EFFector

The Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect Americans from unreasonable searches by their government. But in some cases, there has been a glaring loophole if the FBI wants to read your emails. Sold to the public as a foreign surveillance tool, Section 702 is a law that has let intelligence agencies spy on millions of Americans’ private conversations without a warrant. Despite years of revelations...

Across the country, surveillance companies have spun a vast web of tens of thousands of license plate cameras. Known as ALPR networks, these are mass surveillance systems that allow police to track your car's every move. The people selling this tech want you to believe that it's for your safety, but how are authorities really using license plate readers? Over the past year, we've learned that lice...

When it comes to keeping our texts, chats, and other digital messages safe from prying eyes, we have a powerful tool: end-to-end encryption. Used correctly, end-to-end encryption turns our conversations online into secret messages that can only be decoded by their intended recipients. For years, we've been urging tech companies to bring this privacy-protecting tool to more of the apps and platform...

We'd all like the internet to be a better place—for kids and adults alike. But in the name of online safety, governments around the world are racing to impose a dangerous new system of control. Following Australia's lead, California is now looking to ban anyone under 16 from accessing social media. That means putting much of the internet behind an age gate—a checkpoint that forces every user, rega...

When we use the internet, we're entrusting tech companies with some of our most private information. These companies have promised they'll keep our data safe. But what happens when the government comes knocking at their doors? In April 2025, ICE sent Google an administrative subpoena requesting the data of Amandla Thomas-Johnson, a Ph. D. candidate studying in the U.S. on a student visa. The next...

All across the country, police have convinced communities to pay for mass surveillance systems like license plate readers, claiming they will help stop the most serious crimes. But once these ever-watchful electronic eyes are installed in your city, it's not just violent criminals they're recording—it's everyone. Time and time again, we've seen police surveillance suffer from "mission creep." Tech...

Thanks to smartphones, almost everybody these days is carrying a little video camera around in their pocket, all the time. But the next time a stranger films you in public, you might not be able to tell they're recording at all. In fact, their camera might look just like an ordinary pair of glasses. After years of tech industry experiments, smartglasses with embedded cameras and microphones have f...

We've all had the unsettling experience of seeing an ad online that reveals just how much advertisers know about our lives. You're right to be disturbed. Those very same online ad systems have been used by the government to warrantlessly track peoples' locations, new reporting has confirmed. This week, we're talking about how advertising surveillance enables government surveillance. We're also dis...

The digital world isn't just a place you visit on your phone. It's the battleground where tomorrow's civil liberties will be won—or lost. Each episode of the EFFector podcast will fill you in on the most important news in digital rights, highlighting key developments in the fight for a world where technology supports freedom, not tyranny. For 35 years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been t...