Top Features
Every year, we encounter new, often ill-conceived bills written by state, federal, and international regulators to tackle a broad set of digital topics ranging from child safety to artificial intelligence. These scattershot proposals to correct online harm are often based on censorship and news cycles. Instead of this chaotic approach that rarely leads to the passage of good laws, we propose another solution in a new report: Privacy First: A Better Way to Address Online Harms. In this report, we outline how many of the internet's ills have one thing in common: They're based on the business model of widespread corporate surveillance online. Dismantling this system would not only be a huge step forward to our digital privacy, it would raise the floor for serious discussions about the internet's future.
Today, almost everything about our lives is digitally recorded and stored somewhere. Each credit card purchase, personal medical diagnosis, and preference about music and books is recorded and then used to predict what we like and dislike, and ultimately, who we are. Sometimes companies say our personal data is “anonymized,” implying a one-way ratchet where it can never be dis-aggregated and re-identified. But this is not possible—anonymous data rarely stays this way.
EFF has introduced Badger Swarm, a new tool for Privacy Badger that runs distributed Badger Sett scans in the cloud. Badger Swarm helps us continue updating and growing Privacy Badger’s tracker knowledge, as well as continue adding new ways of catching trackers. Thanks to continually expanding Badger Swarm-powered training, Privacy Badger comes packed with its largest blocklist yet.
EFF Updates
The Federal Trade Commission must act to halt sales by Amazon, AliExpress, and other resellers of Android television set-top boxes and mobile devices manufactured by AllWinner and RockChip that have been pre-infected with malware before ever reaching consumers, the EFF urged in a letter to FTC commissioners.
Social media is a crucial means of communication in times of conflict—it’s where communities connect to share updates, find help, locate loved ones, and reach out to express grief, pain, and solidarity. Unjustified takedowns during crises like the war in Gaza deprives people of their right to freedom of expression and can exacerbate humanitarian suffering.
EFF has asked the Supreme Court to overturn a ruling undermining Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination, and to find that constitutional safeguards prevent police from forcing people to provide or use passcodes for their cell phones so officers can access the tremendous amount of private information on phones.
Generative AI gained widespread attention earlier this year, but one group has had to reckon with it more quickly than most: educators. Teachers and school administrators have struggled with two big questions: Should the use of generative AI be banned? And should a school implement new tools to detect when students have used generative AI? EFF believes the answer to both of these questions is no.
Alaa Abd El Fattah—a prominent Egyptian-British coder, blogger, activist, and one of the most high-profile political prisoners in the entire Arab world—recently spent a tenth consecutive birthday in prison. But we are newly optimistic for his release: Alaa's family and International Counsel acting on his behalf filed an urgent appeal with the United Nations requesting urgent action over his continuing and unjust imprisonment in Egypt.
Here’s an audio version of EFFector. We hope you enjoy it!
Announcements
We value that our success in defending digital rights, innovation, and essential freedoms is possible because of your support, confidence, and readiness to take action. Over the years, our community and the people impacted by our work have broadened, but EFF's dedication to listening to you, your concerns, and what drives your commitment has stayed the same. Please help us do that by participating in our survey. Just 10 minutes of your time will help EFF better understand our community and the members that power our work.
U.S. federal employees and retirees can support the digital freedom movement through the Combined Federal Campaign—the largest and most successful annual charity campaign for U.S. federal employees and retirees. Last year, 175 members of the CFC community raised over $34,000 for EFF's lawyers, activists, and technologists fighting for digital freedoms online. But in a year with many threats popping up to our rights online, we need your support now more than ever.
EFF's series of interviews with free-speech thought leaders has returned. Cindy Cohn interviewed Agustina Del Campo—Director at the Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information at the University of Palermo in Buenos Aires, Argentina—to discuss how, though free speech has a bad rap these days, it is inherent in any advocacy agenda aimed at challenging and changing the status quo and existing power dynamics. And Jillian York interviewed David Kaye, a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine; co-director of the university’s Fair Elections and Free Speech Center; independent board chair of the Global Network Initiative; and the former UN Special Rapporteur on Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression from 2014-2020.
Job Openings
As the Assistant Director of Federal Affairs, you are responsible for helping EFF advocate for digital civil rights and liberties at the federal government level. You have extensive knowledge of Capitol Hill and how congressional offices work and think. You know how to talk to Hill staff. You know how to manage multiple ongoing projects and communication threads, and you enjoy building rapport with people across diverse backgrounds, interests, and experiences.
This position is part of a highly cross-disciplinary Legislative team, and will collaborate regularly with our legal, technologist, and activist colleagues. As threats to digital civil liberties arise, you may need to quickly get up to speed on any number of issues that EFF works on, and be prepared to discuss complicated, emerging issues with diverse audiences. You do not need a technical background—your colleagues have significant technical expertise—but you welcome the opportunity to engage on and learn about technology and how it relates to EFF’s policy goals. Above all, you understand what it takes to bring people together around a common purpose while navigating disagreements and matching tactics and strategies to advocacy goals.
We value candidates who bring diverse experiences and perspectives, professional and otherwise, to our team and to EFF as a whole.
MiniLinks
TechCrunch had an exclusive look into the research done by EFF’s Alexis Hancock, which found that a children’s tablet that her daughter had received as a birthday present had a slew of security and privacy issues that could have put her daughter’s and other children’s data at risk.
Hundreds of pages of emails between the driverless car company Cruise and the San Francisco Police Department show how contentious — and at times, collaborative — their relationship has been since the autonomous vehicle firm offered its robotaxi service to the public last year. The trove of emails, unearthed by EFF and shared exclusively with Bloomberg News, offers a rare glimpse into the interaction between a company at the cutting edge of transportation technology and the law enforcement tasked with making sure its cars operate safely.
After facing considerable blowback, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley walked back her declaration that all people should be required to verify their identities to use social media platforms, after previously calling anonymous accounts a “national security threat.” EFF’s David Greene explained that cracking down on anonymity also could harm vulnerable individuals, including whistleblowers, political dissidents and victims of domestic violence.
EFF’s Katitza Rodriguez joins Nick Ashton-Hart—head of delegation to the Cybercrime Convention Negotiations for the Cybersecurity Tech Accord—and moderator Ali Wyne of the Eurasia Group to discuss a treaty that covers too broad a scope of crime and could fail to protect free speech and other human rights across borders while not even having the intended effect of combating cybercrime.
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