People’s ability to speak online, share ideas, and advocate for change are enabled by the countless online services that host everyone’s views.Despite the central role these online services play in our digital lives, lawmakers and courts spent the last year trying to undermine a key U.S. law, Section 230, that...
EFF’s attorneys, activists, and technologists were media rockstars in 2024, informing the public about important issues that affect privacy, free speech, and innovation for people around the world. Perhaps the single most exciting media hit for EFF in 2024 was “Secrets in Your Data,” the NOVA PBS documentary episode...
EFF supporters get that strong encryption is tied to one of our most basic rights: the right to have a private conversation. In the digital world, privacy is impossible without strong encryption. That’s why we’ve always got an eye out for attacks on encryption. This year, we pushed back—successfully—against anti-encryption...
It is our end-of-year tradition at EFF to look back at the last 12 months of digital rights. This year, the number and diversity of our reflections attest that 2024 was a big year. If there is something uniting all the disparate threads of work EFF has done this year,...
It’s critical that copyright be balanced with limitations that support users’ rights, and perhaps no limitation is more important than fair use. Critics, humorists, artists, and activists all must have rights to re-use and re-purpose source material, even when it’s copyrighted. Yesterday, EFF weighed in...
A federal appeals court just gave software developers, and users, an early holiday present, holding that software updates aren’t necessarily “derivative,” for purposes of copyright law, just because they are designed to interoperate the software they update. This sounds kind of obscure, so let’s cut through the legalese. Lots...
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has failed to address six out of six main privacy protections for three of its border surveillance programs—surveillance towers, aerostats, and unattended ground sensors—according to a new assessment by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).In the report, GAO compared the policies for these technologies...
Privacy isn’t dead. While some information about you is almost certainly out there, that’s no reason for despair. In fact, it’s a good reason to take action.
FINAL HOURS: Keep EFF fighting into 2025 and you’ll help unlock bonus grants! There are challenges ahead for online privacy and free speech, but we’re ready for them with your support.
Some people just can’t take a hint. Today’s perfect example is a group of independent movie distributors that have repeatedly tried, and failed, to force Reddit to give up the IP addresses of several users who posted about downloading movies. The distributors claim they need this information to support their...
As the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy have failed to secure the release of British-Egyptian blogger, coder, and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, UK politicians call for tougher measures to secure Alaa’s immediate return to the UK.During a debate on detained British nationals abroad in early...
Bluesky promises to rethink social media by focusing on openness and user control. But what does this actually mean for the millions of people joining the site?November was a good month for alternatives to X. Many users hit their balking point after two years of controversial changes turned Twitter...
The TikTok ban itself and the DC Circuit's approval of it should be of great concern even to those who find TikTok undesirable or scary. Shutting down communications platforms or forcing their reorganization based on concerns of foreign propaganda and anti-national manipulation is an eminently anti-democratic tactic, one that the...
