The challenges in ensuring strong privacy safeguards, proper oversight of surveillance powers, and effective remedy for those arbitrarily affected continued during 2023 in Latin America. Let’s take a few, non-exhaustive, examples.We saw a scandal unveiling that Brazilian Intelligence agents monitored movements of politicians, journalists, lawyers, police officers, and...

At the start of 2023, we sunsetted the HTTPS Everywhere web extension. It encrypted browser communications with websites and made sure users benefited from the protection of HTTPS wherever possible. HTTPS Everywhere ended because all major browsers now offer the functionality to make HTTPS the default. This is due to...

EFF believes you have the right to have a private conversation–in the physical world, and in the digital world. The best technology to protect that right is end-to-end encryption. Governments around the world are working hard to monitor online conversations, far beyond the bounds of traditional targeted law enforcement. 2023...

Our personal data and the ways private companies harvest and monetize it plays an increasingly powerful role in modern life. Throughout 2023, corporations have continued to collect our personal data, sell it to governments, use it to reach inferences about us, and exacerbate existing structural inequalities across society. EFF is...

Machine learning, artificial intelligence, algorithmic decision making–regardless of what you call it, and there is hot debate over that, this technology has been touted as a supposed threat to humanity, the future of work, as well as the hot new money-making doohickey. But one thing is...

EFF continues to fight back against high-tech general warrants that compel companies to search broad swaths of users’ personal data. In 2023, we saw victory and setbacks in a pair of criminal cases that challenged the constitutionality of geofence and keyword searches. These types of warrants—mostly directed at Google—cast a...

Patents are supposed to be an incentive to invent. Too often, they end up being a way to try to claim “ownership” of what should be basic building blocks of human activity, culture, and knowledge. This is especially true of software patents, an area EFF has been speaking out...