Doxxing: Tips To Protect Yourself Online & How to Minimize Harm
“Doxxing” is an eerie, cyber-sounding term that gets thrown around more and more these days, but what exactly does it mean? Simply put, it’s when a person or other entity exposes information about you, publicly available or secret, for the purpose of causing harm. It might be information you intended...
Vaccine Passports: A Stamp of Inequity
A COVID vaccine has been approved and vaccinations have begun. With them have come proposals of ways to prove you have been vaccinated, based on the presumption that vaccination renders a person immune and unable to spread the virus. The latter is ...
The EU’s Digital Markets Act: There Is A Lot To Like, but Room for Improvement
After lengthy consultations and many rumors and leaks, the European Commission has released its public draft of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which, along with the Digital Services Act (DSA,) represents the first major overhaul of EU Internet legislation in the 21st Century. Like the DSA, the DMA...
European Commission’s Proposed Digital Services Act Got Several Things Right, But Improvements Are Necessary to Put Users in Control
The European Commission is set to release today a draft of the Digital Services Act, the most significant reform of European Internet regulations in two decades. The proposal, which will modernize the backbone of the EU’s Internet legislation—the e-Commerce Directive—sets out new responsibilities and rules for how Facebook, Amazon,...
Protecting Your Rights to Understand and Innovate on the Tech in Your Life
Every three years, the public has an opportunity to chip away at the harm inflicted by an offshoot of copyright law that doesn’t respect traditional safeguards such as fair use. This law, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, impedes speech, innovation, and access to knowledge by threatening huge...
Visa and Mastercard are Trying to Dictate What You Can Watch on Pornhub
Pornhub is removing millions of user-uploaded videos. This action comes after a New York Times column accused the website of hosting sexual videos of underage and nonconsenting women. In response to the Times’ article, Visa and Mastercard cut ties with Pornhub, making it impossible for Pornhub to process...
Massachusetts Legislators Should Stand With Their Communities and Restore Face Recognition Prohibitions to Police Reform Bill
Before 2020 ends, Massachusetts could become the first state to implement robust state-wide protections from government use of face recognition. As part of a sweeping package of police reform legislation (S. 2963) inspired by protests for police accountability, state legislators in the commonwealth passed a prohibition on government agencies...
IPANDETEC Releases First Report Rating Nicaraguan Telecom Providers’ Privacy Policies
IPANDETEC, a digital rights organization in Central America, today released its first "Who Defends Your Data" (¿Quién Defiende Tus Datos?) report for Nicaragua, assessing how well the country’s mobile phone and Internet service providers (ISPs) are protecting users' personal data and communications. The report follows the series of...
California Has a New COVID Exposure Notification App
Today California joined dozens of other states and countries in launching its COVID-19 exposure notification app, CA Notify, built on Google and Apple’s Exposure Notification API. Google and Apple’s API is already used in 20 other U.S. states, as well as countries including Germany, the...
Raid on COVID Whistleblower in Florida Shows the Need to Reform Overbroad Computer Crime Laws and the Risks of Over-Reliance on IP Addresses
The armed Florida Department of Law Enforcement raid on Monday on the Tallahassee Florida home of data scientist and COVID whistleblower Rebekah Jones was shocking on many levels. This incident smacks of retaliation against someone claiming to provide the public with truthful information about the most pressing issue facing both...
