Australia Banning Kids from Social Media Does More Harm Than Good

Age verification systems are surveillance systems that threaten everyone’s privacy and anonymity. But Australia’s government recently decided to ignore these dangers, passing a vague, sweeping piece of age verification legislation after giving...

X's Last-Minute Update to the Kids Online Safety Act Still Fails to Protect Kids—or Adults—Online

Late last week, the Senate released yet another version of the Kids Online Safety Act, written, reportedly, with the assistance of X CEO Linda Yaccarino in a flawed attempt to address the critical free speech issues inherent in the bill. This last...

How to Stop Advertisers From Tracking Your Teen Across the Internet

This post was written by EFF fellow Miranda McClellan. Teens between the ages of 13 and 17 are being tracked across the internet using identifiers known as Advertising IDs. When children turn 13, they age out of the data protections provided by...

The New U.S. House Version of KOSA Doesn’t Fix Its Biggest Problems

An amended version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) that is being considered this week in the U.S. House is still a dangerous online censorship bill that contains many of the same fundamental problems of a similar version the Senate passed in...

School Monitoring Software Sacrifices Student Privacy for Unproven Promises of Safety

Imagine your search terms, key-strokes, private chats and photographs are being monitored every time they are sent. Millions of students across the country don’t have to imagine this deep surveillance of their most private communications: it’s a...

Surveillance Defense for Campus Protests

The recent wave of protests calling for peace in Palestine have been met with unwarranted and aggressive suppression from law enforcement, universities, and other bad actors. It’s clear that the changing role of surveillance on college campuses...

Analyzing KOSA’s Constitutional Problems In Depth 

Why EFF Does Not Think Recent Changes Ameliorate KOSA’s Censorship The latest version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) did not change our critical view of the legislation. The changes have led some organizations to drop their opposition to the...

Thousands of Young People Told Us Why the Kids Online Safety Act Will Be Harmful to Minors

With KOSA passed, the information i can access as a minor will be limited and censored, under the guise of "protecting me", which is the responsibility of my parents, NOT the government. I have learned so much about the world and about myself...

Don’t Fall for the Latest Changes to the Dangerous Kids Online Safety Act 

The authors of the dangerous Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) unveiled an amended version this week, but it’s still an unconstitutional censorship bill that continues to empower state officials to target services and online content they do not like....

Protecting Students from Faulty Software and Legislation: 2023 Year in Review

Lawmakers, schools districts, educational technology companies and others keep rolling out legislation and software that threatens students’ privacy, free speech, and access to social media, in the name of “protecting” children. At EFF, we fought...

The Eyes on the Board Act Is Yet Another Misguided Attempt to Limit Social Media for Teens

Young people’s access to social media continues to be under attack by overreaching politicians. The latest effort, Senator Ted Cruz’s blunt “Eyes on the Board” Act, aims to end social media’s use entirely in schools. This heavy-handed plan to cut...

To Best Serve Students, Schools Shouldn’t Try to Block Generative AI, or Use Faulty AI Detection Tools

Generative AI gained widespread attention earlier this year, but one group has had to reckon with it more quickly than most: educators. Teachers and school administrators have struggled with two big questions: should the use of generative AI be...

Young People May Be The Biggest Target for Online Censorship and Surveillance—and the Strongest Weapon Against Them

Over the last year, state and federal legislatures have tried to pass—and in some cases succeeded in passing—legislation that bars young people from digital spaces, censors what they are allowed to see and share online, and monitors and controls...

How GoGuardian Invades Student Privacy

This post was co-authored by legal intern Kate Prince.Jump to our detailed report about GoGuardian and student monitoring tools. GoGuardian is a student monitoring tool that watches over twenty-seven million students across ten thousand schools,...

Young People Should Oppose the Kids Online Safety Act

Next week, Congress plans to move a bill forward that is opposed by dozens of organizations, digital rights protectors, LGBTQ+ activists, and human rights defenders: the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). As we’ve written before, KOSA would lead to...

Student Monitoring Tools Should Not Flag LGBTQ+ Keywords

One of the more dangerous features of student monitoring tools like GoGuardian, Gaggle, and Bark is their “flagging” functionality. The tools can scan web pages, documents in students’ cloud drives, emails, video content, and more for keywords...

The Kids Online Safety Act is Still A Huge Danger to Our Rights Online

Congress has resurrected the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill that would increase surveillance and restrict access to information in the name of protecting children online. KOSA was introduced in 2022 but failed to gain traction, and today...

After Students Challenged Proctoring Software, French Court Slaps TestWe App With a Suspension

In a preliminary victory in the continuing fight against privacy-invasive software that “watches” students taking tests remotely, a French administrative court outside Paris suspended a university’s use of the e-proctoring platform TestWe, which...

Mandatory Student Spyware Is Creating a Perfect Storm of Human Rights Abuses

Spyware apps were foisted on students at the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns. Today, long after most students have returned to in-person learning, those apps are still proliferating, and enabling an ever-expanding range of human rights abuses. In...

Stop Invasive Remote Proctoring: Pass California’s Student Test Taker Privacy Protection Act

Remote proctoring companies like Proctorio, ProctorU, and ExamSoft collect all manner of private data on students and test takers, from biometric information to citizenship status to video and audio of a user’s surroundings. During the pandemic...