EFF’s Concerns About the UN Draft Cybercrime Convention

The proposed UN Cybercrime Convention is an extensive surveillance pact that imposes intrusive domestic surveillance measures and mandates states’ cooperation in surveillance and data sharing. It requires states to aid each other in cybercrime...

Why You Should Hate the Proposed UN Cybercrime Treaty

International UN treaties aren’t usually on users’ radar. They are debated, often over the course of many years, by diplomats and government functionaries in Vienna or New York, and their significance is often overlooked or lost in the flood of...

Digital Apartheid in Gaza: Unjust Content Moderation at the Request of Israel’s Cyber Unit

This is part one of an ongoing series. Government involvement in content moderation raises serious human rights concerns in every context. Since October 7, social media platforms have been challenged for the unjustified takedowns of...

Electronic Frontier Foundation to Present Annual EFF Awards to Carolina Botero, Connecting Humanity, and 404 Media

SAN FRANCISCO—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce that Carolina Botero, Connecting Humanity, and 404 Media will receive the 2024 EFF Awards for their vital work in ensuring that technology supports freedom, justice, and...

Briefing: Negotiating States Must Address Human Rights Risks in the Proposed UN Surveillance Treaty

At a virtual briefing today, experts from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Access Now, Derechos Digitales, Human Rights Watch, and the International Fund for Public Interest Media outlined the human rights risks posed by the proposed UN...

Journalists Sue Massachusetts TV Corporation Over Bogus YouTube Takedown Demands

BOSTON—A citizen journalists’ group represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a federal lawsuit today against a Massachusetts community-access television company for falsely convincing YouTube to take down video clips of city...

Supreme Court Dodges Key Question in Murthy v. Missouri and Dismisses Case for Failing to Connect The Government’s Communication to Specific Platform Moderation

We don’t know a lot more about when government jawboning social media companies—that is, attempting to pressure them to censor users’ speech— violates the First Amendment; but we do know that lawsuits based on such actions will be hard to win. In...

Why Privacy Badger Opts You Out of Google’s “Privacy Sandbox”

The latest update of Privacy Badger opts users out of ad tracking through Google’s “Privacy Sandbox.” Privacy Sandbox is Google’s way of letting advertisers keep targeting ads based on your online behavior, even after Chrome completes its long...

Media Briefing: EFF, Partners Warn UN Member States are Poised to Approve Dangerous International Surveillance Treaty

SAN FRANCISCO—On Wednesday, July 24, at 11:00 am Eastern Time (8:00 am Pacific Time, 5:00 pm CET), experts from Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Access Now, Derechos Digitales, Human Rights Watch, and the International Fund for Public...

EFF Tells Minnesota Supreme Court to Strike Down Geofence Warrant As Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Takes the Wrong Turn

We haven’t seen the end of invasive geofence warrants just yet, despite Google’s big announcement late last year that it was fundamentally changing how it collects location data. Today, EFF is filing an amicus brief in the Minnesota Supreme Court...

EFF, International Partners Appeal to EU Delegates to Help Fix Flaws in Draft UN Cybercrime Treaty That Can Undermine EU's Data Protection Framework

With the final negotiating session to approve the UN Cybercrime Treaty just days away, EFF and 21 international civil society organizations today urgently called on delegates from EU states and the European Commission to push back on the draft...

Beyond Pride Month: Protecting Digital Identities For LGBTQ+ People

The internet provides people space to build communities, shed light on injustices, and acquire vital knowledge that might not otherwise be available. And for LGBTQ+ individuals, digital spaces enable people that are not yet out to engage with...

UN Cybercrime Draft Convention Dangerously Expands State Surveillance Powers Without Robust Privacy and Data Protection Safeguards

This is the third post in a series highlighting flaws in the proposed UN Cybercrime Convention. Check out Part I, our detailed analysis on the criminalization of security research activities, and Part II, an analysis of the human rights...

Courts Should Have Jurisdiction over Foreign Companies Collecting Data on Local Residents, EFF Tells Appeals Court

This post was written by EFF legal intern Danya Hajjaji. Corporations should not be able to collect data from a state’s residents while evading the jurisdiction of that state’s courts, EFF and the UC Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic...

Victory! EFF Supporters Beat USPTO Proposal To Wreck Patent Reviews

The U.S. patent system is broken, particularly when it comes to software patents. At EFF, we’ve been fighting hard for changes that make the system more sensible. Last month, we got a big victory when we defeated a set of rules that would have...

Modern Cars Can Be Tracking Nightmares. Abuse Survivors Need Real Solutions.

The amount of data modern cars collect is a serious privacy concern for all of us. But in an abusive situation, tracking can be a nightmare.As a New York Times article outlined, modern cars are often connected to apps that show a user a wide range...

Detroit Takes Important Step in Curbing the Harms of Face Recognition Technology

In a first-of-its-kind agreement, the Detroit Police Department recently agreed to adopt strict limits on its officers’ use of face recognition technology as part of a settlement in a lawsuit brought by a victim of this faulty technology. Robert...

Celebrate Repair Independence Day!

Right-to-repair advocates have spent more than a decade working for a simple goal: to make sure you can fix and tinker with your own stuff. That should be true whether we’re talking about a car, a tractor, a smartphone, a computer, or really...

EFF to FCC: SS7 is Vulnerable, and Telecoms Must Acknowledge That

It’s unlikely you’ve heard of Signaling System 7 (SS7), but every phone network in the world is connected to it, and if you have ever roamed networks internationally or sent an SMS message overseas you have used it. SS7 is a set of...

Platforms Have First Amendment Right to Curate Speech, As We’ve Long Argued, Supreme Court Said Without Addressing Whether That Applies to Other Services Like Messaging

Social media platforms, at least in their most common form, have a First Amendment right to curate the third-party speech they select for and recommend to their users, and the government’s ability to manipulate those processes is extremely...