Decoding the Courts’ Digital Decisions | EFFector 36.9

Instead of relaxing for the summer, EFF is in first gear defending your rights online! Catch up on what we're doing with the latest issue of our EFFector newsletter. This time we're sharing updates regarding California law enforcement illegally...

34 Years Supporting the Wild and Weird World Online

Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation commemorates its 34th anniversary of battling for your digital freedom. It’s important to glean wisdom from where we have been, but at EFF we're also strong believers that this storied past helps us build a...

To Sixth Circuit: Government Officials Should Not Have Free Rein to Block Critics on Their Social Media Accounts When Used For Governmental Purposes

Legal intern Danya Hajjaji was the lead author of this post.The Sixth Circuit must carefully apply a new “state action” test from the U.S. Supreme Court to ensure that public officials who use social media to speak for the government do not have...

Beyond Pride Month: Protections for LGBTQ+ People All Year Round

The end of June concluded LGBTQ+ Pride month, yet the risks LGBTQ+ people face persist every month of the year. This year, LGBTQ+ Pride took place at a time of anti-LGBTQ+ violence, harassment and vandalism and back in May, US officials had warned...

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...

Hundreds of Tech Companies Want to Cash In on Homeland Security Funding. Here's Who They Are and What They're Selling.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today has released a near-comprehensive dataset of the vendors who supply or market the technology for the U.S. government’s increasingly AI-powered homeland security efforts, including the so-called...

Craig Newmark Philanthropies Matches EFF's Monthly Donors

To encourage broad support for the digital rights movement, Craig Newmark Philanthropies has offered to match up to $30,000 for EFF members' first year as a new monthly or annual Sustaining Donor.

It’s Time For Lawmakers to Listen to Courts: Your Law Regulating Online Speech Will Harm Internet Users’ Free Speech Rights

Despite a long history of courts ruling that government efforts to regulate speech online harm all internet users and interfere with their First Amendment rights, state and federal lawmakers continue to pass laws that do just that. Three separate...

Careful with your marshmallows 🔥

EFF’s summer membership drive ends next week! Through EFF's 34th anniversary:Get 2 rare gifts (including a Bigfoot privacy pin),Be an EFF member for as little as $20, andMonthly and annual recurring donations get matched for the first year!The...

Podcast Episode: Fighting Enshittification

The early internet had a lot of “technological self-determination" — you could opt out of things, protect your privacy, control your experience. The problem was that it took a fair amount of technical skill to exercise that self-determination. But...

Keep The Momentum Going for The Right to Repair

Thanks to support from local advocates across the country, we’ve been able to have a few strong years for the right to repair. Both California and Minnesota’s right to repair laws go into effect today, and we've even made some headway convincing...

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's Statement on the Netchoice Decisions

The Supreme Court correctly found that social media platforms, like newspapers, bookstores, and art galleries before them, have First Amendment rights to curate and edit the speech of others they deliver to their users, and the government has a...

The SFPD’s Intended Purchase of a Robot Dog Triggers Board of Supervisors’ Oversight Obligations

The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) wants to get a robot quadruped, popularly known as a robot dog. The city’s Board of Supervisors has a regulatory duty to probe into this intended purchase, including potentially blocking it altogether.The...

Now The EU Council Should Finally Understand: No One Wants “Chat Control”

The EU Council has now passed a 4th term without passing its controversial message-scanning proposal. The just-concluded Belgian Presidency failed to broker a deal that would push forward this regulation, which has now been debated in the EU for...

Betting on Your Digital Rights: EFF Benefit Poker Tournament at DEF CON 32

Hacker Summer Camp is almost here... and with it comes the Third Annual EFF Benefit Poker Tournament at DEF CON 32 hosted by security expert Tarah Wheeler.Please join us at the same place and time as last year: Friday, August 9th, at high noon at...

How the FTC Can Make the Internet Safe for Chatbots

No points for guessing the subject of the first question the Wall Street Journal asked FTC Chair Lina Khan: of course it was about AI.Between the hype, the lawmaking, the saber-rattling, the trillion-dollar market caps, and the predictions of...

Mississippi Can’t Wall Off Everyone’s Social Media Access to Protect Children

In what is becoming a recurring theme, Mississippi became the latest state to pass a law requiring social media services to verify users’ ages and block lawful speech to young people. Once again, EFF explained to the court why the law is...

Victory! Grand Jury Finds Sacramento Cops Illegally Shared Driver Data

For the past year, EFF has been sounding the alarm about police in California illegally sharing drivers' location data with anti-abortion states, putting abortion seekers and providers at risk of prosecution. We thus applaud the Sacramento County...

Drone As First Responder Programs Are Swarming Across the United States

Law enforcement wants more drones, and we’ll probably see many more of them overhead as police departments seek to implement a popular project justifying the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs): the “drone as first responder”...