Ninth Circuit: Surveillance Company Not Immune from International Lawsuit
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...
Certbot’s Instructions Generator now available in Farsi
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...
European Parliament’s Plans Of A Digital Services Act Threaten Internet Freedoms
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...
Data Broker Veraset Gave Bulk Device-Level GPS Data to DC Government
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...
Brazil’s Fake News Bill: Perils and Flaws of Expanding Existent Data Retention Obligations
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...
Brazil’s Fake News Bill: Congress Must Stand Firm on Repealing Dangerous and Disproportionate Surveillance Measures
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...
Senators Push To Study “Unstable” Patent Law, While Patent Trolls Cheer Them On
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...
Face Recognition Is So Toxic, Facebook Is Dumping It
Facebook announced it is, for now, shutting down its face recognition program, which created face prints of users and automatically recognized them in uploaded photos. The decision to end the program comes at a time when face recognition technology is receiving push back, criticisms, and legislative bans across the...
PDX Privacy: Building Community Defenses in Difficult Times
The Electronic Frontier Alliance is made up of more than seventy groups of concerned community members, often including workers in the tech industry who see issues of the industry from the inside. One of the Alliance’s most active members is PDX Privacy, a Portland-based privacy group whose membership advocates for...
Copyright Regulator Eases Restrictions on Research, Education, and Repair
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has interfered with a staggering array of speech and innovation, from security research to accessibility for those with disabilities to remix and even repair. By forbidding unauthorized access to a copyrighted work—even for purposes that don’t infringe copyright—the DMCA effectively erased over a century...









