Category: Business

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 […]

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 […]