Without a strong, comprehensive federal privacy law, “surveillance pricing” may give way to a never-ending parade of ways to use the most intimate facts about your life against you.
Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA) Videoconferences are an opportunity for local grassroots groups to share their work, offer mutual support, and participate in exclusive talks and workshops on digital rights issues. These events are only open to EFA member groups, but membership is open to applications for qualifying...
Legal intern Danya Hajjaji was the lead author of this post.EFF filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit supporting a group of journalists in their lawsuit against Israeli spyware company NSO Group. In our amicus brief backing the plaintiffs’ appeal, we argued...
Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a ban on reading any copyrighted work that is encumbered by access restrictions. It makes it illegal for you to read and understand the code that determines how your phone or car works and whether those devices are safe. It makes...
California is one of the nation’s few full-time state legislatures. That means advocates have to track and speak up on hundreds of bills that move through the legislative process on a strict schedule between January and August every year. The legislature has been adjourned for a month, and won't...
Last week, Google backtracked on its long-standing promise to block third-party cookies in Chrome. This is bad for your privacy and good for Google's business. Third-party cookies are a pervasive tracking technology that allow companies to snoop on your online activity for surveillance and ad-targeting purposes. The consumer...
In a big win for free speech online, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that a federal agency violated the First Amendment when it blocked animal rights activists from commenting on the agency’s social media pages. We filed an amicus brief in the case,...
Last month’s unprecedented global IT failure should be a wakeup call. Decades of antitrust inaction have made many industries dangerously reliant on the same tools, making such crises inevitable. We must demand regulators break up the digital monocultures that are creating a less competitive, less safe, and less free...
The Atlanta Police Department has been snooping on social media to closely monitor the meetings, protests, canvassing–even book clubs and pizza parties–of the political movement to stop “Cop City,” a police training center that would destroy part of an urban forest. Activists already believed they were likely under surveillance by...
The draft UN Cybercrime Convention was supposed to help tackle serious online threats like ransomware attacks, which cost billions of dollars in damages every year.But, after two and a half years of negotiations among UN Member States, the draft treaty’s broad rules for collecting evidence across borders may turn it...
The Texas settlement is welcome, but it also highlights the need to give consumers their own private right of action to enforce consumer data privacy laws.
The proposed UN Cybercrime Treaty puts security researchers and journalists at risk of being criminally prosecuted for their work identifying and reporting computer system vulnerabilities, work that keeps the digital ecosystem safer for everyone.The proposed text fails to exempt security research from the expansive scope of its cybercrime...
As UN delegates sat down in New York this week to restart negotiations, calls are mounting from all corners—from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to Big Tech—to add critical human rights protections to, and fix other major flaws in, the proposed UN surveillance treaty, which as...