In the waning hours of 2017, the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal the 2015 Open Internet Order, ending net neutrality protections for the millions of Americans who support them. The fallout of that decision continued all throughout 2018, with attempts to reverse the FCC in Congress, new state laws...

In 2018, federal courts across the country have been asked whether members of the public have a First Amendment right to speak on government social media pages. Three of these cases have been bumped up to appellate courts for review prompting numerous people to write into EFF, their local papers,...

In terms of technical approaches to protecting user privacy online, 2018 has certainly seen its ups and downs.On a positive note, we added a ton of new features to Privacy Badger, EFF’s anti-tracking browser extension for Firefox and Chrome. We started by revamping the experience for new users and...

The First Step Act of 2018 (S. 3649) is now federal law.The criminal justice reform law has been widely hailed as long overdue, and rightly so. But as we turn to its implementation, we urge policymakers to take care with the central provision of the bill that calls for...

As 2018 draws to a close, we’ve gathered together some of EFF’s key legal wins this year. Some of these wins are only stops along the way to a larger goal, but each is hard fought, whether we’re serving as counsel or amicus curiae. Every one of these victories helped...

Your rights go with you when you go online. That’s the simple premise that has guided EFF’s work for 28 years. To make this premise real in 2018, we worked to ensure that law, corporate policies, and software are all hard-coded with the principles of free speech, privacy, and the...

EFF has filed comments on two proposed rules in California regarding the use of pretrial risk assessment tools in courts, urging the Judicial Council to place meaningful restrictions on the use of pretrial risk assessment tools in the state. The California Judicial Council issued the draft rules in...

We’ve written many times about how the patent system is a poor fit for software. Innovation in the U.S. software industry happens despite, not because of, the thousands of software patents that are granted each year.But software is not the only industry where patents make very little sense....

When is software free? Is it enough that the software be licensed under a free or open license? What about patents? Software as a service? Trade secrets? What about DRM? Is software ever free?There's a saying in the software freedom movement: "if you can't open it, it's not yours." That...

EFF and more than 100 civil society organizations across the globe wrote directly to Mark Zuckerberg recently demanding greater transparency and accountability for Facebook content moderation practices. A key step, we told Facebook, is implementation of a robust appeals process giving all users the power to challenge and...