Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) build a searchable map of everywhere a driver goes, fed into databases that police, ICE, and private vendors can query after the fact. Networked across a city, ALPRs are purpose-built to track everyone regardless of suspicion. ALPRs are not a surveillance tool that can be...
The settlement enshrines Meta's harmful surveillance into law, and it will compromise users' privacy and anonymity while increasing their exposure to data breaches and government data requests.
In a welcome win for free expression, France’s top court has struck down the country’s legislation that banned social media use for people under 15 years old, which had been scheduled to take effect in January 2027.
This week, EFF, along with Big Brother Watch, Defend Digital Me, Liberty, Open Rights Group, Race Equality First, Statewatch, and Stopwatch, wrote to Nottinghamshire Police Force in the UK raising concern about the proposed roll-out of live facial recognition technology (LFR), and called for its immediate halt.In particular, the...
Brazil's new internet intermediary liability regime is underway. The implementation of changes established by the Supreme Court includes notice and takedown mechanisms and duty of care obligations. Caution is crucial as these measures can create problematic incentives for enforcement overreach and over censorship of protected speech. The...
When companies receive these unlawful subpoenas, they should be clear with the public that they will not hand over the data unless a court compels them to do so.
Your location isn't just a pin on a map—it can expose some of the most intimate details about your life. The value of this information to advertisers and others has turned the location data business into a multi-billion dollar industry. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're covering a new...
A federal appeals court just made it harder for online services, big and small, to get lawsuits over user speech dismissed early. In California v. Meta, a Ninth Circuit three-judge panel held that the lower court’s denial of Section 230 immunity to Meta is not immediately appealable. The misguided...
Age verification (laws and regulations requiring platforms and websites to assure or estimate that a user seeking to use an online service is of a certain age) is everywhere. At the time of writing, about half the states in the US have some internet age verification law in...
We’ve had a few questions from EFF supporters lately, asking whether the images we use on our blog posts, or on donation and shop items, have been created with AI image generators. We’d like to answer these questions and clarify our internal policy...
Imagine if McDonald’s could use trademark law to control how you use the term “fast food.” Or if the Canadian government could stop you from using the word “Canada” in the title of a book about the country and its people. That wouldn’t just be absurd; it would be an...
Access to accurate information about reproductive and maternal health can be critical. But on Meta's platforms, simply talking about prescription medication, abortion care, or one's own medical experiences can be enough to trigger content removals and account restrictions.That's why EFF recently submitted a public comment to the Meta Oversight Board...
The Senate Commerce Committee will vote this week on several censorious and privacy invasive bills: KOSA, the SCREEN Act, Youth AI Privacy Act, and CHATBOT Act. While we appreciate that the Committee is taking the time to look at these bills separately, it’s...
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has endorsed a commonsense technical interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a law not usually given to such interpretation. Amazon had sued Perplexity AI to try to shut down its Comet browser, claiming the browser’s optional agentic AI “Assistant” that...
