A Cycle of Renewal, Broken: How Big Tech and Big Media Abuse Copyright Law to Slay Competition
As long we've had electronic mass media, audiences and creators have benefited from periods of technological upheaval that force old gatekeepers to compete with brash newcomers with new ideas about what constitutes acceptable culture and art. Those newcomers eventually became gatekeepers themselves, who then faced their own crop of revolutionaries....
Interoperability and Privacy: Squaring the Circle
Last summer, we published a comprehensive look at the ways that Facebook could and should open up its data so that users could control their experience on the service, and to make it easier for competing services to thrive.In the time since, Facebook has continued to be rocked by...
Amazon’s Ring Is a Perfect Storm of Privacy Threats
Doors across the United States are now fitted with Amazon’s Ring, a combination doorbell-security camera that records and transmits video straight to users’ phones, to Amazon’s cloud—and often to the local police department. By sending photos and alerts every time the camera detects motion or someone rings the doorbell, the...
DEEP DIVE: CBP’s Social Media Surveillance Poses Risks to Free Speech and Privacy Rights
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and one of its component agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), released a Privacy Impact Assessment [.pdf] on CBP’s practice of monitoring social media to enhance the agency’s “situational awareness.” As we’ve argued in relation to other government social media surveillance...
'IBM PC Compatible': How Adversarial Interoperability Saved PCs From Monopolization
Update, May 4, 2021: This article was corrected to change the version of DOS that ran on PC compatibles and the model of Intel chip they shipped with; it was also updated to correct which team implemented the spec as code for a new ROM.Adversarial interoperability is what happens...
In Ecuador, Political Actors Must Step Away From Ola Bini’s Case
After spending nearly a week in Ecuador to learn more about the case against Swedish open source software developer Ola Bini, who was arrested here in April, EFF has found a clear consensus among the experts: the political consequences of his arrest appear to be outweighing any actual evidence the...
Someone Is Suing Companies for Using SMS Messages in 2019
Anuwave’s Suit Against Coinbase Demonstrates a Longstanding Flaw in the Patent SystemThis month’s Stupid Patent of the Month deals with SMS (short messaging service), a technology that goes back to the mid-1980s. Modern-day SMS messages, typically bundled with mobile phone services, have been around since 1992, but one...
Equifax Settlement Won’t be Enough to Deter Future Breaches: The Law Must Catch Up
Last week, news broke of a large financial settlement for the massive 2017 Equifax data breach affecting 147 million Americans. While the direct compensation to those harmed and the fines paid are important, it’s equally important to evaluate how much this result is likely to create strong incentives to...
Adblocking: How About Nah?
For more than a decade, consumer rights groups (including EFF) worked with technologists and companies to try to standardize Do Not Track, a flag that browsers could send to online companies signaling that their users did not want their browsing activity tracked. Despite long hours and backing from the...
When Will We Get the Full Truth About How and Why the Government Is Using Face Recognition?
Earlier this month, the House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing to discuss the role of face recognition and other invasive biometric technologies in use by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Despite some pushback from some lawmakers on the committee, John Wagner of the U.S. Customs and...
