A joint committee of the UK’s House of Lords and the House of Commons is preparing to debate a draft bill known as the Snoopers’ Charter, a disastrous data retention bill which, as Techdirt explained, "would require ISPs to record key information about every email sent and Web...

Germany Squares Off Against Facebook on Privacy
Facebook should destroy the database of face images it’s collected from German users’ uploaded photos and refrain from creating digital files using biometric data unless registered users explicitly grant permission, German Data Protection Commissioner Jonannes Caspar has demanded.
On August 15,...

Judges on both coasts of the U.S. have now rejected one of the copyright trolls' favorite tactics - suing an Internet subscriber for "negligence" when someone else allegedly downloaded a movie illegally. Judge Phyllis Hamilton of the Northern California federal court ...

Today is the first day of the 14th round of negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP), a secretive, multi-national trade agreement that threatens to extend restrictive intellectual property (IP) laws across the globe and rewrite international rules on their enforcement. EFF will be at the negotiations this week...

US Congressional Representatives Ron Wyden and Darrell Issa insist that the American people have a right to know what the US is seeking in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) with respect to intellectual property rights (IPR). They have co-authored a letter to Ron Kirk [PDF],...

With more people constantly connected to the Internet, technology companies are becoming massive repositories of sensitive and personal information. Our communications with family and friends now sit stored on servers belonging to Google or Facebook. Cell phone companies keep track of our location by recording every time we connect to...

The Congressional Research Service (CRS), the research division of Congress known for its objective studies, recently released a report on the effects of patent trolls on innovation and the economy. The study (PDF) presents a pretty thorough analysis of the patent troll problem, but what's striking is its existence...

This morning, a bipartisan group of Representatives, led by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), sent a pointed letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and the Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano protesting the recent spat of domain name seizures—executed on dubious copyright grounds—that have been censoring websites with no due...

Australians are fending off threats to their right to privacy from all directions. First, there was Australian Attorney General Nicola Roxon’s push to expand government online surveillance powers, submitted to Parliament in a package of reforms sought in a National Security Inquiry.
Then, on Aug. 22, the Australian...