Along with other civil liberties organizations and activists, EFF has long warned that Amazon Ring and other networked home surveillance devices could be used to monitor political activity and protests. Now we have documented proof that our fears were founded. According to emails obtained by EFF, the LAPD sent requests...

A very weak consumer data privacy bill is sailing through the Virginia legislature with backing from Microsoft and Amazon, which have both testified in support of the bill. The bill, SB 1392 and its companion HB 2307, are based on a Washington privacy law backed by tech giants...

Patents generate profits for private companies, but their power comes from the government, and in this country, the government’s power comes from the people. That means the rights patents confer, regardless of who exercises them, are fundamentally public in nature.Patent owners have no right to keep their patents rights secret....

The prosecution of Julian Assange for charges related to his publications of government documents on the whistleblower website Wikileaks poses a grave threat to press freedom, EFF, Freedom of the Press Foundation and other human rights organizations argue. In an open letter published today, we call on President Biden’s...

In all the madness that made up the last month of 2020, a number of copyright bills and proposals popped up—some even became law before most people had any chance to review them. So now that the dust has settled a little and we have some better idea what the...

As the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines has begun across the U.S., there have been numerous reports of people having trouble getting it—not just because of its limited availability, but also because some counties and states have chosen to require computer and Internet access to sign up. This...

Hateful speech presents one of the most difficult problems of content moderation. At a global scale, it’s practically impossible. That’s largely because few people agree about what hateful speech is—whether it is limited to derogations based on race, gender, religion, and other personal characteristics historically subject to hate, whether it...

To have privacy and security in the digital world, encryption is an indispensable ingredient. Without it, we’re all at risk of exploitation—by authoritarian governments, over-reaching police, nosy corporations, and online criminals.But for some years now, federal law enforcement has paid lip service to “cybersecurity,” while actually seeking to make...

Under traditional copyright law, security research is a well-established fair use, meaning it does not infringe copyright. When it was passed in 1998, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act upset the balance of copyright law. Since then, the balance has been further upset as it has been interpreted...