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EFFecting Change Livestream Series: How to Protest with Privacy in Mind

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Face Off: Law Enforcement Use of Face Recognition Technology

Last updated: April 20, 2020Executive SummaryFace recognition is poised to become one of the most pervasive surveillance technologies, and law enforcement’s use of it is increasing rapidly. Today, law enforcement officers can use mobile devices to capture face recognition-ready photographs of people they stop on the street; surveillance cameras...

The Pregnancy Panopticon

The Pregnancy Panopticon

Women’s health is big business. There are a staggering number of applications for Android and iOS which claim to help people keep track of their monthly cycle, know when they may be fertile, or track the status of their pregnancy. These apps entice the user to input the most intimate...

Who Has Your Back 2017

Who Has Your Back? Government Data Requests 2017

The role of Who Has Your Back is to provide objective measurements for analyzing the policies and advocacy positions of major technology companies when it comes to handing data to the government. We focus on a handful of specific, measurable criteria that can act as a vital stopgap against unfettered...

Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy

by Frida Alim, Nate Cardozo, Gennie Gebhart, Karen Gullo, and Amul KaliaDownload the report as a PDF.EXECUTIVE SUMMARYStudents and their families are backed into a corner. As students across the United States are handed school-issued laptops and signed up for educational cloud services, the way the educational system treats...
Locational Privacy

Unreliable Informants: IP Addresses, Digital Tips and Police Raids

How Police and Courts are Misusing Unreliable IP Address Information and What They Can Do to Better Verify Electronic Tips
The digital revolution has given law enforcement more tools to help track and identify us than ever before. Yet as law enforcement increasingly relies on electronic evidence to investigate...

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Operation Manul

Journalists and political activists critical of Kazakhstan’s authoritarian government, along with their family members, lawyers, and associates, have been targets of an online phishing and malware campaign we believe was carried out on behalf of the government of Kazakhstan. We are releasing our report on the campaign today.
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Who Has Your Back? 2015: Protecting Your Data From Government Requests

We live digital lives—from the videos shared on social networks, to location-aware apps on mobile phones, to log-in data for connecting to our email, to our stored documents, to our search history. The personal, the profound, and even the absurd are all transcribed into data packets, whizzing through the fiber-optic...

Special 404: What You Won't Find in the U.S. Special 301 Report

Every year, the United States publishes a report on countries that, in the opinion of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), fail to give “adequate and effective” protection to U.S. holders of intellectual property rights. This Special 301 Report names and shames nations that do not meet a vague and impossibly...

Defend Innovation: How to Fix Our Broken Patent System

The "Defend Innovation" whitepaper is the culmination of two-and-a-half years worth of research, drawing from the stories, expertise, and ideas of more than 16,500 people who agree that the current patent system is broken.
Split into two parts, the report covers both the challenges facing innovators under the current...

Unintended Consequences - 16 Years Under the DMCA

The “anti-circumvention” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), codified in section 1201 of the Copyright Act, have not been used as Congress envisioned. The law was ostensibly intended to stop copyright infringers from defeating anti-piracy protections added to copyrighted works. In practice, the anti-circumvention provisions have been used...

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