A myth often pushed by incumbents who want to forestall universal fiber is that there is a high “cost” of fiber and cheaper alternatives. They’ll point to figures that for example show that a fiber-to-the home approach costs several thousands of dollars per household, when upgrad … | Continue reading
The full weight of U.S. policing has descended upon protesters across the country as people take to the streets to denounce the police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others who have been subjected to police violence. Along with riot shields, tear gas, and … | Continue reading
In America, we hope that businesses will grow by inventing amazing things that people love – rather than through deep-pocketed catch-and-kill programs in which every competitor is bought and tamed before it can grow to become a threat. We want vibrant, competitive, innovative mar … | Continue reading
Your phone is your life. It’s where you communicate, get your news, take pictures and videos of your loved ones, relax and play games, and find a significant other. It can track your health, give you directions, remind you of events, and much more. It’s an incredibly helpful tool … | Continue reading
We are opening up our Cooperating Attorneys list to people facing legal troubles as a result of their participation in the ongoing demonstrations, especially those involving surveillance or devices such as phones. We urge anyone in such a position to contact us for help in findin … | Continue reading
Legislative efforts to regulate online platforms are underway in many countries. Unfortunately, instead of reflecting about how to put users back in control of their online experiences and how to foster innovation, many governments are opting to make online platforms into the new … | Continue reading
In the midst of pandemic and protest, the Senate Judiciary Committee continued on with the third of many planned hearings about copyright. It is an odd moment to be considering whether or not the notice-and-takedown system laid out by Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyrig … | Continue reading
EFF has joined a broad coalition of civil liberties, civil rights, and labor advocates to oppose A.B. 2261, which threatens to normalize the increased use of face surveillance of Californians where they live and work. Our allies include the ACLU of California, Oakland Privacy, th … | Continue reading
Over the last few months, the EARN IT Act, a bill that would have disastrous consequences for free speech and security online, has gained thousands of critics. Digital rights advocates and technologists have been joined by human rights groups, online platforms, sex worker advocat … | Continue reading
In the wake of nationwide protests against the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we urge protestors to stay safe, both physically and digitally. Our Surveillance Self Defense (SSD) Guide on attending a protest offers practical tips on how to maintain your privac … | Continue reading
This is one of a series of blog posts about President Trump's May 28 Executive Order. Other posts are here, here, and here.The inaptly named Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship seeks to insert the federal government into private Internet speech in several ways. In par … | Continue reading
This is one of a series of blog posts about President Trump's May 28 Executive Order. Other posts are here, here, and here.The inaptly named Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship (EO) seeks to insert the federal government into private Internet speech in several ways. S … | Continue reading
Outside of the beltway, people all over the United States are taking to the streets to demand fundamental change. In the halls of Congress and the White House, however, many people seem to think the biggest thing that needs to be restructured is the Internet. Last week, the presi … | Continue reading
Grassroots education is important for making sure advanced technical knowledge is accessible to communities who may otherwise be blocked or pushed out of the field. By sharing this invaluable knowledge and skills, local groups can address and dissolve these barriers to organizers … | Continue reading
This is one of a series of blog posts about President Trump's May 28 Executive Order. Other posts are here and here.The inaptly named Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship seeks to insert the federal government into private Internet speech in several ways. Through Secti … | Continue reading
At a dark time when the possibility of police accountability seems especially bleak, there is a new glimmer of light courtesy of the California Supreme Court. Under a new ruling, government agencies cannot pass the cost of redacting police body-camera footage and other digital pu … | Continue reading
Over the weekend, Minnesota’s Public Safety Commissioner analogized COVID-19 contact tracing with police investigation of arrested protesters. This analogy is misleading and dangerous. It also underlines the need for public health officials to practice strict data minimization—in … | Continue reading
In January 2011, after hearing about the unrest unfolding in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisian blogger Lina Ben Mhenni (who passed away in January of this year from a chronic illness) began traveling around the country to document the nascent protests and the government’s response to them. “ … | Continue reading
The inaptly named Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship (EO) is a mess on many levels: it’s likely unconstitutional on several grounds, built on false premises, and bad policy to boot. We are no fans of the way dominant social media platforms moderate user content. But … | Continue reading
Black lives matter on the streets. Black lives matter on the Internet. EFF stands with the communities mourning the victims of police homicide. We stand with the protesters who are plowed down by patrol cars. We stand with the journalists placed in handcuffs or fired upon while r … | Continue reading
Black lives matter on the streets. Black lives matter on the Internet. EFF stands with the communities mourning the victims of police homicide. We stand with the protesters who are plowed down by patrol cars. We stand with the journalists placed in handcuffs or fired upon while r … | Continue reading
47 U.S.C. § 230, a Provision of the Communication Decency Act Tucked inside the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 is one of the most valuable tools for protecting freedom of expression and innovation on the Internet: Section 230. This comes somewhat as a surprise, since t … | Continue reading
With states beginning to ease shelter-in-place restrictions, the conversation on COVID-19 has turned to questions of when and how we can return to work, take kids to school, or plan air travel.Several countries and U.S. states, including the UK, Italy, Chile, Germany, and Califor … | Continue reading
Stalkers and abusive partners want access to your device for the same reason governments and advertisers do: because “full access to a person's phone is the next best thing to full access to a person's mind,” as EFF Director of Cybersecurity Eva Galperin explains in her TED talk … | Continue reading
President Trump’s Executive Order targeting social media companies is an assault on free expression online and a transparent attempt to retaliate against Twitter for its decision to curate (well, really just to fact-check) his posts and deter everyone else from taking similar ste … | Continue reading
When it comes to surveillance of our online lives, Internet service providers (ISPs) are some of the worst offenders. Last year, the state of Maine passed a law targeted at the harms ISPs do to their customers when they use and sell their personal information. Now that law is und … | Continue reading
Long before the pandemic crisis, there was widespread concern over the impact that tech was having on the quality of our discourse, from disinformation campaigns to influence campaigns to polarization.It's true that the way we talk to each other and about the world has changed, b … | Continue reading
COVID-19, and containment efforts that rely on personal data, are shining a spotlight on a longstanding problem: our nation’s lack of sufficient laws to protect data privacy. Two bills before Congress attempt to solve this problem as to COVID-19 data. One is a good start that nee … | Continue reading
As Congress gets ready for yet another hearing on copyright and music, we’d like to suggest that rather than more “fact-finding,” where the facts are inevitably skewed toward the views of the finder, our legislators start focusing on a concrete solution that builds on and learns … | Continue reading
Later this week, the House of Representatives is once again voting on whether or not to extend the authorities in Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act—a surveillance law with a rich history of government overreach and abuse, along with two other PATRIOT Act provisions, and possibly, an … | Continue reading
Sacramento, California—On Tuesday, May 26, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will ask California senators to approve a measure that will transition the state’s outdated communications network to fiber, bringing affordable high-speed broadband service, essential during the … | Continue reading
In the Internet age, copyright decisions can have enormous consequences for all kinds of activities, because almost everything we do on the Internet involves making copies. And when courts make a mistake, they may create all sorts of unexpected legal risks. As we explained to the … | Continue reading
EFF submitted a letter to the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance to testify to the negative impacts of mass surveillance on vulnerable communities at the U.S. border. The Special Rapporteur … | Continue reading
Time and again, governments have used crises to expand their power, and often their intrusion into citizens’ lives. The COVID-19 pandemic has seen this pattern play out on a huge scale. From deploying drones or ankle monitors to enforce quarantine orders to proposals to use face … | Continue reading
Patent trolls don’t care much about innovation. Their lawsuits and threats are attempts at rent-seeking; they’re demanding money from people who make, use, or sell technology just for doing what they were already doing—for crossing the proverbial “bridge” that the patent troll ha … | Continue reading
EFF opposes a California bill, A.B. 2004, that would authorize the issuers of COVID-19 test results to do so with digital verifiable credentials. This bill would take us a step towards national digital identification, create information security risks, exacerbate social inequitie … | Continue reading
Governments around the world are using surveillance technologies to monitor whether COVID-19 patients are complying with instructions to quarantine at home. These include GPS ankle shackles, phone apps that track location, and phone apps that require patients to periodically take … | Continue reading
San Francisco - A team of researchers who want to develop a machine learning platform to help analyze and detect any patterns of bias in California parole-suitability decisions has been blocked for years by the state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). In a law … | Continue reading
We’ve been skeptical of Facebook’s Oversight Board from day one. We’ll follow closely and keep open minds, because we appreciate it is a first attempt at some semblance of much-needed governance and external review. But no amount of “oversight” can fix the underlying problem: Con … | Continue reading
There's a dirty secret in the incredible growth of Silicon Valley's tech giants: it's a cheat. Historically, US antitrust regulators would be deeply concerned about mergers with major competitors in concentrated markets ("mergers to monopoly") and acquisitions of small companies … | Continue reading
In a landmark decision, the German Constitutional Court has ruled that mass surveillance of telecommunications outside of Germany conducted on foreign nationals is unconstitutional. Thanks to the chief legal counsel, Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (GFF), this a major victory fo … | Continue reading
Our friends and right to repair leaders at iFixit are can-do people. If they see a need they can fill, they step up to do it – even if that need is massive. And they’ve done precisely that with a new and user-friendly archive of repair information for mission-critical medical equ … | Continue reading
EFF is proud to announce a new addition to our crack advisory board: security expert and scholar Tadayoshi Khono. A professor at University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science... | Continue reading
The just-passed HEROES Act is a massive relief package designed to alleviate the harm of a massive crisis. In it is the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program, which would make it easier for Americans affected by COVID-19 to stay connected to the Internet. As the Senate takes up thi … | Continue reading
In a stunning victory for nonprofits and NGOs around the world working in the public interest, ICANN today roundly rejected Ethos Capital’s plan to transform the .ORG domain registry into a heavily indebted for-profit entity. This is an important victory that recognizes the regis … | Continue reading
The House of Representatives has introduced new COVID-19 emergency response legislation to address the largest public health and economic calamity the United States has faced in generations. Like the crisis it is meant to address, the bill is massive. One provision deserves parti … | Continue reading
Companies and governments across the world are building and deploying a dizzying number of systems and apps to fight COVID-19. Many groups have converged on using Bluetooth-assisted proximity tracking for the purpose of exposure notification. Even so, there are many ways to appro … | Continue reading
This blog post with co-authored with Spandana Singh of New America's Open Technology Institute, a Santa Clara Principles partner.As COVID-19 has spread around the world and online platforms have scrambled to adjust their operations and workforces to a new reality, company commitm … | Continue reading