EFF invites everyone to participate this Saturday, Nov. 13, in this year's (virtual) Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon—an annual event celebrating the life and continuing legacy of activist, programmer, and entrepreneur Aaron Swartz.
Aaron Swartz was a digital rights champion who believed deeply in keeping the internet...

Facebook needs to be reined in. Lawmakers and everyday users are mad, having heard former Facebook employee Frances Haugen explain how Facebook valued growth and engagement over everything else, even health and safety. But Congress’s latest effort—to regulate algorithms that recommend content on social media platforms—misses the mark.We need...

UPDATE: On January 9, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court denied NSO Group's request to hear the case, leaving in place the Ninth Circuit's opinion.Vendors of surveillance technology can make big money on the global market, frequently by enabling authoritarian governments to spy on journalists and activists. That’s why, for...

EFF’s Certbot tool helps to automate TLS/SSL certificates for web servers—and we believe that should be a global right. Certbot is a free, open source software tool for automatically using Let’s Encrypt certificates, and is part of EFF’s larger effort to encrypt...

The EU's Digital Services Act is a chance to preserve what works and to fix what is broken. EFF and other civil society groups have advocated for new rules that protect fundamental rights online, while formulating a bold vision to address today's most pressing challenges. However, while the initial...

In the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, a location data broker called Veraset offered officials in Washington, DC full access to its proprietary database of “highly sensitive” device-level GPS data, collected from cell phones, for the entire DC metro area.The officials accepted the offer, according to public...

This post is the second of two analyzing the risks of approving dangerous and disproportionate surveillance obligations in the Brazilian Fake News bill. You can read our first article here.Following a series of public hearings in Brazil's Chamber of Deputies after the Senate's approval of the so-called Fake News...

This post is the first of two analyzing the risks of approving dangerous and disproportionate surveillance obligations in the Brazilian Fake News bill. You can read our second article here.The revised text of Brazil’s so-called Fake News bill (draft bill 2630), aimed at countering disinformation online, contains both...

Led by a group of senators that spent much of 2019 trying to change U.S. patent law for the worse, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has agreed to study the “current state of patent jurisprudence.” The details of the study make it clear that its proposers...