Evan Greer is many things: A musician, an activist for LGBTQ issues, the Deputy Director of Fight for the Future, and a true believer in the free and open internet. Evan is a longtime friend of EFF, and it was great to chat with her about the state of free expression, and what we … | Continue reading
In a big win for free speech on the Internet, an EFF lawsuit has compelled the nation’s second-largest public university to stop censoring dissent on its social media. To settle our First Amendment case, Texas A&M University (TAMU) agreed to end its automatic and manual blocking … | Continue reading
For almost 10 years, federal and local law enforcement agencies across the country have engaged in a massive and secretive telephone surveillance program known as “Hemisphere.” Publicly disclosed for the first time in September 2013 by the New York Times, the Hemisphere program p … | Continue reading
There’s a new and serious threat to both free speech and security online. Under a draft bill that Bloomberg recently leaked, the Attorney General could unilaterally dictate how online platforms and services must operate. If those companies don’t follow the Attorney General’s rule … | Continue reading
This week, additional stories came out about Clearview AI, the company we wrote about earlier that’s marketing a powerful facial recognition tool to law enforcement. These stories discuss some of the police departments around the country that have been secretly using Clearview’s … | Continue reading
Once appearing to be a done deal, the sale of the .ORG registry to private equity is facing new delays and new opposition, after a successful protest in front of ICANN last week by nonprofits and an intervention by the California Attorney General. Private equity firm Ethos Capita … | Continue reading
Computer security researchers and journalists play a critical role in uncovering flaws in software and information systems. Their research and reporting allows users to protect themselves, and vendors to repair their products before attackers can exploit security flaws. But all t … | Continue reading
The National Football League seems to be gunning for a spot in our Hall of Shame by setting a record for all-time career TDs—no, not touchdowns, but takedowns. We’ve written before about the NFL’s crusade against anyone who dares use the words “Super Bowl” to talk about, well, th … | Continue reading
Christian Frank is a freelance IT consultant who was born and raised, and currently resides, in Cologne, Germany. Last year, he did some work protesting the Article 13 demonstrations in Europe, a topic that he remains passionate about, as you’ll see in this interview. We discusse … | Continue reading
The Safeguarding Americans’ Private Records Act is a Strong Bill That Builds on Previous Surveillance ReformsLast week, Sens. Ron Wyden (D–Oregon) and Steve Daines (R–Montana) along with Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D–California), Warren Davidson (R–Ohio), and Pramila Jayapal (D–Washington … | Continue reading
Law enforcement officials in the U.S. and U.K. have negotiated a deal that sells out the privacy rights of the public in both nations. For Americans, it will effectively abrogate Fourth Amendment protections, and subject their data to search and seizure by foreign police.This is … | Continue reading
If you follow security on the Internet, you may have seen articles warning you to “beware of public Wi-Fi networks" in cafes, airports, hotels, and other public places. But now, due to the widespread deployment of HTTPS encryption on most popular websites, advice to avoid public … | Continue reading
When we talk about patents, we’re usually talking about “utility” patents. Utility patents protect inventions that claim to have some practical application or use. (A lot of them still claim things that are actually useless, but they’re supposed to be potentially useful.)“Design” … | Continue reading
Today Facebook announced the roll-out of its Off-Facebook Activity tool (initially introduced as “Clear History” nearly two years ago). The tools shows you a list of apps, websites, and businesses that Facebook knows you have visited through its business tools (including Facebook … | Continue reading
This week EFF joined a coalition letter asking the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board (PCLOB) to urge that the government suspend its use of face recognition technology. The letter was signed by organizations like Color of Change, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Demand Prog … | Continue reading
Facebook's long-awaited Off-Facebook Activity tool started rolling out today. While it's not a perfect measure, and we still need stronger data privacy laws, this tool is a good step toward greater transparency and user control regarding third-party tracking. We hope other compan … | Continue reading
Today marks the 39th anniversary of the Council of Europe's "Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to the Automatic Processing of Personal Data", or, more catchily, Convention 108. It is the root treaty that spawned the first European Union-wide data protection … | Continue reading
Ring isn't just a product that allows users to surveil their neighbors. The company also uses it to surveil its customers.An investigation by EFF of the Ring doorbell app for Android found it to be packed with third-party trackers sending out a plethora of customers’ personally i … | Continue reading
The New York Times’ recent story on Clearview AI, maker of a secretive facial recognition app that markets its product to law enforcement, has raised critical questions about what can be done to protect our privacy online. Clearview claims to have amassed a dataset of over three … | Continue reading
On January 15, a Norweigian Consumer Council (NCC) investigative report exposed the ways that Grindr, OKCupid, and eight other apps are collecting and sharing extremely sensitive personal data. Grindr in particular was sharing users’ age and location tied to a device ID that woul … | Continue reading
Like so many of her friends, colleagues, and admirers around the world, we were devastated to hear of the death of Lina Ben Mhenni at age 36, following a long illness. The Tunisian blogger, activist, athlete, and linguistics lecturer was a friend to several of us.Amidst a communi … | Continue reading
SAN FRANCISCO–A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of FOSTA, a federal law that has driven marginalized communities and speech about sex and sex work offline, was reinstated today in a court ruling that recognizes the statute poses a substantial threat to free speech.The U … | Continue reading
The United States is the world’s chief exporter of copyright law. With recent news that President Trump is expected to sign the US Mexico-Canada (USMCA) trade agreement next week, we’re one step closer to Canada being forced to align with the US copyright duration to life of the … | Continue reading
This week, prosecutors in Brazil filed a criminal complaint against Glenn Greenwald, an internationally lauded journalist best known for publishing leaked documents detailing the NSA’s mass surveillance. Greenwald’s prosecution is an attempt to use computer crime law to silence a … | Continue reading
On Copyright Week, we like to talk about ways to improve copyright law. One of the biggest improvements available is to fix U.S. copyright’s broken statutory damages regime. In other areas of civil law, the courts have limited jury-awarded punitive damages so that they can’t be f … | Continue reading
Remember the monkey selfie? Animal rights organizations and a photographer went to court to fight over who owned the copyright in a picture where the photographer set up the camera but the animal took the pic, and great fun was had by all. But as our friends at Public Knowledge n … | Continue reading
Los Angeles—Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) activists will join advocates for other public interest nonprofits to protest ICANN’s plans to sell out the Internet .ORG domain registry at a demonstration tomorrow outside ICANN’s board of directors meeting in Los Angeles.EFF, no … | Continue reading
In Unauthorized Bread, a novella by EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow published in his 2019 Tor Books collection Radicalized, a refugee named Salima leads a mass jailbreaking of the locked-down Internet of Things appliances in a subsidized housing unit in Boston. With this act, S … | Continue reading
EFF is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down a law that poses a serious threat to online speech by criminalizing speech that “encourages” unlawful immigration. EFF filed an amicus brief on behalf of itself and Immigrants Rising, the Internet Archive, and Daphne Keller.The … | Continue reading
Addie Wagenknecht is an artist and researcher based between the U.S. and Europe. We met a few years back when she invited me to be part of Deep Lab, a “collaborative group of cyberfeminist researchers, artists, writers, engineers, and cultural producers” that she co-founded in 20 … | Continue reading
Copyright rules are made with the needs of the entertainment industry in mind, designed to provide the legal framework for creators, investors, distributors, production houses, and other parts of the industry to navigate their disputes and assert their interests. | Continue reading
EFF is dismayed to learn of the decision by Brazilian prosecutors to charge journalist Glenn Greenwald under the country’s computer crime law.EFF has long warned that cybersecurity laws in the Americas have been written and interpreted so broadly as to invite misuse. Computer cri … | Continue reading
EFF is dismayed to learn of the decision by Brazilian prosecutors to charge journalist Glenn Greenwald under the country’s computer crime law.EFF has long warned that cybersecurity laws in the Americas have been written and interpreted so broadly as to invite misuse. Computer cri … | Continue reading
San Francisco, California—On Wednesday, January 22, at 9 am, EFF Staff Attorney Jamie Williams will tell a federal appeals court that a lower court correctly dismissed a defamation lawsuit against a blogger, finding that his criticisms of a company’s business practices were opini … | Continue reading
YouTube, which has become essential for video creators to build an audience, has a new tool that’s supposed to help users respond to its copyright filter. Is it something that makes fair use a priority? No, it’s a way to make it easier to remove the part of a video that someone h … | Continue reading
We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, addressing what's at stake and what we need to … | Continue reading
Over 21,000 people, 660 organizations, and now six Members of Congress have asked ICANN, the organization that regulates the Internet’s domain name system, to halt the $1.135 billion deal that would hand control over PIR, the .ORG domain registry, to private equity. There are cru … | Continue reading
At EFF, we have spent years fighting the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The law was aimed at computer crime, but it is both vague and draconian—putting people at risk for prison sentences for ordinary Internet behavior. Now, we are asking the Supreme Court to step in and st … | Continue reading
Trenton, New Jersey—On Tuesday, January 21, at 1 pm., EFF Senior Staff Attorney Andrew Crocker will ask the New Jersey Supreme Court to rule that the state can’t force a defendant to turn over the passcode for his encrypted iPhone under the Fifth Amendment, which protects America … | Continue reading
Between targeted killings, retaliatory air strikes, and the shooting of a civilian passenger plane, the last few weeks have been marked by tragedy as tensions rise between the U.S. and Iranian governments. In the wake of these events, Iranians within the country and in the broade … | Continue reading
The implementation of Art 17 (formerly Article 13) into national laws will have a profound effect on what users can say and share online. The controversial rule, part of the EU’s copyright directive approved last year, turns tech companies and online services operators into copyr … | Continue reading
EFF often criticizes the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) for granting bad patents, but a case in the Supreme Court has us on the same side.On Monday, EFF filed an amicus brief asking the court to reject trademark protection for “Booking.com,” pointing out that other travel comp … | Continue reading
A new year often starts with good resolutions. Some resolve to change a certain habit, others resolve to abandon an undesired trait. Mobile app makers, too, claim to have user behavior and their preferences at their heart. From dating to health to music, their promise is to add c … | Continue reading
Massachusetts has long been a leader in the Right to Repair movement, thanks to a combination of principled lawmakers and a motivated citizenry that refuses to back down when well-heeled lobbyists subvert the legislative process.In 2012, Massachusetts became the first US state to … | Continue reading
On January 14 and 15, 2020, the German Federal Constitutional Court will be holding a hearing to reevaluate the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) Act, which gives the BND agency (similar to the National Security Agency in the United States) broad surveillance authority. The hearing c … | Continue reading
Sometimes lawsuits get filed to chill speech or harass people, rather than resolve legitimate legal disputes. Unfortunately, this trend has increased over the past few decades. Since the 1980s, these lawsuits have been called SLAPPs—or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participat … | Continue reading
Washington D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that functional aspects of Oracle’s Java programming language are not copyrightable, and even if they were, employing them to create new computer code falls under fair use protecti … | Continue reading
You may have heard from a lot of businesses telling you that they’ve updated their privacy policies because of a new law called the California Consumer Privacy Act. But what’s actually changed for you?EFF has spent the past year defending this law in the California legislature, b … | Continue reading