Category: Business

In the name of ‘protecting kids online,’ Congress pushed forward legislation this year that could have severely undermined our privacy and stifled free speech. These bills would have mandated invasive age-verification checks for everyone online—adults and kids alike—handing unprecedented control to tech companies and government authorities. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle introduced bill […]

Our Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) guides, which provide practical advice and explainers for how to deal with government and corporate surveillance, had a big year. We published several large updates to existing guides and released three all new guides. And with frequent massive protests across the U.S., our guide to attending a protest remained one of […]

2025 was the year age verification went from a fringe policy experiment to a sweeping reality across the United States. Half of the U.S. now mandates age verification for accessing adult content or social media platforms. Nine states saw their laws take effect this year alone, with more coming in 2026. The good news is […]

Age verification mandates are spreading fast, and they’re ushering in a new age of online surveillance, censorship, and exclusion for everyone—not just young people. Age-gating laws generally require websites and apps to collect sensitive data from every user, often through invasive tools like ID checks, biometric scans, or other dubious “estimation” methods, before granting them […]

Read more about how ICE has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on surveillance technology to spy on anyone—and potentially everyone—in the United States, and how to follow the Homeland Security Spending Trail.. ICE has been invading U.S. cities, targeting, surveilling, harassing, assaulting, detaining, and torturing people who are undocumented immigrants. They also have targeted […]

EFF last summer asked a federal judge to block the federal government from using Medicaid data to identify and deport immigrants.   We also warned about the danger of the Trump administration consolidating all of the government’s information into a single searchable, AI-driven interface with help from Palantir, a company that has a shaky-at-best record on […]

Today, we’re launching Encrypt It Already, our push to get companies to offer stronger privacy protections to our data and communications by implementing end-to-end encryption. If that name sounds a little familiar, it’s because this is a spiritual successor to our 2019 campaign, Fix It Already, a campaign where we pushed companies to fix longstanding […]

EFF has long warned about the dangers of the “real-time bidding” (RTB) system powering nearly every ad you see online. A proposed class-action settlement with Google over their RTB system is a step in the right direction towards giving people more control over their data. Truly curbing the harms of RTB, however, will require stronger […]

Lawmakers in Washington are once again focusing on kids, screens, and mental health. But according to Congress, Big Tech is somehow both the problem and the solution. The Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing today on “examining the effect of technology on America’s youth.” Witnesses warned about “addictive” online content, mental health, and kids spending […]

The Baton Rouge Police Department announced this week that it will begin using a drone designed by military equipment manufacturer Lockheed Martin and Edge Autonomy, making it one of the first local police departments to use an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a history of primary use in foreign war zones. Baton Rouge is now […]