Category: Business

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 […]

EFF asked a California appeals court to uphold a lower court’s decision to strike a tech CEO’s lawsuit against a journalist that sought to silence reporting the CEO, Maury Blackman, didn’t like. The journalist, Jack Poulson, reported on Maury Blackman’s arrest for felony domestic violence after receiving a copy of the arrest report from a […]

Government invasion of a reporter’s home, and seizure of journalistic materials, is exactly the kind of abuse of power the First Amendment is designed to prevent. It represents the most extreme form of press intimidation.  Yet, that’s what happened on Wednesday morning to Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, when the FBI searched her Virginia home […]

Earlier this month, Iran’s internet connectivity faced one of its most severe disruptions in recent years with a near-total shutdown from the global internet and major restrictions on mobile access. EFF joined architects, operators, and stewards of the global internet infrastructure in calling upon authorities in Iran to immediately restore full and unfiltered internet access. […]