We remain gravely concerned about the deteriorating health of Alaa Abd El Fattah, the British-Egyptian activist, technologist, 2022 EFF Award winner, and Amnesty Prisoner of Conscience. Alaa has now been on hunger strike at Wadi el Natrun Prison in Egypt for more than 200 days, a … | Continue reading
15 October 2022 Dear Foreign Secretary, On behalf of the below signed organisations, we would like to congratulate your appointment as Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs. At a time of significant global uncertainty and unrest, the UK can and must … | Continue reading
Cloudflare’s recent headline-making decision to refuse its services to KiwiFarms—a site notorious for allowing its users to wage harassment campaigns against trans people—is likely to lead to more calls for infrastructure companies to police online speech. Although EFF would shed … | Continue reading
A California trial court has held a geofence warrant issued to the San Francisco Police Department violated the Fourth Amendment and California’s landmark electronic communications privacy law, CalECPA. The court suppressed evidence stemming from the warrant, becoming the first c … | Continue reading
Want the latest news on your digital rights? Well, you're in luck! Version 34, issue 5 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 EFF's current work, including our inv … | Continue reading
Copyright trolls typically don’t produce or distribute content, but instead make money off of copyrighted material by using the threat of litigation to shake down people who allegedly download movies and other content over the internet—a business model that invites harassment and … | Continue reading
Chile’s internet service providers (ISPs) have over the last five years improved transparency about how they protect their users’ data, thanks in large part to Latin American digital rights group Derechos Digitales shining a light on their practices through annual ¿Quien Defiende … | Continue reading
Researchers at a national laboratory are forecasting a future where police and border agents are assisted by artificial intelligence, not as a software tool but as an autonomous partner capable of taking the steering wheel during pursuits and scouring social media to target peopl … | Continue reading
The First Amendment and the freedom of speech and expression it provides has helped make the internet what it is today: a place for diverse communities, support networks, and forums of all stripes to share information and connect people. Individuals and groups exercise their cons … | Continue reading
We, the undersigned human rights organizations, strongly condemn the Iranian authorities’ ruthless persecution, harassment, and arrest of technologists and digital rights defenders, and demand their immediate and unconditional release. In an attempt to crush the popular uprising … | Continue reading
Tor, the onion router, remains one of the most effective censorship circumvention technologies. Millions of people use the Tor network every day to access the internet without fear of surveillance and censorship. Most people get on the Tor network by downloading the Tor Browser a … | Continue reading
This blog post was co-written with EFF Legal Intern Allie Schiele There is no dispute that cell phones contain a lot of personal information. The Supreme Court recognized in 2014 in Riley v. California that a cell phone is “not just another technological convenience. With all the … | Continue reading
uniloc_-_unsealed_license_table.pdf | Continue reading
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, anti-choice sheriffs and bounty hunters will try to investigate and punish abortion seekers based on their internet browsing, private messaging, and phone app location data. We can expect similar tactics from state officials who … | Continue reading
We’ve all read the news stories: study after study shows that facial recognition algorithms are not always reliable, and that error rates spike significantly when involving faces of folks of color, especially Black women, as well as trans and nonbinary people. Yet this technology … | Continue reading
EFF has prevailed in a years-long effort to make public a series of court records that show how a notorious patent troll, Uniloc, uses litigation threats to extracts payments from a variety of businesses. Uniloc earlier this month complied with a federal district court’s unsealin … | Continue reading
The EU continues to crack down on big tech companies with its full arsenal of antitrust rules. This month, Google lost its appeal against a record fine, now slightly trimmed to €4.13 billion, for abusing its dominant position through the tactics it used to keep traffic on Android … | Continue reading
Over the last decade, a vast number of law enforcement agencies around the country have adopted a mass surveillance technology that uses cameras to track the vehicles of every driver on the road, with little thought or respect given to the ways this technology might be abused. No … | Continue reading
An EFF study found the apps compromise young children’s data, and current laws don’t address the problem.SAN FRANCISCO—The Federal Trade Commission must review the lack of privacy and security protections among daycare and early education apps, the Electronic Frontier Foundation … | Continue reading
On August 9, a Saudi woman was sentenced to 34 years in prison by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s notorious specialized criminal court in Riyadh. Her crime? Having a Twitter account and following and retweeting dissidents and activists. That same day, a federal jury in San Francisc … | Continue reading
In 2015, Leicestershire Police scanned the faces of 90,000 individuals at a music festival in the UK and checked these images against a database of people suspected of crimes across Europe. This was the first known deployment of Live Facial Recognition (LFR) at an outdoor public … | Continue reading
Researchers at the University of Washington and Harvard Law School recently published a groundbreaking study analyzing the technical capabilities of 16 electronic monitoring (EM) smartphone apps used as “alternatives” to criminal and civil detention. The study, billed as the “fir … | Continue reading
In a 4-7 vote, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed a 15-month pilot program granting the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) more live surveillance powers. This was despite the objections of a diverse coalition of community groups and civil rights organizations, reside … | Continue reading
The public power utility and police racially profiled Asian communities in the illegal data-sharing scheme.SACRAMENTO—The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) searches entire zip codes’ worth of people’s private data and discloses it to police without a warrant or any sus … | Continue reading
In this video, we discuss the forces that keep us using services like Facebook long after we stop enjoying them (hint, it's not because social media is "addictive") and we present a short "design fiction" explaining what it might be like to use social media in the near future, af … | Continue reading
Today, we launch “How to Ditch Facebook Without Losing Your Friends” - a narrated slideshow and essay explaining how Facebook locks in its users, how interoperability can free them, and what it would feel like to use an “interoperable Facebook” of the future, such as the one cont … | Continue reading
No business can own the generic word for the product it sells. We would find it preposterous if a single airline claimed exclusive use of the word “air,” or a broadband service tried to stop its rivals from using the word “broadband.” Until this year, it seemed settled that the i … | Continue reading
Puzzlemaster Aaron Steimle of the Muppet Liberation Front contributed to this post. Every year, EFF joins thousands of computer security professionals, tinkerers, and hobbyists for Hacker Summer Camp, the affectionate term used for the series of Las Vegas technology conferences i … | Continue reading
Our country’s fair and independent courts exist to resolve serious disputes. Unfortunately, some parties abuse the civil litigation process to silence others’ speech, rather than resolve legitimate claims. These types of censorious lawsuits have been dubbed Strategic Lawsuits Aga … | Continue reading
In the week since EFF and the Associated Press exposed how Fog Data Science purchases geolocation data on hundreds of millions of digital devices in the United States, and maps them for easy-to-use and cheap mass surveillance by police, elected officials have voiced serious conce … | Continue reading
More than four years after its enactment, FOSTA remains an unconstitutional law that broadly censored the internet and harmed sex workers and others by chilling their ability to speak, organize, and access information online. And the fight to overturn FOSTA continues. Last week, … | Continue reading
In yet another failure to follow the rules, the San Francisco Police Department is collaborating with the regional fusion center with nothing in writing—no agreements, no contracts, nothing— governing the relationship, according to new records released to EFF in its ongoing compl … | Continue reading
Apple’s new iOS 16 offers a powerful tool for its most vulnerable users. Lockdown Mode reduces the avenues attackers have to hack into users’ phones by disabling certain often-exploited features. While providing a solid defense against intrusion, it is also trivial to detect that … | Continue reading
It’s that time of the year again when the weather starts to cool down and the leaves start to turn all different shades and colors. More importantly, it is also time for U.S. federal employees to pledge their support for digital freedoms through the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC … | Continue reading
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, anti-choice sheriffs and bounty hunters will try to investigate and punish abortion seekers based on their internet browsing, private messaging, and phone app location data. Legislators must act now to protect this personal data. … | Continue reading
In a victory for users, Slack has fixed its long-standing retention problems for free workspaces. Instead of holding onto your messages on its servers for as long as your workspace exists, Slack is now giving free workspace admins the option to automatically delete all messages o … | Continue reading
Phone app location data brokers are a growing menace to our privacy and safety. All you did was click a box while downloading an app. Now the app tracks your every move and sends it to a broker, which then sells your location data to the highest bidder. So three cheers for the Fe … | Continue reading
Former EFF intern Shashank Sirivolu contributed to this blog post. Social media users who have sued companies for deleting, demonetizing, and otherwise moderating their content have tried several arguments that this violates their constitutional rights. Courts have consistently … | Continue reading
EFF, two Arizona chapters of the National Lawyers Guild, Poder in Action, and Mass Liberation AZ filed a brief in federal court opposing the government's attempt to thwart police accountability.SAN FRANCISCO–A new Arizona law that bans people from recording videos within eig … | Continue reading
With deep sadness, EFF mourns the loss of our friend, the technologist, activist, and cybersecurity expert Peter Eckersley. Peter worked at EFF for a dozen years and was EFF’s Chief Computer Scientist for many of those. Peter was a tremendous force in making the internet a safer … | Continue reading
Stop us if you’ve heard these: piracy is driving artists out of business. The reason they are starving is because no one pays for things, just illegally downloads them. You wouldn’t steal a car. These arguments are old and being dragged back out to get support for rules that woul … | Continue reading
If a company wants to advertise something to you on the internet, it first has to know who you are and what you like to buy. There are many different approaches to gathering this data, but all generally have one goal in common: they link you with the data generated by your device … | Continue reading
In Part 1 of our series on Fog Data Science, we saw how when you give some apps permission to view your location, it can end up being packaged and sold to numerous other companies. Fog Data Science is one of those companies, and it has created a sleek search engine called Fog Rev … | Continue reading
An EFF investigation of public records acquired from dozens of state and local law enforcement agencies has uncovered a widely-used mass surveillance technology. Americans are accustomed to hearing about how the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA … | Continue reading
The data broker selling people’s location data to any local, state, and federal agency willing to buy it is putting our Fourth Amendment rights at risk. EFF recently published its investigation into Fog Data Science, which claims in marketing materials sent to law enforcement tha … | Continue reading
In Chino, CA, police used Fog Data Science’s geolocation service to do massive sweeps revealing who was near minor theft and burglary scenes. In a rural Missouri murder investigation, Fog’s service was used to track a babysitter who was never a suspect. In Greensboro, NC, a crime … | Continue reading
A data broker has been selling raw location data about individual people to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, EFF has learned. This personal data isn’t gathered from cell phone towers or tech giants like Google — it’s obtained by the broker via thousands of diff … | Continue reading
Earlier this week, EFF, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Demand Progress sent a letter to the Senate expressing our concerns about H.R. 3962, The Securing and Enabling Commerce Using Remote and Electronic Notarization Act of 2021 or SECURE Notarization Act. This bill … | Continue reading