Author: Electronic Frontier Foundation

We don’t need government minders in our private conversations. That’s because private conversations, whether they happen offline or online, aren’t a public safety menace. They’re not an invitation to criminality, or terrorism, or a threat to children, no matter how many times those tired old lines get repeated. 

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TELL CONGRESS: DON’T SPEND TAX MONEY TO BREAK ENCRYPTION

Unfortunately, federal law enforcement officials have not stopped asking for backdoor access to Americans’ encrypted messages. FBI Director Christopher Wray did it again just last month, falsely claiming that end-to-end encryption and “user-only access” have “negligible security advantages” but have

Tiburon, California: a 13-square-mile peninsula town in Marin County, known for its glorious views of the San Francisco Bay and its eclectic retail district. 

What the town’s tourism bureau may not want you to know: from the moment you drive into the city limits, your vehicle will be under extreme surveillance. The Tiburon Police Department

The U.S. is distributing more vaccines and the population is gradually becoming vaccinated. Returning to regular means of activity and movement has become the main focus for many Americans who want to travel or see family.

An increasingly common proposal to get there is digital proof-of-vaccination, sometimes called “Vaccine Passports.” On the surface, this may seem like a reasonable solution. But to “return to normal”, we also have to consider that inequity and problems with access are a part of that normal. Also, these proposals require a new infrastructure and culture of doorkeepers to public places regularly requiring visitors

Are tech giants really damned if they do and damned if they don’t (protect our privacy)?

That’s a damned good question that’s been occasioned by Google’s announcement that they’re killing the invasive, tracking third-party cookie (yay!) and replacing it with FLoC, an alternative tracking scheme that will make it harder for everyone except Google to track you (uh, yay?)  (You can find out if Google is FLoCing with you with our Am I FLoCed tool).

Google’s move to kill the third-party cookie has been greeted with both cheers and derision. On the one hand, some people are happy

Phoenix, Arizona—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit today against Proctorio Inc. on behalf of college student Erik Johnson, seeking a judgment that he didn’t infringe the company’s copyrights when he linked to excerpts of its software code in tweets criticizing the software maker.

Proctorio, a developer of exam administration and surveillance software, misused the copyright takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to have Twitter remove posts by Johnson, a Miami University computer engineering undergraduate and security researcher. EFF and co-counsel Osborn Maledon said in a complaint filed today in U.S. District

While Turkey hit the headlines last week with a ban on paying for items with cryptocurrency, the government of India appears to be moving towards outlawing cryptocurrency completely. An unnamed senior government official told Reuters last month that a forthcoming bill this parliamentary session would include the prohibition of the “possession, issuance, mining, trading and transferring [of] crypto-assets.” Officials have subsequently done little to dispel the concern that they are seeking a full cryptocurrency ban: in response to questions by Indian MPs about the timing and the content of a potential Cryptocurrency Act, the Finance Ministry was non-committal, beyond stating

Predictive policing is dangerous and yet its use among law enforcement agencies is growing. Predictive policing advocates, and companies that make millions selling technology to police departments, like to say the technology is based on “data” and therefore it cannot be racially biased. But this technology will disproportionately hurt Black and other overpoliced communities, because the data was created by a criminal punishment system that is racially biased. For example, a data set of arrests, even if they are nominally devoid of any racial information, can still be dangerous by virtue of the fact that police make

San Francisco—On Tuesday, April 20, and Wednesday, April 21, experts from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) fighting copyright abuse will testify at virtual hearings held by the Copyright Office in favor of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) so people who have purchased digital devices—from cameras and e-readers to smart TVs—can repair or modify them, or download new software to enhance their functionality.

The online hearings are part of a rulemaking process held every three years by the Copyright Office to determine whether people are harmed by DMCA “anti-circumvention” provisions, which prohibit anyone from bypassing or disabling

San Francisco, California—Boosting protection of Internet users’ personal data from snooping advertisers and third-party trackers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today announced it has enhanced its groundbreaking HTTPS Everywhere browser extension by incorporating rulesets from DuckDuckGo Smarter Encryption.

The partnership represents the next step in the evolution of HTTPS Everywhere, a collaboration with The Tor Project and a key component of EFF’s effort to encrypt the web and make the Internet echo system safe for users and website owners.

“DuckDuckGo Smarter Encryption has a list of millions of HTTPS-encrypted websites, generated by continually crawling the web instead of through