EasyTracGPS is a family-owned business that provides GPS tracking solutions to commercial shipping fleets. Recently, EasyTracGPS faced a litigation threat from Inventergy LBS, LLC, which accused it of infringing U.S. Patent No. 8,760,286. That patent supposedly claims a “[s]ystem … | Continue reading
Internet Lab, the Brazilian independent research center, has published their fourth annual report of “Quem Defende Seus Dados?" (“Who defends your data?"), comparing policies of their local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and how they treat users’ data after receiving governmen … | Continue reading
Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs)—a mass surveillance technology that allows law enforcement to record the location and travel patterns of nearly every driver on the road—are poorly regulated, threaten privacy, and worsen the racial and economic inequalities already ingrain … | Continue reading
Unfortunately, app developers are facing another onslaught of letters demanding money they shouldn’t have to pay. This time, the sender is Jorge Maass, a patent owner who also runs a real-estate business in Texas. In recent months, Maass has been sending out threatening letters u … | Continue reading
The news of iconic children’s television show “Sesame Street”’s new arrangement with the HBO MAX streaming service has sent ripples around the Internet. Starting this year, episodes of “Sesame Street” will debut on HBO and on the HBO MAX service, with new episodes being made avai … | Continue reading
It’s Open Access Week and we’re joining SPARC and dozens of other organizations this week to discuss the importance of open access to scientific research publications. An academic publisher should widely disseminate the knowledge produced by scholars, not hold it for ransom. But … | Continue reading
Patents give their owners the power to stop people (and companies) from doing whatever the patent claims as an “invention” for twenty years. But that power doesn’t come for free: it’s a trade. In exchange for the right to sue others to stop using the invention, patent applicants … | Continue reading
A Guide to Law Enforcement Spying TechnologyEFF’s “Street-Level Surveillance” project shines light on the advanced surveillance technologies that law enforcement agencies routinely deploy in our communities. These resources are designed for members of the public, advocacy organiz … | Continue reading
The Stronger Patents Act, S. 2082, won’t give us a stronger patent system—just the opposite, in fact. It is a deliberate attempt to dismantle one of the few effective forums for challenging wrongly-issued patents. The bill would put dramatic and unwarranted changes into effect th … | Continue reading
The movement to encrypt the web has reached milestone after milestone in recent years as major platforms and small websites alike have made the shift from insecure HTTP to more secure HTTPS. Let’s Encrypt and EFF’s Certbot have changed the game here, making what was once an expen … | Continue reading
San Francisco – On Thursday, Oct. 23, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will urge the California Court of Appeal to reverse a lower court and hold that law enforcement use of data gathered from automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems is a search that requires a warra … | Continue reading
Law enforcement officials across San Diego County, California have run more than 65,500 face recognition scans over the last three years, including thousands of queries by federal agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the U … | Continue reading
Is Your Printer Spying On You? Imagine that every time you printed a document it automatically included a secret code that could be used to identify the printer - and potentially the person who used it. Sounds like something from an episode of "Alias " right? Unfortunately the sc … | Continue reading
It’s Not Too Late: The Senate Can Still Stop the CASE Act The House of Representatives has just voted in favor of the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act (CASE Act) by 410-6 (with 16 members not voting), moving forward a bill that Congress has had no hearings an … | Continue reading
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today called on Congress to support implementation of an Internet protocol that encrypts web traffic, a critical tool that will lead to dramatic improvements in user privacy and help impede the ability of governments to track … | Continue reading
For many years, Chinese users of Apple devices have had a very different experience from non-Chinese users. Chinese users can’t type or see the Taiwanese flag emoji (which has even caused severe bugs in the past); iCloud backups and encryption keys for Chinese users are stored lo … | Continue reading
Chicago – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging Amazon, along with basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, to cancel an event promoting Ring home-surveillance cameras at a police chiefs’ conference in Chicago later this month. EFF and many other civil liberties and priva … | Continue reading
EFF is asking Ring spokesman Shaquille O’Neal to cancel his appearance at a party hosted by the company at the upcoming International Association of Chiefs of Police conference on October 27. Instead, we’re challenging Shaq to a one-on-one: not on the basketball court, but across … | Continue reading
Tomorrow the House of Representatives has scheduled to vote on what appears to be an unconstitutional copyright bill that carries with it life altering penalties. The bill would slap $30,000 fines on Internet users who share a copyrighted work they don’t own online.Take ActionNow … | Continue reading
Update 10/18: EFF has submitted its comments to HUD, which you can read here. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently released a proposed rule that will have grave consequences for the enforcement of fair housing laws. Under the Fair Housing Act, indiv … | Continue reading
Face surveillance by government poses a threat to our privacy, chills protest in public places, and amplifies historical biases in our criminal justice system. Massachusetts has the opportunity to become the first state to stop government use of this troubling technology, from Pr … | Continue reading
The United States, its states, and its local governments are in dire need of universal fiber plans. Major telecom carriers such as AT&T and Verizon have discontinued their fiber-to-the-home efforts, leaving most people facing expensive cable monopolies for the future. While much … | Continue reading
The Keys to a Healthy Internet Are User Empowerment and Competition, Not CensorshipThe House Energy and Commerce Committee held a legislative hearing today over what to do with one of the most important Internet laws, Section 230. Members of Congress and the testifying panelists … | Continue reading
Four years have passed since our partners first published Who Defends Your Data (¿Quién Defiende Tus Datos?), a report that holds ISPs accountable for their privacy policies and processes in eight Latin America countries and Spain. Since then, we’ve seen major technology companie … | Continue reading
Watch EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry Defend the Essential Law Protecting Internet SpeechAll of us have benefited from Section 230, a federal law that has promoted the creation of virtually every open platform or communication tool on the Internet. The law’s premise is simple … | Continue reading
Washington, D.C. – On Wednesday, Oct. 16, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Legal Director Corynne McSherry will testify at a congressional hearing in support of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA)—one of the most important laws protecting Internet speech.CDA 2 … | Continue reading
Whittier, California—On Thursday, Oct. 17, at 10 am, EFF Chief Program Officer Rainey Reitman will urge California lawmakers to prioritize consumer choice and privacy in developing cryptocurrency regulations.Reitman will testify at a hearing convened by the California Assembly Co … | Continue reading
Today, Congress is back in session after a two-week break. Now that they’re back, we’re asking you to take a few minutes to call and tell them not to pass the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act. The CASE Act would create an obscure board inside the U.S. … | Continue reading
How can a single, ill-conceived law wreak havoc in so many ways? It prevents you from making remix videos. It blocks computer security research. It keeps those with print disabilities from reading ebooks. It makes it illegal to repair people's cars. It makes it harder to compete … | Continue reading
But the Court Misses the Larger Problem: Section 702’s Mass Surveillance is Inherently UnconstitutionalEFF has long maintained that it is impossible to conduct mass surveillance and still protect the privacy and constitutional rights of innocent Americans, much less the human rig … | Continue reading
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged a federal appeals court today to rule that the creators of a parody book called “Oh The Places You’ll Boldly Go!”—a mash-up of Dr. Seuss and Star Trek themes—didn’t infringe copyrights in the Dr. Seuss classic “Oh The P … | Continue reading
Those outside the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are accustomed to thinking of the Internet censorship practices of the Chinese state as primarily domestic, enacted through the so-called "Great Firewall"—a system of surveillance and blocking technology that prevents Chinese cit … | Continue reading
Stop us if you’ve heard this before: you give a tech company your personal information in order to use two-factor authentication, and later find out that they were using that security information for targeted advertising.That’s exactly what Twitter fessed up to yesterday in an un … | Continue reading
Stop us if you’ve heard this before: you give a tech company your personal information in order to use two-factor authentication, and later find out that they were using that security information for targeted advertising.That’s exactly what Twitter fessed up to yesterday in an un … | Continue reading
California’s Governor Gavin Newsom has officially signed a bill that puts a moratorium on law enforcement’s use of face recognition for three years.Under Assemblymember Phil Ting’s bill, A.B. 1215, police departments and law enforcement agencies across the state of California wil … | Continue reading
The European Union seems to fallen in love with the idea of requiring service providers to edit the Internet, with predictable consequences for speech. Until recently, there was reason to hope those consequences could be contained. For example, the EU’s highest court recently rul … | Continue reading
The First Amendment protects the public’s right to use electronic devices to secretly audio record police officers performing their official duties in public. This is according to an amicus brief EFF filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. The case, Martin v. Ro … | Continue reading
Last year, we warned that the passage of the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act would weaken global privacy standards, opening up the possibility of more permissive wiretapping and data collection laws. Today’s announcement of the U.S.-UK Agreement is the first st … | Continue reading
Top law enforcement officials in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia told Facebook today that they want backdoor access to all encrypted messages sent on all its platforms. In an open letter, these governments called on Mark Zuckerberg to stop Facebook’s plan to intr … | Continue reading
San Francisco—Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California (ACLU SoCal) have reached an agreement with Los Angeles law enforcement agencies under which the police and sheriff’s departments will turn over license pla … | Continue reading
A bill pending in the Brazilian Senate (PLS 272/2016) amends the current anti-terrorism law to make it a “terrorist act” to interfere with, sabotage or damage computer systems or databases in order to hinder their operation for a political or ideological motivation. Publicly prai … | Continue reading
“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car’s cigarette lighter.But interoper … | Continue reading
Organizations raising concerns about mass surveillance, secrecy, and the Fourth Amendment, among other issues, have filed amicus briefs in support of EFF’s Jewel v. NSA case, currently pending in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals is set to review the Distri … | Continue reading
Users, advocates, and service providers have been waiting for months to find out whether an appellate court will bless the Federal Communications Commission’s effort to repeal net neutrality protections, and whether the FCC can simultaneously force the states to follow suit. The … | Continue reading
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition and Consumer Rights held a hearing last week to explore the competitive impacts of big tech companies’ massive string of mergers with smaller companies in the last handful of years. Before the Senate committe … | Continue reading
Communities called for police officers to carry or wear cameras, with the hope that doing so would improve police accountability, not further mass surveillance. But today, we stand at a crossroads: face recognition technology is now capable of being interfaced with body-worn came … | Continue reading
Section 215, the controversial law at the heart of the NSA’s massive telephone records surveillance program, is set to expire in December. Last week the House Committee on the Judiciary held an oversight hearing to investigate how the NSA, FBI, and the rest of the intelligence co … | Continue reading