DOJ Moves Forward with Dangerous Plan to Collect DNA from Immigrant Detainees
The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) recently-issued final rule requiring the collection of DNA from hundreds of thousands of individuals in immigration detention is a dangerous and unprecedented expansion of biometric screening based not on alleged conduct, but instead on immigration status. This type of forcible DNA collection erodes civil...
African WhatsApp Modders are the Masters of Worldwide Adversarial Interoperability
Since the earliest days of consumer computing, computer users have asserted their right to have a say in how their tools worked: whether it was Gopher delivering easy new ways to access services that had originally been designed for power users who could memorize obscure addresses and arcane commands;...
Tattoo Recognition Score Card: How Institutions Handled Unethical Biometric Surveillance Dataset
In response to an EFF campaign started last year, roughly a third of institutions that we believe requested problematic and exploitive data as part of a government automated tattoo recognition challenge deleted the data or reported that they had never received or used it.EFF has long been concerned with...
Protecting Civil Liberties During a Public Health Crisis
Across the world, public health authorities are working to contain the spread of COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019). In pursuit of this urgent and necessary task, many government agencies are collecting and analyzing personal information about large numbers of identifiable people, including their health, travel, and personal relationships. As our...
NGO Community Urges ICANN to Scrutinize the .ORG Sale
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is reviewing the proposed sale of the .ORG domain registry to private equity firm Ethos Capital, and ICANN has the power to stop the sale. EFF and several other organizations joined a public forum today as part of ICANN’s winter...
Empty Promises Won’t Save the .ORG Takeover
The Internet Society’s (ISOC) November announcement that it intended to sell the Public Interest Registry (PIR, the organization that oversees the .ORG domain name registry) to a private equity firm sent shockwaves through the global NGO sector. The announcement came just after a change to the .ORG registry agreement—the...
Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers' Fortresses
When Apple's App Store launched in 2008, it was widely hailed as a breakthrough in computing, a "curated experience" that would transform the chaos of locating and assessing software and replace it with a reliable one-stop-shop where every app would come pre-tested and with a trusted seal of approval.But app...
Ring Updates Device Security and Privacy—But Ignores Larger Concerns
Amazon’s surveillance doorbell company Ring has announced extra layers of security and control for users after a wave of backlash from civil liberties and cyber security organizations like EFF and Mozilla. Organizations raised major concerns over Ring’s lack of effort in protecting the data and security of users,...
In Foreshadowing Cryptocurrency Regulations, U.S. Treasury Secretary Prioritizes Law Enforcement Concerns
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin foreshadowed the Trump administration’s plans for greater surveillance of cryptocurrency users during his testimony before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday. He noted that cryptocurrency was a “crucial area” for the Treasury Department to examine, and said:We are working with FinCEN and we...
Uruguay Steps Too Quickly into the Right to be Forgotten Quagmire
The further the "Right to be Forgotten" (RTBF) online progresses from its original creation by Europe's Court of Justice, the broader and more damaging its ramifications seem to be. The latest attempt to insert it is a rushed proposal in Uruguay. The complaints of multiple digital rights groups across...
