Deeplinks

In my first weeks as Executive Director of EFF, I’ve been reminded every day how consequential this moment is in determining what kind of future we will have. We are on the edge. What each one of us steps up to do – with our expertise, energy, and resources – will determine whether our future is one of openness, security, and fundamental rights, or one controlled through fear, surveillance, and ce...

This post is part 2 in a series about automated content moderation. Read the first post here . When whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked a set of documents from Meta in 2020, among the revelations was a jarring statistic: The company’s algorithms designed to detect terrorist content incorrectly deleted nonviolent Arabic-language content 77 percent of the time, while failing to detect hate speech un...

Last May, EFF reported that a sheriff’s office in Texas searched data from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to track down a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion. ALPRs are promoted as tools for keeping communities safe by finding missing persons and locating stolen vehicles, but this case showed how ALPRS can be weaponized to investigate people’s private healt...

Last week, the House voted on the KIDS Act , a disjointed package of legislation that seeks to control Americans’ web browsing and private messaging. The package combines a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act  ( KOSA), with several other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements, and new regulations. Different parts of the bill pressure online services to impose different age-g...

Users are always seeking more control over their social networking experience to make it better, whether to improve privacy or enhance flexibility. Interoperability between social networking platforms like Facebook and TikTok has so many benefits that solve those issues.    Say you’re on multiple platforms because you have friends you follow on different networks, but you’ve decided to choose one...

Google owes its existence to the open web, but today, its technological “innovations” have much to do with locking users into a “walled garden.” The latest of these is “ reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification ,” an experimental initiative that will let companies block users if they are running independent, "de-googled" versions of Android. These “indie Android” versions are favored by people who want to pr...

This blog post is part 1 of a 2-part series. The second part will set out recommendations for companies and policymakers. Six years ago—one month into a global pandemic—we argued that the automated moderation processes many platforms were rapidly adopting should be highly transparent, easily appealable, and temporary. We warned that "protocols adopted in times of crisis often persist when the cris...

In the global race to build and dominate the AI industry, it can sure seem like the interests of ordinary people sit last on the agenda. It's just the opposite for EFF. While companies furiously jam AI tools into their veins and your eyeballs, EFF’s technologists, activists, and attorneys have been meticulously cutting through the hype to ensure AI can serve your privacy and free expression. Techn...

This Pride, we’re answering all your digital rights questions in season two of our initiative, LGBT Q&A .  You Asked: Is there a way for me to wipe data about me online that could point to my queer identity? EFF’s Answer: You cannot protect everything all the time, but there are ways to wipe information about yourself online.  Most information available about you online will typically be found...

X Corp. should not be able to escape privacy compliance because it changed its name.  On May 15, X Corp. filed a petition before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to set aside or modify an order issued in 2022 requiring the company to report regularly to the FTC for its violations of user data. The order or “consent decree” is a result of misleading the platforms’ 140 million users by using priva...

This Pride, we’re answering all your digital rights questions in season two of our initiative, LGBT Q&A .  You Asked: I live in the UK, and we have age verification now on a bunch of websites (including Reddit) and now on iPhones. Can you explain what sort of data companies are actually collecting when they check for age and whether there are any real threats to my safety?  EFF’s Answer: Age v...

The Illinois legislature recently passed House Bill 5511 , which imposes a sweeping, device-level age-gating framework across nearly all internet-enabled hardware, operating systems, and online services. This well-intentioned but deeply flawed piece of legislation will harm young people who rely on the internet to access essential information and find community. That’s why we’re urging the Illinoi...

You have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world, and even short-term surveillance of these movements is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in Chatrie v. United States .    The case involved geofence warrants, a form of dragnet surveillance police have used to vacuum up location data from electronic devi...

This Pride month, we’re calling on the dating app Grindr to prioritize LGBTQ+ user safety by making privacy the default across its platform. That means no more sharing personal data with advertisers or training AI on private information without users’ opt-in consent. Grindr is a dating app for the LGBTQ+ community; and for queer people, privacy violations can have life-altering consequences. Infor...

Poke your head into just about any online social network—or any general conversations about internet culture—and you’ll likely find a boogieman: the algorithm. Since at least the moment Facebook introduced ( and apologized for ) its News Feed, “the algorithm” has been shorthand for the ways the tech giants control what we see and when we see it. In the age of enshittification, there is a push to r...

This is not science fiction. It’s not premature. If towns, cities, states, or the federal government want to act to reign in the emergence of armed police drones and robots , we have precious little time. In the absence of substantial regulation around when and how domestic law enforcement in the United States can deploy force using drones, the companies that markets technology to law enforcement...

Ignoring EFF’s warnings about the dangers and impossibility of implementing a new mandate for 3D print surveillance software , the California State Assembly has signed off on legislation to do just that. In the process, legislators amended the bill to make it even more confusing, while failing to address the risks to privacy, speech, and consumer rights. We must renew our call on legislators to dr...

Time and time again, researchers have found numerous compromised Android devices for sale at large online retailers like Amazon. When these devices get individually reported, we have seen some noted efforts to take them down. But this is a systemic problem and Amazon and other major online retailers must make a corresponding systemic and intentional effort to stop these devices from entering peopl...

Seeking transparency and accountability in Paraguay’s use of facial recognition, EFF, the Association of Technology, Education, Development, Research, Communication (TEDIC), and the Centre for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) filed a complaint  with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights against the state for arbitrarily denying access to information about its implementation and use of...

This week marks four years since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade ’s constitutional protections for people seeking abortion care. Anniversaries are a moment to take stock, and over the last four years, EFF has seen firsthand how digital rights and reproductive rights have become increasingly intertwined. One major way this has happened: the fight over abortion ha...

The Federal Communications Commission wants to require telecommunications providers to collect vast amounts of personal information from every person who wants a phone number in the name of combatting scam and spam calls. This plan will fail to combat the deluge of unwanted calls people in the United States receive every day while giving untrustworthy companies a gold mine of information that woul...

When a car passes an automated license plate reader (ALPR), its plate is captured and instantly compared against a list of vehicles that police are actively looking for or that police have identified for real-time surveillance. These are called “hotlists,” and EFF has learned that one used by agencies across the country targets immigrants on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  Ag...

Within the next week, Congress is preparing to vote on the KIDS Act , a sprawling package of legislation that seeks to control Americans’ web browsing and private messaging. The package includes a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act , or KOSA, combined with a collection of other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements, and new regulations. Instead of debating any of these pro...

Sold to the public as a foreign surveillance tool, Section 702 is the law has let intelligence agencies spy on millions of Americans’ private conversations without a warrant. Despite years of revelations about this law's misuse, Congress has repeatedly reauthorized Section 702 without meaningful reform. Until this month, that is, when it finally lapsed in a major victory for privacy. In our latest...

This week, politicians in the UK pushed forward with plans to eviscerate privacy and free speech on the internet by announcing a ban on social media for users under 16 that is set to take effect in Spring 2027.  The UK government continues to falsely characterize this policy as a necessary response to growing concerns about online harms for young people. In reality, much like the Online Safety Act...