Law Enforcement Use of Face Recognition Systems Threatens Civil Liberties, Disproportionately Affects People of Color: EFF Report
San Francisco, California—Face recognition—fast becoming law enforcement’s surveillance tool of choice—is being implemented with little oversight or privacy protections, leading to faulty systems that will disproportionately impact people of color and may implicate innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit, says an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) ...
Court Dismisses Playboy's Lawsuit Against Boing Boing (For Now)
In a win for free expression, a court has dismissed a copyright lawsuit against Happy Mutants, LLC, the company behind acclaimed website Boing Boing. The court ruled [PDF] that Playboy’s complaint—which accused Boing Boing of copyright infringement for linking to a collection of centerfolds—had not sufficiently established...
Will Canada Be the New Testing Ground for SOPA-lite? Canadian Media Companies Hope So
A consortium of media and distribution companies calling itself “FairPlay Canada” is lobbying for Canada to implement a fast-track, extrajudicial website blocking regime in the name of preventing unlawful downloads of copyrighted works. It is currently being considered by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), an agency roughly...
Let's Encrypt Hits 50 Million Active Certificates and Counting
In yet another milestone on the path to encrypting the web, Let’s Encrypt has now issued over 50 million active certificates. Depending on your definition of “website,” this suggests that Let’s Encrypt is protecting between about 23 million and 66 million websites with HTTPS (more on that...
The Revolution and Slack
UPDATE (2/16/18): We have corrected this post to more accurately reflect the limits of Slack's encryption of user data at rest. We have also clarified that granular retention settings are only available on paid Slack workspaces.The revolution will not be televised, but it may be hosted on Slack. Community...
Companies Must Be Accountable to All Users: The Story of Egyptian Activist Wael Abbas
Egyptian journalist Wael Abbas holds a special distinction: Over the years, he’s experienced censorship at the hands of four of Silicon Valley’s top companies. Although more extreme, his story isn’t so different from that of the many individuals who, following a single misstep or mistake at the hands of...
We Don’t Need New Laws for Faked Videos, We Already Have Them
Video editing technology hit a milestone this month. The new tech is being used to make porn. With easy-to-use software, pretty much anyone can seamlessly take the face of one real person (like a celebrity) and splice it onto the body of another (like a porn star), creating videos that...
How Have Europe's Upload Filtering and Link Tax Plans Changed?
Although we have been opposing Europe's misguided link tax and upload filtering proposals ever since they first surfaced in 2016, the proposals haven't been standing still during all that time. In the back and forth between a multiplicity of different Committees of the European Parliament, and two other institutions...
Internet Users Spoke Up To Keep Safe Harbors Safe
Today, we delivered a petition to the U.S. Copyright Office to keep copyright’s safe harbors safe. We asked the Copyright Office to remove a bureaucratic requirement that could cause websites and Internet services to lose protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). And we asked them to help...
Imprisoned Blogger Eskinder Nega Won't Sign a False Confession
Online publisher and blogger Eskinder Nega has been imprisoned in Ethiopia since September 2011 for the "crime" of writing articles critical of his government. He is one of the longest-serving prisoners in EFF's Offline casefile of writers and activists unjustly imprisoned for their work online.
Now a...









