Augmented Reality Must Have Augmented Privacy
Imagine walking down the street, looking for a good cup of coffee. In the distance, a storefront glows in green through your smart glasses, indicating a well-reviewed cafe with a sterling public health score. You follow the holographic arrows to the crosswalk, as your wearables silently signal the self-driving cars...
California Is Putting Together A Broadband Plan. We Have Thoughts.
Right now the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Broadband Council are collecting public comments to create the California Broadband Plan, per Governor Newsom’s Executive Order 73-20. The order’s purpose is to find a way to deliver 100 mbps-capable Internet connections to around 2 million Californians who lack...
Latin American Governments Must Commit to Surveillance Transparency
This post is the second in a series about our new State of Communications Privacy Laws report, a set of questions and answers about privacy and data protection in eight Latin American countries and Spain. The series’ first post was “A Look-Back and Ahead on Data Protection in...
Education Groups Drop Their Lawsuit Against Public.Resource.Org, Give Up Their Quest to Paywall the Law
This week, open and equitable access to the law got a bit closer. For many years, EFF, along with co-counsel at Fenwick & West and attorney David Halperin, has defended Public.Resource.Org in its quest to improve public access to the law — including standards, like the National Electrical...
San Francisco Supervisors Must Rein In SFPD’s Abuse of Surveillance Cameras
Black, white, or indigenous; well-resourced or indigent; San Francisco residents should be free to assemble and protest without fear of police surveillance technology or retribution. That should include Black-led protesters of San Francisco who took to the streets in solidarity and protest, understanding that though George Floyd and Breonna Taylor...
Thank You For Your Transparency Report, Here’s Everything That’s Missing
Every major social media platform—from Facebook to Reddit, Instagram to YouTube—moderates and polices content shared by users. Platforms do so as a matter of self-interest, commercial or otherwise. But platforms also moderate user content in response to pressure from a variety of interest groups and/or governments. As a consequence, social...
We Fight For the Users: An Appreciation of IETF's RFC 8890
Here at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we have a guiding motto: "I Fight For the Users." (We even put it on t-shirts from time to time!) We didn't pick that one by accident (nor merely because we dig the 1982 classic film "Tron"), but because it provides such a...
EFF and ACLU Ask Ninth Circuit to Overturn Government’s Censorship of Twitter’s Transparency Report
Citing national security concerns, the government is attempting to infringe on Twitter's First Amendment right to inform the public about secret government surveillance orders. For more than six years, Twitter has been fighting in court to share information about law enforcement orders it received in 2014. Now, Twitter has brought...
Bar Applicants Deserve Better than a Remotely Proctored “Barpocalypse”
This week was the California Bar Exam, a grueling two-day test that determines whether or not a person can practice law in California. Despite the privacy and security risks remote proctoring apps present to users, the California Bar, as well as several other state bars throughout the country, are requiring...
Facebook’s Most Recent Transparency Report Demonstrates the Pitfalls of Automated Content Moderation
In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, many social media platforms shifted their content moderation policies to rely much more heavily on automated tools. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube all ramped up their machine learning capabilities to review and identify flagged content in efforts to ensure the wellbeing...









