Despite a long history of courts ruling that government efforts to regulate speech online harm all internet users and interfere with their First Amendment rights, state and federal lawmakers continue to pass laws that do just that. Three separate rulings issued in the past week show that...
The early internet had a lot of “technological self-determination" — you could opt out of things, protect your privacy, control your experience. The problem was that it took a fair amount of technical skill to exercise that self-determination. But what if it didn’t? What if the benefits of online privacy,...
Thanks to support from local advocates across the country, we’ve been able to have a few strong years for the right to repair. Both California and Minnesota’s right to repair laws go into effect today, and we've even made some headway convincing large companies, like Apple, to...
The Supreme Court correctly found that social media platforms, like newspapers, bookstores, and art galleries before them, have First Amendment rights to curate and edit the speech of others they deliver to their users.
Right-to-repair advocates have spent more than a decade working for a simple goal: to make sure you can fix and tinker with your own stuff. That should be true whether we’re talking about a car, a tractor, a smartphone, a computer, or really anything you buy. Yet...
The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) wants to get a robot quadruped, popularly known as a robot dog. The city’s Board of Supervisors has a regulatory duty to probe into this intended purchase, including potentially blocking it altogether.The SFPD recently proposed the acquisition of a new robot dog in...
The EU Council has now passed a 4th term without passing its controversial message-scanning proposal. The just-concluded Belgian Presidency failed to broker a deal that would push forward this regulation, which has now been debated in the EU for more than two years. For all those who have reached out...
Hacker Summer Camp is almost here... and with it comes the Third Annual EFF Benefit Poker Tournament at DEF CON 32 hosted by security expert Tarah Wheeler.Please join us at the same place and time as last year: Friday, August 9th, at high noon at the...
In what is becoming a recurring theme, Mississippi became the latest state to pass a law requiring social media services to verify users’ ages and block lawful speech to young people. Once again, EFF explained to the court why the law is unconstitutional.Mississippi’s law (House Bill 1126) requires...
For the past year, EFF has been sounding the alarm about police in California illegally sharing drivers' location data with anti-abortion states, putting abortion seekers and providers at risk of prosecution. We thus applaud the Sacramento County Grand Jury for hearing this call and investigating two police agencies that...
Law enforcement wants more drones, and we’ll probably see many more of them overhead as police departments seek to implement a popular project justifying the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs): the “drone as first responder” (DFR).Police DFR programs involve a fleet of drones, which can range in number...
A global increase in anti-LGBTQ+ intolerance is having a significant impact on digital rights. As we wrote last year, censorship of LGBTQ+ websites and online content is on the rise. For many LGBTQ+ individuals the world over, the internet can be a safer space for exploring identity, finding...
We’ve said it before: online age verification is incompatible with privacy. Companies responsible for storing or processing sensitive documents like drivers’ licenses are likely to encounter data breaches, potentially exposing not only personal data like users’ government-issued ID, but also information about the sites that they visit. This threat...
