Here at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we have a guiding motto: "I Fight For the Users." (We even put it on t-shirts from time to time!) We didn't pick that one by accident (nor merely because we dig the 1982 classic film "Tron"), but because it provides such a clear moral c … | Continue reading
Citing national security concerns, the government is attempting to infringe on Twitter's First Amendment right to inform the public about secret government surveillance orders. For more than six years, Twitter has been fighting in court to share information about law enforcement … | Continue reading
This week was the California Bar Exam, a grueling two-day test that determines whether or not a person can practice law in California. Despite the privacy and security risks remote proctoring apps present to users, the California Bar, as well as several other state bars throughou … | Continue reading
In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, many social media platforms shifted their content moderation policies to rely much more heavily on automated tools. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube all ramped up their machine learning capabilities to review and identify flagged content in e … | Continue reading
Privacy Badger was created to protect users from pervasive non-consensual tracking, and to do so automatically, without relying on human-edited lists of known trackers. While our goals remain the same, our approach is changing. It is time for Privacy Badger to evolve.Thanks to di … | Continue reading
As the extradition hearing for Wikileaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange unfolds, it is increasingly clear that the prosecution of Assange fits into a pattern of governments selectively enforcing laws in order to punish those who provoke their ire. As we see in Assange’s case and … | Continue reading
The past few months have seen plenty of attempts to undermine Section 230, the law that makes a free Internet possible. But now we’re seeing one from a surprising place: the California League of Cities.To be clear, the League of Cities, an association of city officials from aroun … | Continue reading
San Francisco—Local activists sued San Francisco today over the city police department’s illegal use of a network of more than 400 non-city surveillance cameras to spy on them and thousands of others who protested as part of the Black-led movement against police violence.The Elec … | Continue reading
Today, we’re announcing that the upcoming release of Privacy Badger will support the Global Privacy Control, or GPC, by default.GPC is a new specification that allows users to tell companies they'd like to opt out of having their data shared or sold. By default, Privacy Badger wi … | Continue reading
The long-awaited report[pdf] by the House Judiciary Committee staff[1] on Big Tech’s monopoly power hits all the right notes—and just a few wrong ones. Following a year of hearings and research, the staff of the Subcommittee on Antitrust found that Facebook, Google, Amazon, and A … | Continue reading
The last few months have seen a steady stream of proposals, encouraged by the advocacy of the FBI and Department of Justice, to provide “lawful access” to end-to-end encrypted services in the United States. Now lobbying has moved from the U.S., where Congress has been largely par … | Continue reading
Sacramento - More than 60 California community leaders—including public officials, businesses, education advocates, and civil rights groups—have joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Common Sense Media to call on California Governor Gavin Newsom to convene a special … | Continue reading
On Wednesday the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the long-running case of Oracle v. Google. We’ll be following closely, and looking for signs that the Court will reverse the Federal Circuit’s dangerous decisions in this ground-breaking litigation. And then we’ll be … | Continue reading
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in your home can involve the creation of an intimate portrait of your private life. The VR/AR headsets can request audio and video of the inside of our house, telemetry about our movements, depth data and images that can build a highly accura … | Continue reading
Cops in Vallejo have put their controversial cell-phone surveillance tool back in the box, after a judge released a tentative ruling (which the judge might or might not later finalize or amend) that they'd acquired it in violation of state law. The case was brought by Oakland Pri … | Continue reading
The dangerous EARN IT Act passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, and now it’s been introduced in the House of Representatives.Take ActionTell Congress to Reject the Earn It ActWe need your help to stop this anti-speech, anti-security bill. Email your elected officials … | Continue reading
EFF is standing with a huge coalition of organizations to urge Congress to oppose the Online Content Policy Modernization Act (OCPMA, S. 4632). Introduced by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the OCPMA is yet another of this year’s flood of misguided attacks on Internet speech (read bi … | Continue reading
Right now you can help EFF receive a portion of a $150,000 donation pool just by casting your vote! EFF is one of the three nonprofits featured in CREDO's giving group this month, so if you vote for EFF by October 31 you will direct a bigger piece of the donation pie toward prote … | Continue reading
After the federal government rolled back net neutrality protections for consumers in 2017, California stepped up and passed a bill that does what FCC wouldn’t: bar telecoms from blocking and throttling Internet content and imposing paid prioritization schemes. The law, SB 822, en … | Continue reading
We need your help. On September 11, 2020, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced its intention to significantly expand both the number of people required to submit biometrics during routine immigration applications and the types of biometrics that individuals must su … | Continue reading
More than fifty California organizations, businesses, and public officials—including the AARP of California, the San Francisco Tech Council, the California Center for Rural Policy, the Khan Academy, and a number of California cities and counties—join Common Sense Kids Action and … | Continue reading
The early 1980s were a period of tremendous foment and excitement for tech. In the four years between 1980 and 1984, Americans met:The Vic-20 (1980);The Commodore 64 (1981);The IBM PC (1982); andThe PC-compatible ROM (1984)But no matter how exciting things were in Silicon Valley … | Continue reading
Using a network named "openwireless.org"? Check out important information about this network.What is the Open Wireless Movement?Imagine a future with ubiquitous open Internet.We envision a world where, in any urban environment:Dozens of open networks are available at your fingert … | Continue reading
At the EFF Threat Lab we spend a lot of time hunting for malware that targets vulnerable populations, but we also spend time trying to classify malware samples that we have come across. One of the tools we use for this is YARA. YARA is described as “The Pattern Matching Swiss Kni … | Continue reading
U.S. antitrust enforcers are reported to be crafting a lawsuit against Google (and its parent company, Alphabet). The Department of Justice and a large coalition of state attorneys general are meeting this week and could file suit very soon. While it will reportedly focus on Goog … | Continue reading
Special thanks to legal intern Tracy Zhang, who was lead author of this post.Privacy groups aren’t the only ones raising the alarm about the dangers of invasive proctoring apps. Through dozens of petitions across the country, and the globe, students too are pushing school adminis … | Continue reading
Law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local level are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on surveillance technology in order to track, locate, watch, and listen to people in the United States, often targeting dissidents, immigrants, and people of color. … | Continue reading
In a nation ruled by law, access to public court records is essential to democratic accountability. Thanks to the Internet and other technological innovations, that access should be broader and easier than ever. The PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) system could a … | Continue reading
Washington, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) today filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the government to obtain records showing whether federal agencies have cut their advertising on social media … | Continue reading
A company called PopID has created an identity-management system that uses face recognition. Their first use case is as a system for in-store, point of sale payments using face recognition as authorization for payment.They are promoting it as a tool for restaurants, claiming that … | Continue reading
We're proud to announce a new updated version of The State of Communications Privacy Laws in eight Latin American countries and Spain. For over a year, EFF has worked with partner organizations to develop detailed questions and answers (FAQs) around communications privacy laws. O … | Continue reading
This post was written by Summer 2020 Intern Jessica Romo, a student at the Reynolds School of Journalism at University of Nevada, Reno. As law enforcement and government surveillance technology continues to become more and more advanced, it has also become harder for everyday peo … | Continue reading
Special thanks to legal intern Ross Ufberg, who was lead author of this post.A group of organizations and individuals are continuing their fight to overturn the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, known as FOSTA, arguing that the law violates the Constit … | Continue reading
Recently, EFF joined the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and 26 other organizations to send a letter to the Senate opposing the EARN IT Act (S. 3398), asking that the Senate oppose fast tracking the bill, and to vote NO on passage of the bill.As we have written many tim … | Continue reading