Category: Business

Secure messaging platforms, like Signal, WhatsApp, and recently, encrypted RCS, operate on a straightforward assumption: the content at each end of a conversation is private to the participants in the conversation. End-to-end encryption helps provide the mathematical guarantees that the companies who operate these messaging platforms cannot access the contents of messages. But there’s no […]

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s executive order is an opportunity for a needed, thoughtful conversation about artificial intelligence and its potential harms. Everyday Californians are feeling real anxiety about the risks of artificial intelligence, and as an organization that works to ensure technology empowers people, EFF welcomes this order as a way for the state of […]

The West African country has increased domestic revenue by 0.5 per cent of GDP each year for the past decade, issued Africa’s first SDG bond in 2021 and used the resulting funding to expand access to education and drinking water, Aristide Medenou, Benin’s minister of economic cooperation, said on Friday. Access to drinking water there […]

Apple’s new operating system is here, and along with it comes a new version of Siri, dubbed with two very familiar letters: AI. As the name suggests, this Siri power-up resembles an AI chatbot more than the often derided voice assistant you might be used to. It has even evolved from a blob you invoke […]

With doomsday AI scenarios dominating the news, lawmakers are rightly concerned about reports concerning security breaches at major US AI labs, such as the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident and the many others reported in its aftermath. As they consider potentially regulating frontier AI, they should focus any new legislation on the immediate, demonstrated risks from those […]

A California law that prohibits teens from receiving recommended social media content from other social media users violates their First Amendment rights, EFF argued this week. The case, Meta v. Bonta, challenges SB 976, which requires that teen social media users get their parents’ permission before seeing other users’ recommended speech on their social media […]

Since its integration into our digital world, social media has played a pivotal role in youth organizing and social mobilization. Yet, people’s access to these platforms is increasingly coming under threat from courts and legislatures under the guise of protecting young people online—presenting a significant hindrance to youth organizing.   In a major recent example, Meta settled in a lawsuit with 52 states and territories regarding the use of Instagram and Facebook by young people. The settlement will require Meta, and […]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce today that Alexander “amac” Macgillivray — a former White House official who also served in top legal capacities at Twitter and Google — has joined EFF’s Board of Directors.  Macgillivray served in the Biden Administration as Deputy Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Office of Science […]

 The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit handed internet users and programmers a big win today, by rejecting an attempt to stretch a narrow provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into a new source of copyright liability.   The case involves Section 1202 of the DMCA, which prohibits intentionally removing copyright management […]

Courts have for two decades found that linking and embedding someone else’s web content, be it a photo, music, or an article, doesn’t violate copyright law–the entity that controls the server that hosts a copyrighted work, not the user or website that merely directs others to it, is directly liable if the content turns out […]