Surveillance Self-Defense: 2023 Year in Review

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 […]

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The Last Mile of Encrypting the Web: 2023 Year in Review

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 […]

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Recent Surveillance Revelations, Enduring Latin American Issues: 2023 Year in Review

 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 […]

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Electronic Frontier Alliance Comes Back Strong: 2023 in Review

The Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA) is a loose network of local groups fighting for digital rights in the United States, chaired by EFF. Members’ efforts have been recovering from the limitations put on local organizing caused by the pandemic. More EFA members have been holding in-person workshops and meet-ups that help cement the relationships needed […]

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Corporate Spy Tech and Inequality: 2023 Year in Review

Our personal data and the ways private companies harvest and monetize it plays an increasingly powerful role in modern life. Throughout 2023, corporations have continued to collect our personal data, sell it to governments, use it to reach inferences about us, and exacerbate existing structural inequalities across society.  EFF is fighting back. Earlier this year, […]

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Protecting Encryption And Privacy In The US: 2023 Year in Review

EFF believes you have the right to have a private conversation–in the physical world, and in the digital world. The best technology to protect that right is end-to-end encryption.  Governments around the world are working hard to monitor online conversations, far beyond the bounds of traditional targeted law enforcement. 2023 has been a year of […]

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Artificial Intelligence and Policing: Year in Review 2023

Machine learning, artificial intelligence, algorithmic decision making–regardless of what you call it, and there is hot debate over that, this technology has been touted as a supposed threat to humanity, the future of work, as well as the hot new money-making doohickey. But one thing is for certain, with the amount of data required to […]

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Sketchy and Dangerous Android Children’s Tablets and TV Set-Top Boxes: 2023 in Review

You may want to save your receipts if you gifted any low-end Android TV set-top boxes or children’s tablets to a friend or loved one this holiday season. In a series of investigations this year, EFF researchers confirmed the existence of dangerous malware on set-top boxes manufactured by AllWinner and RockChip, and discovered sketchyware on […]

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Surveillance and the U.S.-Mexico Border: 2023 Year in Review

The U.S.-Mexico border continues to be one of the most politicized spaces in the country, with leaders in both political parties supporting massive spending on border security, including technological solutions such as the so-called “virtual wall.” We spent the year documenting surveillance technologies at the border and the impacts on civil liberties and human rights […]

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