Facebook’s Election-Week War on Accountability is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong
A legacy of the 2016 U.S. election is the controversy about the role played by paid, targeted political ads, particularly ads that contain disinformation or misinformation. Political scientists and psychologists disagree about how these ads work, and what effect they have. It's a pressing political question, especially on the eve...
Defending Fair Use in the Omegaverse
Copyright law is supposed to promote creativity, not stamp out criticism. Too often, copyright owners forget that – especially when they have a convenient takedown tool like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).EFF is happy to remind them – as we did this month on behalf of Internet creator Lindsay...
Jim Tyre
Jim Tyre was one of the biggest and best Internet advocates you may never have heard of. He was a friend to EFF, acting as Special Counsel for many years, and we were saddened to hear of his passing earlier this year.
Content Moderation and the U.S. Election: What to Ask, What to Demand
With the upcoming U.S. elections, major U.S.-based platforms have stepped up their content moderation practices, likely hoping to avoid the blame heaped upon them after the 2016 election, where many held them responsible for siloing users into ideological bubbles—and, in Facebook’s case, the Cambridge Analytica imbroglio. It’s...
Why Getting Paid for Your Data Is a Bad Deal
One bad privacy idea that won’t die is the so-called “data dividend,” which imagines a world where companies have to pay you in order to use your data.Sound too good to be true? It is. Let’s be clear: getting paid for your data—probably no more than a handful of dollars...
EU vs Big Tech: Leaked Enforcement Plans and the Dutch-French Counterproposal
Update (10/29/2020): Our discussion of interoperability measures was altered to acknowledge that, while this is contemplated in the leaked document, the mentions are lacking the specificity of other measures under consideration.At the end of September, multiple press outlets published leaked set of antimonopoly enforcement proposals proposed for the a...
Why Open Access Is Necessary for Makers
This is an Open Access Week guest post by Jordan Bunker, prototype engineer and open access advocate.After the world went into lockdown for COVID-19, Makers were suddenly confined to their workshops. Rather than idly wait it out, many of them decided to put their tools and skills...
EFF Files Comment Opposing the Department of Homeland Security's Massive Expansion of Biometric Surveillance
EFF, joined by several leading civil liberties and immigrant rights organizations, recently filed a comment calling on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to withdraw a proposed rule that would exponentially expand biometrics collection from both U.S. citizens and noncitizens who apply for immigration benefits and would allow...
Victory! EFF Wins Appeal for Access to Wiretap Application Records
Imagine learning that you were wiretapped by law enforcement, but couldn’t get any information about why. That’s what happened to retired California Highway Patrol officer Miguel Guerrero, and EFF sued on his behalf to get more information about the surveillance. This week, a California appeals court ruled in his...
EFF Urges Vallejo’s Top Officials to End Unconstitutional Practice of Blocking Critics on Social Media
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told the City of Vallejo that its practice of blocking people and deleting comments on social media because it doesn't like their messages is illegal under the First Amendment, and demanded that it stop engaging in such viewpoint discrimination, unblock all members of the...









