Category: Business

The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday announced action against the pharmacy chain Rite Aid for its use of face recognition technology in hundreds of stores. The regulator found that Rite Aid deployed a massive, error-riddled surveillance program, chose vendors that could not properly safeguard the personal data the chain hoarded, and attempted to keep it […]

Have no fear, it’s the final EFFector of the year! Be the digital freedom expert for your family and friends during the holidays by catching up on the latest online rights issues with EFFector 35.16. This issue of our newsletter covers topics including: the surveillance one could be gifting another with smart speakers and other […]

Here’s another reason to block digital surveillance: it might reduce financial fraud.  That’s the upshot of a small but promising study published as a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper, “Consumer Surveillance and Financial Fraud.  Authors Bo Bian, Michaela Pagel and Huan Tang investigated the relationship between the rollout of Apple’s App Tracking […]

Last week, the Utah Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors violated a defendant’s Fifth Amendment privilege against self incrimination when they presented testimony about his refusal to give police the passcode to his cell phone. In State v. Valdez, the court found that verbally telling police a passcode is “testimonial” under the Fifth Amendment, and that […]

Today, EFF joins more than 25 civil society organizations to launch the Coalition #MigrarSinVigilancia (“To Migrate Without Surveillance”). The Latin American coalition’s aim is to oppose arbitrary and indiscriminate surveillance affecting migrants across the region, and to push for the protection of human rights by safeguarding migrants’ privacy and personal data. On this International Migrants […]

Like the weather rapidly getting colder outside, the fight over renewing, reforming, or sunsetting the mass surveillance power of Section 702 has been put on ice until spring. In the last week of legislative business before the winter break, Congress was scheduled to consider two very different proposals: H.R. 6570, the Protect Liberty and End […]

SAN FRANCISCO—A cartel of major publishing companies must not be allowed to criminalize fair-use library lending, the Internet Archive argued in an appellate brief filed today.  The Internet Archive is a San Francisco-based 501(c)(3) non-profit library which preserves and provides access to cultural artifacts of all kinds in electronic form. The brief filed in the […]

While there is a surge in federated social media sites, like Bluesky and Mastodon, some technologists are hoping to take things further than this model of decentralization with fully peer-to-peer applications. Two leading projects, Spritely and Veilid, hint at what this could look like. There are many technologies used behind the scenes to create decentralized […]

WHO said that 88 countries have no minimum age at which e-cigarettes can be bought and 74 countries have not implemented any e-cigarette regulations. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called on countries to ramp up prevention measures, saying that “kids are being recruited and trapped at an early age to use e-cigarettes and may get […]

Every internet user should have the ability to privately communicate with the people that matter to them, in a secure fashion, using the tools and protocols of their choosing. Apple’s iMessage offers end-to-end encrypted messaging for its customers, but only if those customers want to talk to someone who also has an Apple product. When […]