EFF has been awarded a new $200,000 grant from Craig Newmark Philanthropies to strengthen our cybersecurity work in 2024. We are especially grateful this year, as it marks 30 years of donations from Craig Newmark, who joined as an EFF member just three years after our founding an … | Continue reading
These Dragnet Searches Violate the Privacy of Millions of Americans SAN FRANCISCO—Keyword warrants that let police indiscriminately sift through search engine databases are unconstitutional dragnets that target free speech, lack particularity and probable cause, and violate the p … | Continue reading
Generative AI allows people to produce piles upon piles of images and words very quickly. It would be nice if there were some way to reliably distinguish AI-generated content from human-generated content. It would help people avoid endlessly arguing with bots online, or believing … | Continue reading
As millions of internet users watch videos online for news and entertainment, it is essential to uphold a federal privacy law that protects against the disclosure of everyone’s viewing history, EFF argued in court last month. For decades, the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) h … | Continue reading
Video footage captured by police drones sent in response to 911 calls cannot be kept entirely secret from the public, a California appellate court ruled last week. The decision by the California Court of Appeal for the Fourth District came after a journalist sought access to vide … | Continue reading
An increase in anti-LGBTQ+ intolerance is impacting individuals and communities both online and offline across the globe. Throughout 2023, several countries sought to pass explicitly anti-LGBTQ+ initiatives restricting freedom of expression and privacy. This fuels offline intoler … | Continue reading
It’s a big year for the oozing creep of corporate paternalism and ad-tracking technology online. Google and its subsidiary companies have tightened their grips on the throat of internet innovation, all while employing the now familiar tactic of marketing these things as beneficia … | Continue reading
At EFF, we believe that all the rights we have in the offline world–to speak freely, create culture, play games, build things and do business–must hold up in the digital world, as well. EFF’s longstanding project of fighting for a more balanced, just patent system has always bor … | Continue reading
When a system becomes too tightly-controlled and centralized, the people being squeezed tend to push back to reclaim their lost autonomy. The internet is no exception. While the internet began as a loose affiliation of universities and government bodies, that emergent digital com … | Continue reading
Legislatures in more than half of the country targeted young people’s use of social media this year, with many of the proposals blocking adults’ ability to access the same sites. State representatives introduced dozens of bills that would limit young people’s use of some of the m … | Continue reading
Private communication is a fundamental human right. In the online world, the best tool we have to defend this right is end-to-end encryption. Yet throughout 2023, politicians across Europe attempted to undermine encryption, seeking to access and scan our private messages and pict … | Continue reading
Whatever online harms you want to alleviate on the internet today, you can do it better—with a broader impact—if you enact strong consumer data privacy legislation first. That is a grounding principle that has informed much of EFF’s consumer protection work in 2023. While consume … | Continue reading
EFF works every year to improve policy in ways that protect your digital rights in states across the country. Thanks to the messages of hundreds of EFF members across the country, we've spoken up for digital rights this year from Sacramento to Augusta. Much of EFF's state legisla … | Continue reading
EFF has long advocated for affordable, accessible, future-proof internet access for all. Nearly 80% of Americans already consider internet access to be as essential as water and electricity, so as our work, health services, education, entertainment, social lives, etc. increasingl … | Continue reading
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