Since EFF visited Ecuador three weeks ago, the investigation into open source developer Ola Bini has proceeded as we described then: drawn out, with little evidence of wrong-doing, but potentially compromised by acts of political theater outside the bounds of due process and a fa … | Continue reading
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a new ruling in U.S. v. Cano [.pdf] that offers greater privacy protection for people crossing the border with their electronic devices, but it doesn’t go as far as we sought in our amicus brief.Cano had attempted to cross th … | Continue reading
Yesterday, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple’s Safari browsers started blocking a security certificate previously used by Kazakh ISPs to compromise their users’ security and perform dragnet surveillance. We encourage other browsers to take similar security measures. Since … | Continue reading
YouTube has taken a stand against a particularly pernicious copyright troll who was not only abusing the takedown system to remove content but was also using it in an extortion scam. While this gives the weight—and resources—of a large corporation in a fight that will benefit use … | Continue reading
If you want to play music as part of your business, either live or recorded, chances are you are going to have to pay the two big performing rights organizations. The American Society of Composers and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) license the rights to a lot … | Continue reading
Recent months have seen a wave of cities and counties around the country rejecting the use of automated license plate readers in their communities, citing privacy concerns posed by the technology. Added to recent local level victories barring the use of face recognition technolog … | Continue reading
Ever since mid-2017, Apple has been tackling web tracking in a big way. Various iterations of its Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) technology have been introduced over the past few years in WebKit, the browser engine for Safari. ITP already protects users from tracking in va … | Continue reading
The New York Times reported that the Trump administration wants Section 215, the legal authority that allows the National Security Agency to collect Americans’ telephone records, renewed indefinitely. That’s despite earlier reports the NSA had shuttered its Call Details Record (C … | Continue reading
Free speech in the patent world saw a big win on Friday, when the New Hampshire Supreme Court held that calling someone a “patent troll” doesn’t constitute defamation. The court’s opinion [PDF] is good news for critics of abusive patent litigation, and anyone who values robust pu … | Continue reading
It's Panama’s turn to take a closer look at the practices of its most prominent Internet Service Providers, and how their policies support their users’ privacy. IPANDETEC, the leading digital rights NGO in Panama, has launched its first "Who Defends Your Data" (¿Quién Defiende Tu … | Continue reading
A single surveillance vendor has garnered a monopoly on training law enforcement in California on the use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—a mass surveillance technology used to track the movements of drivers. After examining the course materials, EFF is now calling on … | Continue reading
As long we've had electronic mass media, audiences and creators have benefited from periods of technological upheaval that force old gatekeepers to compete with brash newcomers with new ideas about what constitutes acceptable culture and art. Those newcomers eventually became gat … | Continue reading
The California Supreme Court just rejected the government’s attempt to require a youth probationer, as a condition of release, to submit to random searches of his electronic devices and social media accounts. The trial court had imposed the condition because the judge believed te … | Continue reading
San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce the winners of its 2019 Pioneer Awards: trailblazing tech scholar danah boyd, groundbreaking cyberpunk author William Gibson, and the influential surveillance-fighting group Oakland Privacy. The cerem … | Continue reading
Este lunes se cumple el cuarto mes de procesamiento de Ola Bini, el desarrollador de código abierto que se encuentra, actualmente, bajo investigación por parte de las autoridades ecuatorianas. Los fiscales todavía no han revelado ninguna prueba real que apoye las acusaciones form … | Continue reading
Last summer, we published a comprehensive look at the ways that Facebook could and should open up its data so that users could control their experience on the service, and to make it easier for competing services to thrive.In the time since, Facebook has continued to be rocked by … | Continue reading
Biometric surveillance by companies against consumers is a growing menace to our privacy, freedom of expression, and civil rights. Fortunately, a federal appeals court has ruled that a lawsuit against Facebook for its face surveillance may move forward. The decision, by the feder … | Continue reading
Doors across the United States are now fitted with Amazon’s Ring, a combination doorbell-security camera that records and transmits video straight to users’ phones, to Amazon’s cloud—and often to the local police department. By sending photos and alerts every time the camera dete … | Continue reading
Today EFF and Public Knowledge are releasing a whitepaper titled Which Internet registries offer the best protection for domain owners? Top-level domains are the letters after the dot, like .com, .uk, .biz, or .mobi. Since 2003, hundreds of new top-level domains have come onto t … | Continue reading
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit last week became the first federal appellate court to rule that Section 230 bars civil terrorism claims against a social media company. The plaintiffs, who were victims of Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, argued that Facebook sho … | Continue reading
With so much dissatisfaction over how companies like Facebook and YouTube moderate user speech, you might think that the groups that run the Internet’s infrastructure would want to stay far away from the speech-policing business. Sadly, two groups that control an important piece … | Continue reading
San Francisco – A team from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has returned from a fact-finding mission in Quito for the case of Ola Bini—a globally renowned Swedish programmer who is facing tenuous computer-crime charges in Ecuador.Bini was detained in April, as he left hi … | Continue reading
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and one of its component agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), released a Privacy Impact Assessment [.pdf] on CBP’s practice of monitoring social media to enhance the agency’s “situational awareness.” As we’ve argued in … | Continue reading
Adversarial interoperability is what happens when someone makes a new product or service that works with a dominant product or service, against the wishes of the dominant business.Though there are examples of adversarial interoperability going back to early phonograms and even be … | Continue reading
As the number of migrants at the southern border has surged in the past several months, the Trump administration has turned to increasingly draconian measures as a form of deterrence. While the separation of children from their parents and housing of migrants in overcrowded and i … | Continue reading
After spending nearly a week in Ecuador to learn more about the case against Swedish open source software developer Ola Bini, who was arrested here in April, EFF has found a clear consensus among the experts: the political consequences of his arrest appear to be outweighing any a … | Continue reading
EFF is back this year at Vegas Security Week, sometimes affectionately known as Hacker Summer Camp. Stop by our booths at BSides, Black Hat, and DEF CON to find out about the latest developments in protecting digital freedom, sign up for our action alerts and mailing list, and do … | Continue reading
Note: Sam Jadali, the author of the DataSpii report referenced in this blog post, is an EFF Coders’ Rights client. However, the information about DataSpii in this post is based entirely on public reports.Last week we learned about DataSpii, a report by independent researcher Sam … | Continue reading
There is no saving grace for the federal government approving what is on its face an illegal horizontal merger between T-Mobile and Sprint. The wireless market is already highly concentrated according to the Department of Justice’s own guidelines, and this merger only exacerbates … | Continue reading
Last week, Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray chose to spend some of their time giving speeches demonizing encryption and calling for the creation of backdoors to allow the government access to encrypted data. You should not spend any of your time lis … | Continue reading
Anuwave’s Suit Against Coinbase Demonstrates a Longstanding Flaw in the Patent SystemThis month’s Stupid Patent of the Month deals with SMS (short messaging service), a technology that goes back to the mid-1980s. Modern-day SMS messages, typically bundled with mobile phone servic … | Continue reading
Last week, news broke of a large financial settlement for the massive 2017 Equifax data breach affecting 147 million Americans. While the direct compensation to those harmed and the fines paid are important, it’s equally important to evaluate how much this result is likely to cre … | Continue reading
When it comes to politics, in-person meetings make a huge difference. Just a few questions from constituents during town halls can show a representative or senator which issues are resonating with the residents of their district or state. Even if you’ve never met an elected repre … | Continue reading
We at EFF are deeply grateful to each one of the 2,076 people who gave a donation during our Better Digital Future membership drive. They join the over 30,000 supporters around the world who have answered our call to reclaim the fate of the Internet. Your help allows us to develo … | Continue reading
The Senate Judiciary Committee recently held a hearing on “Protecting Digital Innocence.” The hearing covered a range of problems facing young people on the Internet today, with a focus on harmful content and privacy-invasive data practices by tech companies. While children do fa … | Continue reading
As we head into the August, Congress will be on recess and most of your senators and representatives will be heading back to their home states. That means it’ll be easier for you to reach out and talk to them or their staff and ask them to act on important legislation. Earlier th … | Continue reading
Since academics and investigative journalists first reported last year that Facebook was using people’s two-factor authentication numbers and “shadow” contact information for targeted advertising, Facebook has shown little public interest in fixing this critical problem. Subseque … | Continue reading
For more than a decade, consumer rights groups (including EFF) worked with technologists and companies to try to standardize Do Not Track, a flag that browsers could send to online companies signaling that their users did not want their browsing activity tracked. Despite long hou … | Continue reading
In its next release, Android plans to up its privacy game. But the operating system still caters to ad trackers at its users’ expense.The newest release of Android, dubbed “Q,” is currently in late-stage beta testing and slated for a full release this summer. After a year defined … | Continue reading
Earlier this month, Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 68, which includes a curated "list of recommended extensions that have been thoroughly reviewed for security, usability and usefulness." We are pleased to announce that both of our popular browser extensions, HTTPS Ever … | Continue reading
EFF is disappointed by the terms of the settlement agreement announced today between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Facebook. It is grossly inadequate to the task of protecting the privacy of technology users from Facebook’s surveillance-based system of social networking … | Continue reading
EFF legal intern Roger Li co-wrote this blog post. Satellites could soon track our movements from space, allowing for surveillance on a mass scale that most people haven’t ever contemplated. Yet U.S. rules governing commercial satellite licenses require satellite companies to dis … | Continue reading
Earlier this month, the House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing to discuss the role of face recognition and other invasive biometric technologies in use by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Despite some pushback from some lawmakers on the committee, John Wagn … | Continue reading
If you, like a great many Californians, have shopped for high-speed broadband options (in excess of 100 mbps) and found that you always ended up with Comcast, it is because the state’s legislature has failed to promote broadband competition for more than ten years. That reality h … | Continue reading
Why do we care about encryption? Why was it a big deal, at least in theory, when Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this year that Facebook would move to end-to-end encryption on all three of its messaging platforms? We don’t just support encryption for its own sake. We fight for … | Continue reading
Earlier this week, Oakland’s City Council voted unanimously to ban local government use of face surveillance. The amendment to Oakland’s Surveillance and Community Safety Ordinance will make Oakland the third U.S. city to take this critical step toward protecting the safety, priv … | Continue reading