Category: Business

Whatever online harms you want to alleviate on the internet today, you can do it better—with a broader impact—if you enact strong consumer data privacy legislation first. That is a grounding principle that has informed much of EFF’s consumer protection work in 2023. While consumer privacy will not solve every problem, it is superior to […]

There’s been plenty of bad news regarding federal legislation in 2023. For starters, Congress has failed to pass meaningful comprehensive data privacy reforms. Instead, legislators have spent an enormous amount of energy pushing dangerous legislation that’s intended to limit young people’s use of some of the most popular sites and apps, all under the guise […]

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 back against this overreach and demand accountability and transparency. Bad bills and invasive monitoring systems, though sometimes well-meaning, hurt students rather than […]

It seems like a no-brainer that everyone should be able to read, copy, and share the laws we all must follow, but few things are simple in the internet age. Public.Resource.Org’s victory at the D.C. Circuit appeals court in September, in which the court ruled that non-commercial copying of codes and standards that have been […]

2023 has been an unfortunate reminder that the right to free expression is most fragile for groups on the margins, and that it can quickly become a casualty during global conflicts. Threats to speech arose out of the ongoing war in Palestine. They surfaced in bills and laws around the world that explicitly restrict LGBTQ+ […]

You might’ve heard that most of EFF’s funding comes from regular people’s modest donations—we’re proud of that. But did you know that EFF members who donate $10 or less each month raised over $400,000 for digital rights this year? That covers multiple staff members who work in the courts, run advocacy campaigns, and build privacy-enhancing […]

It’s been a big year for Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD), our repository of self-help resources for helping better protect you and your friends from online spying. We’ve done a number of updates and tackled a few new emerging topics with blog posts. Fighting for digital security and privacy rights is important, but sometimes we all just need […]

Throughout the many years that EFF has been around, our goal has remained consistent: creating a future where you have your rights when you go online, and one where they are enhanced by new technologies. But our goal isn’t the only part of EFF that has remained consistent: for decades, the digital freedom supporters that […]

At the start of 2023, we sunsetted the HTTPS Everywhere web extension. It encrypted browser communications with websites and made sure users benefited from the protection of HTTPS wherever possible. HTTPS Everywhere ended because all major browsers now offer the functionality to make HTTPS the default. This is due to the grand efforts of the […]

 The challenges in ensuring strong privacy safeguards, proper oversight of surveillance powers, and effective remedy for those arbitrarily affected continued during 2023 in Latin America. Let’s take a few, non-exhaustive, examples. We saw a scandal unveiling that Brazilian Intelligence agents monitored movements of politicians, journalists, lawyers, police officers, and judges. In Perú, leaked documents indicated […]