In January, San Diego voted to reduce public oversight over police surveillance even before the ordinance enforcing that oversight has been fully implemented.
With strong bipartisan support, the U.S. House voted 352 to 65 to pass HR 7521 this week, a bill that would ban TikTok nationwide if its Chinese owner doesn’t sell the popular video app. The TikTok bill’s future in the U.S. Senate isn’t yet clear, but President Joe...
Our concerns about the selling and misuse of location data for those seeking reproductive and gender healthcare are escalating amid a recent wave of cases and incidents demonstrating that the digital trail we leave is being used by anti-abortion activists.The good news is some states and tech companies...
Cars collect a lot of our personal data, and car companies disclose a lot of that data to third parties. It’s often unclear what’s being collected, and what's being shared and with whom. A recent New York Times article highlighted how data is shared by G.M. with insurance companies,...
Special thanks to EFF legal intern Alissa Johnson, who was the lead author of this post. Earlier this month, the European Union Court of Justice ruled that harmonized standards are a part of EU law, and thus must be accessible to EU citizens and residents free of charge.While it...
What do House Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Barbara Lee have in common with House Republicans like Thomas Massie and Andy Biggs? Not a lot. But they do know an unconstitutional bill when they see one.These and others on both sides of the aisle were among the ...
Special thanks to EFF legal intern Jack Beck, who was the lead author of this post. Amid heavy criticism for its ties to weapons manufacturers supplying Israel, South by Southwest—the organizer of an annual conference and music festival in Austin—has been on the defensive. One tool in their arsenal: bogus...
Welcome to your U.S. presidential election year, when all kinds of bad actors will flood the internet with election-related disinformation and misinformation aimed at swaying or suppressing your vote in November. So… what’re you going to do about it? As EFF’s Corynne McSherry wrote in 2020,...
Congress’ unfounded plan to ban TikTok under the guise of protecting our data is back, this time in the form of a new bill—the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” H.R. 7521 — which has gained a dangerous amount of momentum in Congress. This bipartisan legislation was...
The U.S. Senate is moving forward with two bills that would enrich patent trolls, patent system insiders, and a few large companies that rely on flimsy patents, at the expense of everyone else. One bill, the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA) would bring back some of the worst software...
The First Amendment requires courts to apply a robust balancing test before unmasking anonymous online speakers, EFF explained in an amicus brief it filed recently in a New York State appeal.In the case on appeal, GSB Gold Standard v. Google, a German company that sells cryptocurrency investments is seeking...
We’ve been saying it for 20 years, and it remains true now more than ever: the internet is an essential service. It enables people to build and create communities, shed light on injustices, and acquire vital knowledge that might not otherwise be available. And access to it becomes...
Imagine a world in which the internet is first and foremost about empowering people, not big corporations and government. In that world, government does “after-action” analyses to make sure its tech regulations are working as intended, recruits experienced technologists as advisors, and enforces real accountability for intelligence and law enforcement...
Copyright’s reach is already far too broad, and courts have no business expanding it any further, particularly where that reframing will undermine adversarial interoperability. Unfortunately, a federal district court did just that in the latest iteration of Oracle v. Rimini, concluding that software Rimini developed was a “derivative work” because...
More than four years after it was first introduced, the Online Safety Act (OSA) was passed by the U.K. Parliament in September 2023. The Act seeks to make the U.K. “the safest place” in the world to be online and provides Ofcom, the country’s communications regulator, with the power...
