As Ola Bini Prosecutors Wrap Up Investigation, Amnesty Calls Out Human Rights Violations in His Case
Today marks the last day that the Ecuadorean prosecution has to investigate its case against Ola Bini, the Swedish free software programmer who was arrested there in April and detained for over two months without trial and without clear charges. On Thursday, the judge accepted a plea by the prosecutors...
Don't Play in Google's Privacy Sandbox
Last week, Google announced a plan to “build a more private web.” The announcement post was, frankly, a mess. The company that tracks user behavior on over ⅔ of the web said that “Privacy is paramount to us, in everything we do.” Google not only doubled down on...
Harvard Student’s Deportation Raises Concerns About Border Device Searches and Social Media Surveillance
Five Concerns about Amazon Ring’s Deals with Police
More than 400 police departments across the country have partnered with Ring, tech giant Amazon’s “smart” doorbell program, to create a troubling new video surveillance system. Ring films and records any interaction or movement happening at the user’s front door, and alerts users’ phones. These partnerships expand the web...
EFF and Mozilla Release Public Letter to Venmo
EFF is teaming up with the Mozilla Foundation to tell Venmo to clean up its privacy act. In a public letter sent to President/CEO Dan Schulman and COO Bill Ready today, we are telling Venmo to make transactions private by default and let users hide their friend lists.Both EFF...
EFF and Mozilla to Venmo: Clean Up Your Privacy Settings
San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Mozilla have teamed up in an open letter to Venmo, telling the popular payment app to clean up its privacy settings, which leaves sensitive financial data exposed to the public.Venmo is marketed as a way for friends to send and...
California Has No Broadband Plan for the Future While The World Marches Ahead
The world’s largest economies are aggressively modernizing their Internet infrastructure with universal fiber to-the-home plans or have already achieved that metric—with the exception of the United States. EFF noted that there is a desperate need for a federal “Fiber for All” plan that tackles this national problem. But the...
EFF Sues DHS To Uncover Information About Border Agents Using GPS Devices Without a Warrant To Track Vehicles
Washington, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its component agencies today to obtain information about the agencies’ warrantless use of global positioning system (GPS) devices to track vehicles entering the U.S.In 2012, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in a landmark decision...
U.S. Export Controls and “Published” Encryption Source Code Explained
Throughout our long history of defending encryption, EFF has taken a special interest in ensuring that researchers and programmers who help build and strengthen digital security are not prevented from sharing their knowledge. Because of this history, we periodically get requests about the status of U.S. export controls and how...
There Are No Magic Words That You Can Post to Change Instagram’s Terms of Service
Every so often, a rash of identical posts starts to take over social media. This isn’t the work of bots, but the result of a number of people believing that these words will have an effect on the terms of service of Facebook, or, in this most recent case, Instagram....
