Being able to accurately determine your location anywhere on the planet is a useful technological trick. But when tracking isn’t done by you, but to you—without your knowledge or consent—it’s a violation of your privacy. That’s why at EFF we’ve long fought against dragnet surveillance, mobile device tracking,...
First came tracking devices like Tiles and AirTags, marketed as clever, button-sized Bluetooth-enabled gizmos that can find your lost backpack. Then, after bad actors started using the devices to stalk or follow people, came scanning apps to help victims find out whether those same gizmos were tracking them.Such is the...
EFF client Erik Johnson, a Miami University computer engineering undergraduate, reached a settlement in the lawsuit we brought on his behalf against exam surveillance software maker Proctorio, in a victory for fair use of copyrighted material and people’s right to fight back against bad faith Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)...
Putting children under surveillance and limiting their access to information doesn’t make them safer—in fact, researchsuggests just the opposite. Unfortunately those tactics are the ones endorsed by the Kids Online Safety Act of 2022 (KOSA), introduced by Sens. Blumenthal and Blackburn. The bill deserves credit for...
Remote proctoring companies like Proctorio, ProctorU, and ExamSoft collect all manner of private data on students and test takers, from biometric information to citizenship status to video and audio of a user’s surroundings. During the pandemic there has been a 500% increase in the usage of these proctoring tools—in...
When journalists want to know if and how local police or governments are using technology tools to surveil communities, one of the first people they call (or message on Signal) is Dave Maass, EFF Director of Investigations.Maass’ expertise in the use of police tech like automated license plate readers,...
Like many young people, Zach Latta went to a school that didn't teach any computer classes. But that didn’t stop him from learning everything he could about them and becoming a programmer at a young age. After moving to San Francisco, Zach founded Hack Club, a nonprofit network of high...
Tech companies earn staggering profits by targeting ads to us based on our online behavior. This incentivizes all online actors to collect as much of our behavioral information as possible, and then sell it to ad tech companies and the data brokers that service them. This pervasive online behavioral surveillance...
After the defeat of SOPA/PIPA, Big Content has mostly focused on quiet, backroom deals for copyright legislation, like the unconstitutional CASE Act, which was so unpopular it had to be slipped into a must-pass bill in the dead of winter. But now, almost exactly a decade later, they’ve come screaming...
The horrific Russian military invasion of Ukraine has understandably led to a backlash against Russia. The temptation is to label anything Russian, from state media and students to cats, as bad and block it to signal outrage and ostracization. This type of thinking has infected the open...
Update: a new text of the Fake News Bill was released days after our post, which brings some clarity to a few of many critical ambiguities in this proposal. We welcome these attempts to provide greater clarity to the rule, but this proposal is still dangerously underspecified and the many...
Pity the poor content moderator. Big Tech platforms expect their mods to correctly apply a set of rules to users in more than a hundred countries, in over a thousand languages. These users are clustered into literally millions of online communities, each with its own norms and taboos. What a...
An upcoming proposal from the European Union Commission could make government scanning of user messages and photos mandatory throughout the E.U. If that happens, it would be inconsistent with providing true end-to-end encryption in Europe. That would be a disaster, not just for the privacy and security...
Today, EFF joins Article 19 and more than 50 organizations in urging the Iranian government to rescind a bill with severe implications for the privacy, security and freedom of expression of Internet users in Iran. The text of our letter is below.Iran: Human rights groups sound alarm against draconian...
