EFF submitted a letter to the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance to testify to the negative impacts of mass surveillance on vulnerable communities at the U.S. border. The Special Rapporteur called for submissions on “Race, Borders, and...

Time and again, governments have used crises to expand their power, and often their intrusion into citizens’ lives. The COVID-19 pandemic has seen this pattern play out on a huge scale. From deploying drones or ankle monitors to enforce quarantine orders to proposals to use face recognition...

Patent trolls don’t care much about innovation. Their lawsuits and threats are attempts at rent-seeking; they’re demanding money from people who make, use, or sell technology just for doing what they were already doing—for crossing the proverbial “bridge” that the patent troll has decided to lurk under.You might think that,...

EFF opposes a California bill, A.B. 2004, that would authorize the issuers of COVID-19 test results to do so with digital verifiable credentials. This bill would take us a step towards national digital identification, create information security risks, exacerbate social inequities in access to smartphones and COVID-19 tests,...

Governments around the world are using surveillance technologies to monitor whether COVID-19 patients are complying with instructions to quarantine at home. These include GPS ankle shackles, phone apps that track location, and phone apps that require patients to periodically take quarantine selfies and send them to government monitors.All of these...

We’ve been skeptical of Facebook’s Oversight Board from day one. We’ll follow closely and keep open minds, because we appreciate it is a first attempt at some semblance of much-needed governance and external review. But no amount of “oversight” can fix the underlying problem: Content moderation is extremely difficult to...

There's a dirty secret in the incredible growth of Silicon Valley's tech giants: it's a cheat. Historically, US antitrust regulators would be deeply concerned about mergers with major competitors in concentrated markets ("mergers to monopoly") and acquisitions of small companies to neutralize future competitive threats ("catch and kill"). And while...

In a landmark decision, the German Constitutional Court has ruled that mass surveillance of telecommunications outside of Germany conducted on foreign nationals is unconstitutional. Thanks to the chief legal counsel, Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (GFF), this a major victory for global civil liberties, but especially those that live and...