Members of Congress have mounted a major threat to your freedom of speech and privacy online. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) recently introduced a bill that would undermine key protections for Internet speech in U.S. law. It would also expose provide … | Continue reading
We're hiring a new Director of Technology Projects. That's the team at EFF that develops and maintains Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, the Certbot client for Let's Encrypt, and Panopticlick, as well as housing our Threat Lab research group. On top of building and coding, the te … | Continue reading
The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently joined several California-based ISPs, tech companies, non-profits, and local governments to commend Governor Newsom for adopting a “Broadband for All” vision. But simply saying “broadband” without a clear eye towards the future risks ha … | Continue reading
Across the world, public health authorities are working to contain the spread of COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019). In pursuit of this urgent and necessary task, many government agencies are collecting and analyzing personal information about large numbers of identifiable peopl … | Continue reading
Now that HTTPS encrypts over 80% of web connections, powerful actors are targeting root certificate stores to compromise our security and surveil us. In the past year alone, that’s included a “market research” company secretly owned by Facebook and the government of Kazakhstan.Fo … | Continue reading
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is reviewing the proposed sale of the .ORG domain registry to private equity firm Ethos Capital, and ICANN has the power to stop the sale. EFF and several other organizations joined a public forum today as part of IC … | Continue reading
Washington, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today urged a panel of judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to take a stand for open access to judicial proceedings and allow the public to watch by video an upcoming hearing in a patent case involvi … | Continue reading
A data privacy bill in Washington State has gained momentum. The bill, 2SSB 6281 (also known as the Washington Privacy Act, or WPA), has received widespread support from big tech companies. It’s no wonder they like it because, as currently written, the WPA would be a weak, token … | Continue reading
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently held in Prager University v. Google that YouTube is not a government actor bound by First Amendment limits simply because it hosts a forum for public speech. Rather, as EFF argued in an amicus brief, YouTube is a private en … | Continue reading
Ethos Capital—the private equity firm poised to purchase the .ORG domain registry for $1.1 billion—and Public Interest Registry (PIR, the entity Ethos wants to buy) have been attempting to respond to the concerns raised by the .ORG community. These after-the-fact changes just mak … | Continue reading
EFF has just learned that our dear friend Special Counsel Jim Tyre—one of the biggest and best Internet advocates you may never have heard of—has passed away. We don't have a lot of information yet, except that there will be a funeral in Los Angeles on Friday. We will update this … | Continue reading
Members of Congress are about to introduce a bill that will undermine the law that undergirds free speech on the Internet. If passed, the bill known as the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act, will fulfill a long-standing dream of U.S … | Continue reading
Argentinian civil rights group Asociación por los Derechos Civiles (ADC) has just launched its second edition of the ¿Quien Defiende Tus Datos? (Who Defends Your Data?) report, rating nine companies’ commitments to transparency and user privacy. Argentinian companies are off to a … | Continue reading
San Francisco – A Reddit commenter has won their fight to stay anonymous after facing an improper copyright claim from the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, a group that publishes doctrines for Jehovah’s Witnesses. A U.S. District Court judge has granted a motion to quash a sub … | Continue reading
Any day now, Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal are scheduled to introduce the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act. If passed, it could fulfill a long-standing dream of U.S. law enforcement: the end of private, encrypted m … | Continue reading
Ahmet Alphan Sabancı is a Turkish digital activist who works on free expression, security and privacy. Ahmet began his life as an activist after Turkey first blocked YouTube. When the Internet Governance Forum came to Istanbul in 2014, he co-organized an ungovernance forum alongs … | Continue reading
The European Union’s controversial new copyright rules are on a collision course with EU data privacy rules. The GDPR guards data protection, privacy, and other fundamental rights in the handling of personal data. Such rights are likely to be affected by an automated decision-mak … | Continue reading
Over two hundred New York City residents—including workers, parents, students, business owners, and technologists—have signed a petition calling to end government use of face surveillance in New York City. This morning, EFF and a coalition of over a dozen civil liberties groups d … | Continue reading
San Francisco – Schools across the country are increasingly using technology to spy on students at home, at school, and on social media. Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launched a new Surveillance Self-Defense guide for students and their parents, so they can lear … | Continue reading
EFF is seeking a Director of Technology Projects to help lead our team of ethical technologists in defending encryption, outwitting censorship, and coding a better digital future. This is a senior leadership role within EFF, and will help guide the organization in charting its ov … | Continue reading
There’s a very rare opportunity available right now for an engineering director to join EFF’s leadership team, and we’re asking our community to help us find the perfect candidate.We’re doing an open hire for our Technology Projects Director role. The role will lead a 16-person t … | Continue reading
A school district in New York recently adopted facial recognition technology to monitor students, and it is now one of a growing number of schools across the country conducting mass privacy violations of kids in the name of “safety.” The invasive use of surveillance technologies … | Continue reading
Earlier today, the House Committee on the Judiciary was scheduled to mark up the USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act of 2020, a bill meant to reform and reauthorize Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, as well as some other provisions of FISA, before they are due to expire on March 15 … | Continue reading
Last week, we responded to recent changes Amazon’s surveillance doorbell company Ring made to the security and privacy of their devices. In our response, we made a number of suggestions for what Ring could do to be responsive to the privacy and security concerns of its customers … | Continue reading
The Internet Society’s (ISOC) November announcement that it intended to sell the Public Interest Registry (PIR, the organization that oversees the .ORG domain name registry) to a private equity firm sent shockwaves through the global NGO sector. The announcement came just after a … | Continue reading
2020.02.25_-_ccpa_comments.pdf | Continue reading
Today, EFF joined a coalition of privacy advocates in filing comments with the California Attorney General regarding its ongoing rulemaking process for the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The CCPA was passed in 2018, and took effect on January 1, 2020. Later this year, th … | Continue reading
EFF and 10 human rights organizations called out Apple for enabling China's censorship and surveillance regime through overly broad content restrictions on the App Store in China, and for its decision to move iCloud backups and encryption keys to within China. In a letter to Phil … | Continue reading
Federal law enforcement in Seattle sought an average of one court order a day to disclose people’s sensitive information such as calling history in the first half of 2019, according to a report released this year.The report, the first of its kind by the U.S. District Court for th … | Continue reading
There’s a whole catalog of devices that are missing from our world. Things we’d pay money for — things you could earn money with — don’t exist thanks to the chilling effects of an obscure copyright law: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA 1201).... | Continue reading
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) Education Fund today called on ICANN and private equity firm Ethos Capital to make public secret details —hidden costs, loan servicing fees, and inducements to insiders—about finan … | Continue reading
When Apple's App Store launched in 2008, it was widely hailed as a breakthrough in computing, a "curated experience" that would transform the chaos of locating and assessing software and replace it with a reliable one-stop-shop where every app would come pre-tested and with a tru … | Continue reading
sas_v_wpl_complaint_edtx_18-295_07-18-18-1.pdf | Continue reading
Although the Ninth Circuit issued a strong opinion last year in favor of digital privacy rights at the border, EFF filed an amicus brief [PDF] in a new case urging the court to go a step further. The Ninth Circuit should finally hold that the Fourth Amendment requires a probable … | Continue reading
The California Advanced Services Fund (CASF), a program launched in 2008 to connect all Californians to high-speed Internet, was an early success. It helped build middle mile open access fiber to hard-to-serve communities and delivered high-speed access to areas that never had In … | Continue reading
Amazon’s surveillance doorbell company Ring has announced extra layers of security and control for users after a wave of backlash from civil liberties and cyber security organizations like EFF and Mozilla. Organizations raised major concerns over Ring’s lack of effort in protecti … | Continue reading
The Virginia legislature is on the verge of a big step forward for free expression. In the coming days, legislators will have the opportunity to pass a bill that would push back against harassing lawsuits called SLAPPs, or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.SLAPPs ar … | Continue reading
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin foreshadowed the Trump administration’s plans for greater surveillance of cryptocurrency users during his testimony before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday. He noted that cryptocurrency was a “crucial area” for the Treasury Departme … | Continue reading
California police and sheriffs are failing to protect the privacy of drivers on city streets, the California State Auditor’s office determined after a seven-month investigation into the use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) by the Los Angeles Police Department and three … | Continue reading
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is one of the most important laws affecting the Internet and technology. Without the DMCA’s safe harbors from crippling copyright liability, many of the services on which we rely, big and small, commercial and noncommercial, would not e … | Continue reading
San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is asking a state court to protect the identity of an anonymous Glassdoor commenter who is being targeted by their former employer. EFF filed a motion to quash a subpoena for identifying information of its client after the … | Continue reading
The further the "Right to be Forgotten" (RTBF) online progresses from its original creation by Europe's Court of Justice, the broader and more damaging its ramifications seem to be. The latest attempt to insert it is a rushed proposal in Uruguay. The complaints of multiple digita … | Continue reading
Washington, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and advocates for public interest organizations will participate tomorrow in an open discussion about a controversial plan by the nonprofit Internet Society to sell the .ORG domain registry to private equity firm Ethos Cap … | Continue reading
San Francisco – An Open Source advocate and blogger criticizing a company, Open Source Security Inc. (OSS), has successfully defended a defamation lawsuit after an appeals court found that the company’s accusations against the blogger were baseless.The Electronic Frontier Foundat … | Continue reading
Thanks to the adoption of a disastrous new Copyright Directive, the European Union is about to require its member states to pass laws requiring online service providers to ensure the unavailability of copyright-protected works. This will likely result in the use of copyright filt … | Continue reading
The bad news is that Twitter has disclosed a failure to protect users' phone numbers, again. The good news is that Twitter users can take steps to protect themselves.Earlier this week, Twitter announced it had discovered and shut down “a large network of fake accounts” that were … | Continue reading
Twitter has publicly disclosed a security “incident” that points to long-standing problems with how the service handles phone numbers. Twitter announced it had discovered and shut down “a large network of fake accounts” that were uploading large numbers of phone numbers and using … | Continue reading
So, you own or are thinking of buying a Ring camera. This post outlines a list of privacy and civil liberties concerns we have with Amazon’s Ring system so that you can be a more informed consumer, or—if you already own a Ring camera—be a more considerate neighbor. If You’re Thin … | Continue reading