The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is back in the Senate. Sponsors are claiming—again—that the latest version won’t censor online content. It isn’t true. This bill still sets up a censorship regime disguised as a “duty of care,” and it will do what previous versions threatened: suppress lawful, important speech...
We’ve covered a lot of federal and state proposals that badly miss the mark when attempting to grapple with protecting young people’s safety online. These include bills that threaten to cut young people off from vital information, infringe on their First Amendment rights to speak for...
This is the final part of a three-part series about age verification in the European Union. In part one, we give an overview of the political debate around age verification and explore the age verification proposal introduced by the European Commission, based on digital identities. Part two takes...
This week, the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee moved forward with a proposal in its budget reconciliation bill to impose a ten-year preemption of state AI regulation—essentially saying only Congress, not state legislatures, can place safeguards on AI for the next decade.We strongly oppose this. We’ve talked before about...
Montana has done something that many states and the United States Congress have debated but failed to do: it has just enacted the first attempt to close the dreaded, invasive, unconstitutional, but easily fixed “data broker loophole.” This is a very good step in the right direction because right...
Encrypted chat apps like Signal and WhatsApp are one of the best ways to keep your digital conversations as private as possible. But if you’re not careful with how those conversations are backed up, you can accidentally undermine your privacy. When a conversation is properly encrypted end-to-end, it means that...
President Trump’s attack on public broadcasting has attracted plenty of deserved attention, but there’s a far more technical, far more insidious policy change in the offing—one that will take away Americans’ right to unencumbered access to our publicly owned airwaves. The FCC is quietly contemplating a fundamental restructuring of...
Another federal appeals court has ruled on controversial geofence warrants—sort of. The new opinion in Chatrie is a missed opportunity for the Fourth Circuit to join both other appellate courts to have considered the issue in finding geofence warrants unconstitutional.
We all leave digital trails as we navigate the internet – records of what we searched for, what we bought, who we talked to, where we went or want to go in the real world – and those trails usually are owned by the big corporations behind the platforms we...
The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) recently joined a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) task force geared towards finding and deporting immigrants, according to a report from the Washington Post. Now, immigration officials want two sets of data from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service...
Nominations are now open for the 2025 EFF Awards! The nomination window will be open until Friday, May 23rd at 2:00 PM Pacific time. You could nominate the next winner today!For over thirty years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation presented awards to key leaders and organizations in...
When your local police department buys one piece of surveillance equipment, you can easily expect that the company that sold it will try to upsell them on additional tools and upgrades. At the end of the day, public safety vendors are tech companies, and their representatives are salespeople using all...
The right to repair just keeps on winning. Last week, thanks in part to messages from EFF supporters, the Washington legislature passed a strong consumer electronics right-to-repair legislation through both the House and Senate. The bill affirms our right to repair by banning restrictions that keep people and local businesses...
Setting a crucial precedent, a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling held that consumers can sue national or multinational companies in the consumers’ home courts if those companies violate state data privacy laws.
This is the second part of a three-part series about age verification in the European Union. In this blog post, we take a deep dive into the age verification app solicited by the European Commission, based on digital identities. Part one gives an overview of the political debate around...
