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
In a new round of talks this week to formulate a UN Cybercrime Treaty, EFF is calling for strictly limiting the scope of the convention’s international cooperation provisions and safeguards to ensure that states respect human rights when responding to legal assistance requests.EF … | Continue reading
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will soon rule on Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drones, which are capable of flying while its operator (pilot) is far away. While these types of drones might offer benefits to society—think of deliveries, infrastructure inspection, … | Continue reading
The scourge of stalkerware—malicious apps used by perpetrators of domestic violence to secretly spy on their victims—is not going unchallenged or unaddressed. Antivirus makers are increasingly adding stalkerware to the list of apps their products detect on devices; victim support … | Continue reading
A growing number of states have prohibited transgender youths from obtaining gender-affirming health care. So these youths and their families must travel out-of-state for necessary health care. The states they visit are health care sanctuaries. These states must also be data sanc … | Continue reading
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overruled a half century of precedent supporting the constitutional right to abortion access, numerous states have moved towards making abortion illegal and restricting additional reproductive health services. In South Carolina, Republican state Senat … | Continue reading
Online proctoring companies employ a lengthy list of dangerous monitoring and tracking techniques in an attempt to determine whether or not students are potentially cheating, many of which are biased and ineffective. This week, one of the more invasive techniques—the “room scan”— … | Continue reading
Originating from the streets of Chicago, drill music is a creative output of inner-city Black youths. It is defined by real life experiences and perspectives, and whilst drill rappers often document gang-related conflict and anti-establishment narratives in their lyrics and music … | Continue reading
Even in the face of strong public protest over a set of proposed revisions to criminal laws that infringe Indonesians’ free expression rights, the Indonesian Ministry of Law and Human Rights last month sent to the Parliament a new draft of the Criminal Code (CC) that threatens to … | Continue reading
More than seven years after Congress mandated it and EFF sued to pry them loose, the government released seven heavily-redacted but previously classified rulings from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that shed new light on how the secret court interprets key provisions … | Continue reading
Right now, Americans live in a country where the companies that control our access to the internet face little-to-no oversight. In most states, these companies can throttle your service—or that of, say, a fire department fighting the largest wildfire in state history. They can bl … | Continue reading
Internet users’ private messages, files, and photos of everyday people are increasingly being examined by tech companies, which check the data against government databases. While this is not a new practice, the public is being told this massive scanning should extend to nearly ev … | Continue reading
The U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)'s placement of “Tornado Cash” as an entity on the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) sanction list raises important questions that are being discussed around the world. OFAC explained its sanction by saying “Tornado Cash (Tornado … | Continue reading
Jump straight to the Online Privacy for Nonprofits Guide to Better Practices Today, the vast majority of websites and emails that you encounter contain some form of tracking. Third-party cookies let advertisers follow you around the web; tracking pixels in emails confirm whether … | Continue reading
Jump straight to the Online Privacy for Nonprofits Guide to Better Practices Today, the vast majority of websites and emails that you encounter contain some form of tracking. Third-party cookies let advertisers follow you around the web; tracking pixels in emails confirm whether … | Continue reading
A recently introduced patent bill would authorize patents on abstract ideas just for including computer jargon, and would even legalize the patenting of human genes. The “Patent Eligibility Restoration Act,” sponsored by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), explicitly overrides some of the m … | Continue reading
When legal issues light up the Internet, people turn to EFF for answers. Whether it’s attacks on coders' rights, overreaching copyright claims online, or governments' efforts to censor or spy on people, we are often among the first to hear about troubling events online, and we're … | Continue reading
The ease with which bad actors can find a worldwide market for malicious apps that spy on people’s digital devices is at the center of an Australian Federal Police case against a man who, starting at the age of 15, wrote a stalkerware application and sold it to 14,500 people in 1 … | Continue reading
When data broker SafeGraph got caught selling location information on Planned Parenthood visitors, it had a public relations trick up its sleeve. After the company agreed to remove family planning center data from its platforms in response to public outcry, CEO Auren Hoffman trie … | Continue reading
Even if you think that online intermediaries should be more proactive in detecting, deprioritizing, or removing certain user speech, the requirements on intermediaries to review all content before publication—often called “general monitoring” or “upload filtering”—raises serious … | Continue reading
Police used private network of 300 surveillance cameras to spy on George Floyd protests in 2020, plaintiffs tell appeals court.SAN FRANCISCO–San Francisco police violated the city’s surveillance technology law by tapping into a private surveillance camera network to spy on demons … | Continue reading
EFF members come from all over the world to DEF CON to experience the world’s largest computer hacking conference and enjoy what Las Vegas has to offer. This year some of EFF’s supporters combined their love for internet freedom and a good time by competing in the first EFF Benef … | Continue reading
Government involvement in content moderation raises serious human rights concerns in every context, and these concerns are further troubling when the involvement originates with law enforcement. When sites cooperate with government agencies, it leaves the platform inherently bias … | Continue reading
With the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs reversing long-standing rights to abortion access, workers and volunteers for reproductive health clinics must reevaluate the risks they face (also known as a threat model) and take steps to safeguard their personal information–incl … | Continue reading
Over nearly three decades, DEF CON grew and evolved into the world's largest hacker conference for computer security professionals, tinkerers, hobbyists, and more. The EFF staff will return to support the community at the Las Vegas summer security conferences—BSides LV, Black Hat … | Continue reading
EFF intern Emma Plankey contributed to this blog post. Students should not have to fear expulsion for expressing themselves on social media after school and off-campus, but that is just what happened to the plaintiff in C1.G v. Siegfried. Last month, the Tenth Circuit Court of Ap … | Continue reading
The UK government has had more than a year to revise its Online Safety Bill into a proposal that wouldn’t harm users’ basic rights. It has failed to do so, and the bill should be scrapped. The current bill is a threat to free expression, and it undermines the encryption that we a … | Continue reading
EFF is celebrating the spirit of Las Vegas hacker summer camp this week and—whether you're online or in person—you're invited to support the movement for digital freedom. Technology touches more of your life every day. Whether you’re telling a friend you’re on the way or you’re f … | Continue reading
Reports have surfaced about the removal of information about abortion from social media. Unfortunately, none of it is unprecedented. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram have long maintained broad and vague community standards that allows them to remove content with little recou … | Continue reading
There's a lot of discussion right now about how a federal privacy bill, the American Data Privacy Protection Act (H.R.8152), will affect state privacy laws. EFF has a clear position on this: federal privacy laws should not roll back state privacy protections. The ADPPA, as curren … | Continue reading
Nominations Now Open for the 2022 EFF AwardsFor thirty years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation presented awards to key leaders in the fight for freedom and innovation online. EFF’s annual Pioneer Award Ceremony celebrated the longtime stalwarts working on behalf of technology u … | Continue reading
EFF is disappointed by the latest draft of the American Data Privacy Protection Act, or the ADPPA (H.R. 8152), a federal comprehensive data privacy bill. The bill passed the U.S. House Energy and Commerce committee on Wednesday, and is headed to the House floor. We have been clos … | Continue reading
How transparent are police about surveillance technology? It depends on where you look. When it comes to acceptable levels of secrecy around police tools, states have drawn their lines in very different places, resulting in some communities where it is much harder for the public … | Continue reading
EFF joined the Association of Progressive Communications (APC) and other digital rights organizations from around the world, urging the Indian government to withdraw its new amendment to Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code (2021 IT Rules). EFF has already expres … | Continue reading
11 July 2022 H.E. Ms. Faouzia Boumaiza Mebarki ChairpersonAd Hoc Committee to Elaborate a Comprehensive International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communication Technologies for Criminal Purposes Your Excellency, We, the undersigned, represent NGOs accredit … | Continue reading
The DEF CON hacking conference is back in Las Vegas for its 30th year and we’re going all in on internet freedom. Security expert Tarah Wheeler will host EFF's first charity poker tournament at Bally's Poker Room on Friday, August 12. The event features emcee Jen Easterly and mor … | Continue reading
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Court has ruled that a seven-month ban on Twitter by Nigerian authorities in 2021 was unlawful and infringed freedom of expression and access to media. The court, which is a political and economic union of fifteen West Africa … | Continue reading
Nominations are now open for the 2022 EFF Awards! The nomination window will be open until August 2nd at 2:00 PM Pacific time. You could nominate the next winner today!For thirty years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation presented awards to key leaders in the fight for freedom an … | Continue reading
In a letter to the Indian Government, EFF and partner digital rights organizations from around the world called on the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to withdraw the so-called traceability requirement under its Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media … | Continue reading