Amazon’s Ring Is a Perfect Storm of Privacy Threats
Doors across the United States are now fitted with Amazon’s Ring, a combination doorbell-security camera that records and transmits video straight to users’ phones, to Amazon’s cloud—and often to the local police department. By sending photos and alerts every time the camera detects motion or someone rings the doorbell, the...
Second Circuit Rules That Section 230 Bars Civil Terrorism Claims Against Facebook
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit last week became the first federal appellate court to rule that Section 230 bars civil terrorism claims against a social media company. The plaintiffs, who were victims of Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, argued that Facebook should be liable...
Opening the Door for Censorship: New Trademark Enforcement Mechanisms Added for Top-Level Domains
With so much dissatisfaction over how companies like Facebook and YouTube moderate user speech, you might think that the groups that run the Internet’s infrastructure would want to stay far away from the speech-policing business. Sadly, two groups that control an important piece of the Internet’s infrastructure have decided to...
EFF Delegation Returns from Ecuador, says Ola Bini’s Case is Political, Not Criminal
San Francisco – A team from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has returned from a fact-finding mission in Quito for the case of Ola Bini—a globally renowned Swedish programmer who is facing tenuous computer-crime charges in Ecuador.Bini was detained in April, as he left his home in Quito to take...
DEEP DIVE: CBP’s Social Media Surveillance Poses Risks to Free Speech and Privacy Rights
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and one of its component agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), released a Privacy Impact Assessment [.pdf] on CBP’s practice of monitoring social media to enhance the agency’s “situational awareness.” As we’ve argued in relation to other government social media surveillance...
'IBM PC Compatible': How Adversarial Interoperability Saved PCs From Monopolization
Update, May 4, 2021: This article was corrected to change the version of DOS that ran on PC compatibles and the model of Intel chip they shipped with; it was also updated to correct which team implemented the spec as code for a new ROM.Adversarial interoperability is what happens...
ICE’s Rapid DNA Testing on Migrants at the Border Is Yet Another Iteration of Family Separation
As the number of migrants at the southern border has surged in the past several months, the Trump administration has turned to increasingly draconian measures as a form of deterrence. While the separation of children from their parents and housing of migrants in overcrowded and ill-equipped holding facilities have rightfully...
In Ecuador, Political Actors Must Step Away From Ola Bini’s Case
After spending nearly a week in Ecuador to learn more about the case against Swedish open source software developer Ola Bini, who was arrested here in April, EFF has found a clear consensus among the experts: the political consequences of his arrest appear to be outweighing any actual evidence the...
EFF at Vegas Security Week
EFF is back this year at Vegas Security Week, sometimes affectionately known as Hacker Summer Camp. Stop by our booths at BSides, Black Hat, and DEF CON to find out about the latest developments in protecting digital freedom, sign up for our action alerts and mailing list, and...
Google’s Plans for Chrome Extensions Won’t Really Help Security
Note: Sam Jadali, the author of the DataSpii report referenced in this blog post, is an EFF Coders’ Rights client. However, the information about DataSpii in this post is based entirely on public reports.Last week we learned about DataSpii, a report by independent researcher Sam Jadali about the “catastrophic...







