Category: Business

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

It’s easy to feel hopeless about the collapse of the tech sector into a group 0f monopolistic silos that harvest and exploit our data, hold our communities hostage, gouge us on prices, and steal our wages. But all over the world and across different government departments, policymakers are converging on a set of muscular, effective […]

Do you ever look at something once and then get targeted ads? Have you ever been exposed in some company’s data breach? Have you ever heard a lawmaker push restrictions on technology that they don’t even understand? To live in the modern world is to interact with technology in ways that are wonderful—and others that […]

Patents are supposed to be an incentive to invent. Too often, they end up being a way to try to claim “ownership” of what should be basic building blocks of human activity, culture, and knowledge. This is especially true of software patents, an area EFF has been speaking out about for more than 20 years […]

WASHINGTON, DC—The Supreme Court should clarify standards for determining if the government permissibly advised or convinced social media companies to censor content from 2020 to 2022, or impermissibly coerced or threatened sites in violation of the First Amendment, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said in a brief filed today.  “Government co-option of content moderation systems […]

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 […]