Press Releases: June 2019

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Press Release | June 12, 2019

Social Media Platforms Increase Transparency About Content Removal Requests, But Many Keep Users in the Dark When Their Speech Is Censored, EFF Report Shows

San Francisco and Tunis, Tunisia—While social media platforms are increasingly giving users the opportunity to appeal decisions to censor their posts, very few platforms comprehensively commit to notifying users that their content has been removed in the first place, raising questions about their accountability and transparency, the Electronic...
Press Release | June 12, 2019

Details of Justice Department Efforts To Break Encryption of Facebook Messenger Must Be Made Public, EFF Tells Court

San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation, ACLU and Stanford cybersecurity scholar Riana Pfefferkorn asked a federal appeals court today to make public a ruling that reportedly forbade the Justice Department from forcing Facebook to break the encryption of a communications service for users.Media widely reported last fall that a...
Press Release | June 10, 2019

Hearing Tuesday: EFF Will Voice Support For California Bill Reining In Law Enforcement Use of Facial Recognition

Sacramento, California—On Tuesday, June 11, at 8:30 am, EFF Grassroots Advocacy Organizer Nathan Sheard will testify before the California Senate Public Safety Committee in support of a measure to prohibit law enforcement from using facial recognition in body cams.Following San Francisco’s historic ban on police use of the...
Press Release | June 4, 2019

Hearing Today: EFF Staff Attorney Alex Moss Will Testify About Proposed Changes to Patent Law That Will Benefit Trolls, Foster Bad Patents

Washington D.C.—EFF Staff Attorney Alex Moss will tell U.S. lawmakers today that proposed changes to Section 101 of the U.S. Patent Act—the section that defines, and limits, what can get a patent—will upend years of case law that ensures only true inventions, not basic practices or rudimentary ideas, should...
Press Release | June 3, 2019

Caught in the Net: The Impact of ‘Extremist’ Speech Regulations on Human Rights Content

San Francisco – Social media companies have long struggled with what to do about extremist content that advocates for or celebrates terrorism and violence. But the dominant current approach, which features overbroad and vague policies and practices for removing content, is already decimating human rights content online, according to a...