The Long Fight to Stop Mass Surveillance: 2018 in Review
EFF is in it for the long run, especially in the important, hard fights for your rights. One of the longest running fights in online civil liberties is over your right to have a private conversation over a digital network. Whether it’s for our intimate relationships, our healthcare, our associations...
Data Privacy Scandals and Public Policy Picking Up Speed: 2018 in Review
2018 may be remembered as the Year of the Facebook Scandal, and rightly so. The Cambridge Analytica fiasco, Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony, a massive hack, and revelations of corporate smear campaigns were only the tip of the iceberg. But many...
Wrangling With Monopolies: 2018 in Review
This year has brought numerous stories of large Internet companies using their dominance of key Internet functions in ways that harm users and shut out competitors. From Google’s treatment of competing search companies in its results, to Facebook’s playing favorites with its developer APIs, to AT&T and Comcast’s ...
Where Governments Hack Their Own People and People Fight Back: 2018 in Review
Throughout 2018, new surveillance practices continued to erode the privacy of people in Latin America. Yet local and regional digital rights organizations continue to push back with strategic litigation, journalists and security researchers investigate to shed light on government use of malware, and local activists work tirelessly to fight overarching...
Terrorism Lawsuits Threaten Lawful Speech: 2018 in Review
One of the most important principles underpinning the Internet is that if you say something illegal, you should be held responsible for it—not the owners of the site or service where you said it. That principle has seen many threats this year—not just in federal legislation, but also in...
From Encrypting the Web to Encrypting the Net: 2018 Year in Review
We saw 2017 tip the scales for HTTPS. In 2018, web encryption continues to improve. EFF has begun to shift its focus towards email security, and the security community is shifting its focus towards further hardening TLS, the protocol that drives encryption on the Internet.By default, all Internet traffic...
Congress Censors the Internet, But EFF Continues to Fight FOSTA: 2018 in Review
EFF fought FOSTA in 2018. We fought the bill in Congress and, when the president signed it into law, immediately set our sights on challenging it in court.The Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865) was ostensibly passed to fight sex trafficking. The...
The Year of the GDPR: 2018’s Most Famous Privacy Regulation in Review
To the extent that 260-page regulations can ever be said to be “famous,” Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) certainly had its moment in limelight in 2018. When it came into force on May 25, it was heralded by a flurry of emails from tech companies, desperate to re-establish their...
Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review
This wasn’t a great year for those of us whose job it is to defend the use of encryption.In the United States, we heard law enforcement officials go on about the same “going dark” problem they’ve been citing since the late 90s, but even after all these years, they...
Victories in the State Legislatures: 2018 In Review
States are often the “laboratories of democracy,” to borrow a phrase from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. They lead the way to react quickly to technological advances, establish important rights, and sometimes pass laws that serve as a template for others across the country. This year, EFF worked—and fought—alongside...




