Last week, the New York Attorney General secured a $410,000 fine from Patrick Hinchy and 16 companies that he runs which produce and sell spyware and stalkerware. In addition, he and his companies must modify their stalkerware to alert victims that their devices have been comprom … | Continue reading
Parts of the fediverse have been in something of an uproar recently over an experimental search service that was under development called (appropriately enough) Searchtodon. The project aimed to enable people to search their own home timeline and worked by being authorized by a u … | Continue reading
When a tech company moves to your city, the effects ripple far beyond just the people it employs. It can impact thousands of ancillary jobs – from teachers to nurses to construction workers – as well as the community’s housing, transportation, health care, and other businesses. A … | Continue reading
Meritless defamation lawsuits can deter legal speech by forcing people to spend time and money fighting them. That is why courts must diligently protect people’s First Amendment rights by quickly dismissing claims that target people’s protected opinions. That did not happen in a … | Continue reading
Amicus Brief Urges the Court to Increase Transparency of SCA Warrant Requests ST. LOUIS — The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of an appeal filed by the Reporters Committee for Fr … | Continue reading
The Washington Post recently published an op-ed by Megan McArdle titled "Twitter might be replaced, but not by Mastodon or other imitators." The article argues that Mastodon is falling into a common trap for open source projects: building a look-alike alternative which improves t … | Continue reading
As the UK's Online Safety Bill enters its Second Reading in the House of Lords, EFF, Liberty, Article 19, and Big Brother Watch are calling on Peers to protect end-to-end encryption and the right to private messaging online. As we've said before, undermining protections for end-t … | Continue reading
In the last week, a number of dangerous and conspiracy-driven attacks were made against EFF board member Gigi Sohn, an eminently qualified nominee to the Federal Communications Commission. These attacks attempt to twist EFF's long-held positions and commitments into dog whistles … | Continue reading
Should the police be able to identify everyone who was in a busy metropolitan area, just because a crime occurred there? In two amicus briefs just filed in appellate courts, we argue that’s a clearly unconstitutional search.[1] The two cases are People v. Meza, in the California … | Continue reading
EFF was proud to support New York’s A. 7326/S. 6541, which the legislature passed to protect the confidentiality of medical immunity information. It limits what data can be collected or shared, who it can be shared with, and how long it can be stored. (In New York, bills must hav … | Continue reading
Patent trolls make patents, and argue over them. They don’t have to ever make the thing described in their patents, if it’s even possible to determine what those things are. Instead, they generate legal threats and waste the time and money of companies that do do these things. T … | Continue reading
When it was passed in 2015, the California Electronic Communications Act (CalECPA) was heralded as a major achievement for digital privacy, because it required law enforcement to obtain a warrant in most cases before searching a suspect's data, be it on a personal device or on th … | Continue reading
Brazil’s biggest internet connection providers made moderate advances in protecting customer data and being transparent about their privacy practices, but fell short on meeting certain requirements for upholding users’ rights under Brazil's data protection law, according to Inte … | Continue reading
The Supreme Court is about to hear a case that could dramatically affect users’ speech rights online. EFF has filed a brief explaining what’s at stake, and urging the court to preserve the key law protecting user expression, 47 U.S.C § 230 (Section 230.) In Gonzalez v. Google, th … | Continue reading
When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released their new broadband map in November 2022, many hoped the chronic inaccuracies of past FCC maps would be resolved. Previous maps of high-speed broadband access in the United States painted inaccurate pictures partly because … | Continue reading
Swedish computer security expert Ola Bini was arrested in April, 2019, in Ecuador, and a cloud has hung over his case ever since. Bini's case has been impacted by numerous due process violations and human rights concerns, and there have been suspensions or delays at nearly every … | Continue reading
What can a bustling electronic components bazaar in Shenzhen, China, tell us about building a better technology future? To researcher and hacker Andrew “bunnie” Huang, it symbolizes the boundless motivation, excitement, and innovation that can be unlocked if people have the right … | Continue reading
Yesterday, we wrote about the importance of fair use as a safeguard for free expression. But all too often, fair use and other legal limits on copyright are not enough to stop copyright enforcement from serving as cover for silencing critics. Time and again, we see copyright cla … | Continue reading
It’s been a good year for right to repair advocates. Colorado passed an important law to allow wheelchair users access to resources they need to fix their own chairs. The Federal Trade Commission has stepped up enforcement of companies that limit the right to repair. And New York … | Continue reading
Lawyers, scholars, and activists, including EFF, often highlight Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Section 230 (originally of the Communications Decency Act) as the legal foundations of the internet. But there’s another, much older, doctrine that’s at least … | Continue reading
The Internet Copyright Wars are in their third decade, and despite the billions of dollars and trillions of phosphors spilled on its battlegrounds around the world, precious little progress has been made. A quarter of a century after Napster’s founding, we’re still haunted by the … | Continue reading
Artificial Intelligence (AI) grabs headlines with new tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, but it is already here and having major impacts on our lives. Increasingly we see law enforcement, medical care, schools and workplaces all turning to the black box of AI to make life altering … | Continue reading
It's a new year! There's no better time to keep up with the latest updates on your digital rights. Version 35, issue 1 of our EFFector newsletter is out now. Catch up on the latest EFF news by reading our newsletter or listening to the audio version below. This issue covers a col … | 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, and addressing what's at stake, and what we nee … | 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, and addressing what's at stake, and what we nee … | Continue reading
Longtime EFFer and Deputy Executive Director and General Counsel Kurt Opsahl will be moving on from the Electronic Frontier Foundation after nearly 20 years, on February 1. But we aren’t going to let him go too far: Kurt will continue on as a Special Counsel of EFF. Kurt will be … | Continue reading
According to leaks reported last week, the company that owns Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is planning to revoke the open license that has, since the year 2000, applied to a wide range of unofficial, commercial products that build on the mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons. The report … | Continue reading
EFF is attending this week and next a new round of negotiations over the proposed UN Cybercrime Treaty to raise concerns that draft provisions now on the table include a long list of content-related crimes that pose serious threats to free expression, privacy, and the legitimate … | Continue reading
Calling all U.S. federal employees and retirees: the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) pledge period is closing on January 14, 2023. Be sure to make a pledge for EFF now to support digital freedoms for every internet user. It's easy to donate to EFF through the CFC! Here are the s … | Continue reading
In the wake of this year’s Supreme Court decision in Dobbs overruling Roe v. Wade, sheriffs and bounty hunters in anti-abortion states will try to investigate and punish abortion seekers based on their internet browsing, private messaging, and phone app location data. We can expe … | Continue reading
This year, we have seen an array of different ways governments around the world have tried to alter basic security on the web for users. Much of this was attempted through legislation, direct network interference, or as a request directly from a government to internet governance … | Continue reading
Since the new UN cybercrime treaty began to take shape in 2022, EFF has been fighting on behalf of users to make sure robust human rights safeguards and rule of law standards are the basis of any final product. There’s a lot at stake—the proposed UN cybercrime treaty has the pote … | Continue reading
Informed citizens need comprehensive libraries that meet people where they are. Today, that means online spaces that welcome everyone to use their resources, invite them to create new and truthful works, and respect the interests of both authors and readers. EFF client Internet … | Continue reading
The internet can be a powerful tool for communicating, collaborating, and finding community. But lawsuits and threats from patent trolls have been an obstacle to the dream of a free and open internet. That’s why EFF has been fighting back against them for more than 15 years. Pat … | Continue reading
Reproductive justice and safe access to abortion, like so many other aspects of managing our healthcare, is fundamentally tied to our digital lives. And since it is part of our healthcare, we should have the ability to keep it private and access information about it, even when it … | Continue reading
In 2022, student privacy gets a solid “C” grade. The trend of schools engaging in student surveillance did not let up in 2022. There were, however, some small wins indicative of a growing movement to push back against this encroachment. Unfortunately, more schools than ever are … | Continue reading
EFF’s first ask for the incoming Biden Administration on broadband policy was to ban digital redlining by regulating broadband as a public good instead of a private luxury. EFF has extensively researched the state of fiber broadband infrastructure in the United States for years. … | Continue reading
2022 has been a big year for enforcement of the antitrust laws against tech companies, with the five largest (Apple, Google, Meta/Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft) all facing lawsuits or investigations in the US. Government scrutiny of tech company mergers is on the rise too: the … | Continue reading
We love San Francisco. It’s EFF’s home. It’s often an example for other cities in regards to technology use and civil liberties. We helped make San Francisco the first city in the United States to ban government use of facial recognition, and one of the first to require communit … | Continue reading
EFF worked on bills in more than a dozen states this year, fighting for strong digital rights at the state level. Across the country, legislators focused on issues including medical privacy, biometric privacy, and the right to repair. In California, EFF was proud to support thre … | Continue reading
Walled gardens can be great: we all like it when Stuff Just Works because a single company oversees all its elements. Walled gardens can be terrible: when all of our data, our social relations and our educational, romantic, professional and family ties are trapped inside a com … | Continue reading
The online conversations that bring us closer together can help build a world that’s more free, fair, and creative. But talking to each other only works when the people talking have their human rights respected, including their right to speak privately. The best tool to defend th … | Continue reading
It’s been a tumultuous year for free expression globally. From internet shutdowns, crackdowns on expression and closed-door partnerships to attempts to restrict anonymity and end to end encryption, in many places, digital rights are under threat. And while the European Union has … | Continue reading
The rising tide of policing by robots and drones may seem relentless or even inevitable. But activism, legislative advocacy, and public outrage can do a lot to protect our safety and freedom from these technologies. This year began with a report that elucidated what police are do … | Continue reading
EFF and our supporters have fought off numerous wrongheaded attempts by Congress to regulate online speech, including several that we wrote about last December. The bevy of bad internet regulation proposals coming out of Congress hasn’t stopped. In 2022, the EARN IT Act was re-in … | Continue reading
EFF continued to expand our work on technology issues in the workplace in 2022. We first renewed our attention to worker privacy when the specter of “bossware”—tracking software on work devices—reared its ugly head at the start of the pandemic. Since then, EFF has joined with tho … | Continue reading
2022 marked an important year for digital rights across the European Union as the landmark Digital Services Act (DSA) came into force on 16 November seeking to foster a safer and more competitive digital space. The DSA overhauls the EU’s core platform regulation, the e-Commerce D … | Continue reading
Over the past few years, just like the rest of the world, EFF has had to adapt to change and face new challenges. We’ve even had to relearn how we did things before most of the world shut down for over a year. Even through all this, EFF members have shown that the fight for digit … | Continue reading