Lawmakers, schools districts, educational technology companies and others keep rolling out legislation and software that threatens students’ privacy, free speech, and access to social media, in the name of “protecting” children. At EFF, we fought back against this overreach and d … | Continue reading
There’s been plenty of bad news regarding federal legislation in 2023. For starters, Congress has failed to pass meaningful comprehensive data privacy reforms. Instead, legislators have spent an enormous amount of energy pushing dangerous legislation that’s intended to limit youn … | Continue reading
"The EFF are relentless." That's what a New York Police Department lieutenant wrote on LinkedIn after someone sent him a link to the Atlas of Surveillance, EFF's moonshot effort to document which U.S. law enforcement agencies are using which technologies, including drones, automa … | Continue reading
2023 has been an unfortunate reminder that the right to free expression is most fragile for groups on the margins, and that it can quickly become a casualty during global conflicts. Threats to speech arose out of the ongoing war in Palestine. They surfaced in bills and laws aroun … | Continue reading
It seems like a no-brainer that everyone should be able to read, copy, and share the laws we all must follow, but few things are simple in the internet age. Public.Resource.Org’s victory at the D.C. Circuit appeals court in September, in which the court ruled that non-commercial … | Continue reading
You might’ve heard that most of EFF’s funding comes from regular people’s modest donations—we’re proud of that. But did you know that EFF members who donate $10 or less each month raised over $400,000 for digital rights this year? That covers multiple staff members who work in th … | Continue reading
The U.S. Supreme Court has taken an unusually active interest in internet free speech issues. EFF participated as amicus in a whopping nine cases before the court this year. The court decided four of those cases, and decisions in the remaining five cases will be published in 2024 … | Continue reading
Throughout the many years that EFF has been around, our goal has remained consistent: creating a future where you have your rights when you go online, and one where they are enhanced by new technologies. But our goal isn't the only part of EFF that has remained consistent: for de … | Continue reading
It's been a big year for Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD), our repository of self-help resources for helping better protect you and your friends from online spying. We've done a number of updates and tackled a few new emerging topics with blog posts. Fighting for digital security … | Continue reading
The challenges in ensuring strong privacy safeguards, proper oversight of surveillance powers, and effective remedy for those arbitrarily affected continued during 2023 in Latin America. Let’s take a few, non-exhaustive, examples. We saw a scandal unveiling that Brazilian Intell … | Continue reading
At the start of 2023, we sunsetted the HTTPS Everywhere web extension. It encrypted browser communications with websites and made sure users benefited from the protection of HTTPS wherever possible. HTTPS Everywhere ended because all major browsers now offer the functionality to … | Continue reading
EFF believes you have the right to have a private conversation–in the physical world, and in the digital world. The best technology to protect that right is end-to-end encryption. Governments around the world are working hard to monitor online conversations, far beyond the bound … | Continue reading
Our personal data and the ways private companies harvest and monetize it plays an increasingly powerful role in modern life. Throughout 2023, corporations have continued to collect our personal data, sell it to governments, use it to reach inferences about us, and exacerbate exis … | Continue reading
You may want to save your receipts if you gifted any low-end Android TV set-top boxes or children's tablets to a friend or loved one this holiday season. In a series of investigations this year, EFF researchers confirmed the existence of dangerous malware on set-top boxes manufac … | Continue reading
Machine learning, artificial intelligence, algorithmic decision making–regardless of what you call it, and there is hot debate over that, this technology has been touted as a supposed threat to humanity, the future of work, as well as the hot new money-making doohickey. But one t … | Continue reading
EFF continues to fight back against high-tech general warrants that compel companies to search broad swaths of users’ personal data. In 2023, we saw victory and setbacks in a pair of criminal cases that challenged the constitutionality of geofence and keyword searches. These typ … | Continue reading
Patents are supposed to be an incentive to invent. Too often, they end up being a way to try to claim “ownership” of what should be basic building blocks of human activity, culture, and knowledge. This is especially true of software patents, an area EFF has been speaking out abou … | Continue reading
First Amendment Bars Coercive Censorship Demands But Some Communications Are PermissibleWASHINGTON, DC—The Supreme Court should clarify standards for determining if the government permissibly advised or convinced social media companies to censor content from 2020 to 2022, or impe … | Continue reading
Do you ever look at something once and then get targeted ads? Have you ever been exposed in some company’s data breach? Have you ever heard a lawmaker push restrictions on technology that they don’t even understand? To live in the modern world is to interact with technology in wa … | Continue reading
It’s easy to feel hopeless about the collapse of the tech sector into a group 0f monopolistic silos that harvest and exploit our data, hold our communities hostage, gouge us on prices, and steal our wages. But all over the world and across different government departments, policy … | Continue reading
The U.S.-Mexico border continues to be one of the most politicized spaces in the country, with leaders in both political parties supporting massive spending on border security, including technological solutions such as the so-called "virtual wall." We spent the year documenting s … | Continue reading
At the end of every year, we look back at the last 12 months and evaluate what has changed for the better (and worse) for digital rights. While we can be frustrated—hello ongoing attacks on encryption—overall it's always an exhilarating reminder of just how far we've come since … | Continue reading
The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday announced action against the pharmacy chain Rite Aid for its use of face recognition technology in hundreds of stores. The regulator found that Rite Aid deployed a massive, error-riddled surveillance program, chose vendors that could not pr … | Continue reading
The Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA) is a loose network of local groups fighting for digital rights in the United States, chaired by EFF. Members’ efforts have been recovering from the limitations put on local organizing caused by the pandemic. More EFA members have been holdin … | Continue reading
Last week, the Utah Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors violated a defendant’s Fifth Amendment privilege against self incrimination when they presented testimony about his refusal to give police the passcode to his cell phone. In State v. Valdez, the court found that verbally te … | Continue reading
Here’s another reason to block digital surveillance: it might reduce financial fraud. That’s the upshot of a small but promising study published as a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper, “Consumer Surveillance and Financial Fraud. Authors Bo Bian, Michaela … | Continue reading
Have no fear, it's the final EFFector of the year! Be the digital freedom expert for your family and friends during the holidays by catching up on the latest online rights issues with EFFector 35.16. This issue of our newsletter covers topics including: the surveillance one could … | Continue reading
Today, EFF joins more than 25 civil society organizations to launch the Coalition #MigrarSinVigilancia ("To Migrate Without Surveillance"). The Latin American coalition’s aim is to oppose arbitrary and indiscriminate surveillance affecting migrants across the region, and to push … | Continue reading
In the last week of legislative business before the winter break, Congress was scheduled to consider two very different proposals: H.R. 6570, the Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act in House Judiciary Committee (HJC); and H.R. 6611, the FISA Reform and Reauthoriz … | Continue reading
The Archive’s Controlled Digital Lending Program is a Lawful Fair Use that Preserves Traditional Library Lending in the Digital WorldSAN FRANCISCO—A cartel of major publishing companies must not be allowed to criminalize fair-use library lending, the Internet Archive argued in an … | Continue reading
Google announced this week that it will be making several important changes to the way it handles users’ “Location History” data. These changes would appear to make it much more difficult—if not impossible—for Google to provide mass location data in response to a geofence warrant … | Continue reading
Dr. Carolina Are is an Innovation Fellow at Northumbria University Centre for Digital Citizens. Her research primarily focuses on the intersection between online abuse and censorship. Her current research project investigates Instagram and TikTok’s approach to malicious flagging … | Continue reading
Every internet user should have the ability to privately communicate with the people that matter to them, in a secure fashion, using the tools and protocols of their choosing. Apple’s iMessage offers end-to-end encrypted messaging for its customers, but only if those customers wa … | Continue reading
While there is a surge in federated social media sites, like Bluesky and Mastodon, some technologists are hoping to take things further than this model of decentralization with fully peer-to-peer applications. Two leading projects, Spritely and Veilid, hint at what this could loo … | Continue reading
Both OpenAI and Google have released guidance for website owners who do not want the two companies using the content of their sites to train the company's large language models (LLMs). We've long been supporters of the right to scrape websites—the process of using a computer to l … | Continue reading
Earlier this week, both the House Committee on the Judiciary (HJC) and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) marked up two very different bills (H.R. 6570 - Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act in HJC, and HR 6611, the FISA Reform and Reauth … | Continue reading
Two bills reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act are headed to the House floor. Meanwhile, FBI agents have used Section 702 databases to conduct millions of invasive searches for Americans’ communications, including those of protesters, racial just … | Continue reading
Laws Violate First Amendment Protections that Help Create Diverse Forums for Users’ Free ExpressionWASHINGTON D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and five organizations defending free speech urged the Supreme Court to strike down laws in Florida and Texas that let the s … | Continue reading
With the holidays upon us, it's easy to default to giving the tech gifts that retailers tend to push on us this time of year: smart speakers, video doorbells, bluetooth trackers, fitness trackers, and other connected gadgets are all very popular gifts. But before you give one, th … | Continue reading
At EFF, we spend a lot of time calling out the harm caused by copyright trolls and protecting internet users from their abuses. Copyright trolls are serial plaintiffs who use search tools to identify technical, often low-value infringements on the internet, and then seek nuisance … | Continue reading
Yesterday Meta announced that they have begun rolling out default end-to-end encryption for one-to-one messages and voice calls on Messenger and Facebook. While there remain some privacy concerns around backups and metadata, we applaud this decision. It will bring strong encrypti … | Continue reading
Alison Macrina is an activist librarian and the director of Library Freedom Project (LFP). LFP is radically rethinking the library professional organization by creating a network of values-driven librarian-activists taking action together to build information democracy. LFP offer … | Continue reading
The Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) closes on January 15, 2024! U.S. federal employees and retirees can make a pledge to help support EFF’s lawyers, activists, and technologists fight for user rights online. If you’re a U.S. federal employee or retiree, giving to EFF through the … | Continue reading
The European Parliament and Member States’ representatives last week negotiated a controversial special status for media outlets that are active on large online platforms. The EU Media Freedom Act (EMFA), though well-intended, has significant flaws. By creating a special class of … | Continue reading
Legal intern Muhammad Essa Fasih contributed to this post. In the wake of the October 7 attack on Israel and the ensuing backlash on Palestine, Meta has engaged in unjustified content and account takedowns on its social media platforms. This has suppressed the voices of journalis … | Continue reading
EFF’s “How to Fix the Internet” podcast is a finalist in the Anthem Awards Community Voice competition, and we need YOUR help to put it over the top! The Anthem Awards honors the purpose and mission-driven work of people, companies and organizations around the world. By amplifyin … | Continue reading
After finding risky software on an Android (Google’s mobile operating system) device marketed for kids, we wanted to put together some tips to help better secure your kid's Android device (and even your own). Despite the dangers that exist, there are many things that can be done … | Continue reading
In August of 2023 EFF announced the Tor University Challenge, a campaign to get more universities around the world to operate Tor relays. The primary goal of this campaign is to strengthen the Tor network by creating more high bandwidth and reliable Tor nodes. We hope this will a … | Continue reading