2019 has been an eventful year for consumer privacy, both in a few key courts and state legislatures as well as in Silicon Valley. An important decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in August defended the ability of Illinois citizens to protect their biometric data. Meanwhile, a flurry...

Here at EFF, we maintain a repository of self-help resources on circumventing surveillance across a variety of different platforms, devices, and threat models. We call it Surveillance Self-Defense, or SSD for short.SSD covers myriad topics, and is broken up into four main sections:Basics: Overviews on what digital surveillance...

Vendors woo law enforcement with a seemingly inexhaustible flow of new spy tech. This places concerned community members, civil society, and lawmakers in a seemingly Sisyphean struggle of trying to keep up with new technological threats to privacy, and to shepard the adoption of enforceable policy to protect essential civil...

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) was enacted in 2018 and goes into effect in 2020. Throughout 2019, EFF and our privacy coalition allies beat back numerous attempts by big business to block this important law before it goes into effect. We did so in the California Legislature,...

When someone says something unlawful online, they should be the one held responsible for it, not the website or platform where they said it. Section 230—the most important law protecting free speech online—reflects that common-sense principle. This year, EFF defended Section 230 in Congress, the courts, and on the...

We’ve all heard the expression, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” We might hope that what we do and where we go will only be known to those who were there in person. Yet maintaining such anonymity and privacy in public spaces is becoming ever more difficult. 2019 has...

This February, with Venezuela rocked by economic collapse and a presidential succession crisis, an opposition party put out a call for volunteers. Juan Guaidó, a political leader with the Popular Will party, called on supporters to register at the site “Volunteers for Venezuela”. Guaidó announced that the call...

Last year, the Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion in a case we’ve written about a lot, called Carpenter v. United States, ruling that the Fourth Amendment protects data generated by our phones called historical cell-site location information or CSLI. The Court recognized that CSLI creates a “detailed chronicle...

Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s landmark case challenging NSA’s mass spying moved forward in 2019, setting up a crucial decision for the Ninth Circuit in 2020. We’ve pursued this case for over a decade because we believe that mass surveillance, like all general search and seizure schemes, is both illegal and...