Category: Technology

In the early 1990s, crime-loving television audiences could choose mainly between cozy, fictional detective series such as Columbo and Murder, She Wrote. The US docuseries Unsolved Mysteries brought a few real cold-case investigations to light, but coverage of forensic science on screen was still relatively simple. Then, in May 1991, The Silence of the Lambs […]

When it comes to keeping our texts, chats, and other digital messages safe from prying eyes, we have a powerful tool: end-to-end encryption. Used correctly, end-to-end encryption turns our conversations online into secret messages that can only be decoded by their intended recipients. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we’re covering new developments in this tool, and how […]

When imagining our early human ancestors in prehistoric Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, one might envision trekkers plodding across a savanna, baking under an equatorial sun. Research, however, suggests that our species’ unique strengths – creativity, cooperation and adaptability – may have been honed in a very different environment. Our team of archaeologists […]

Bees are very good at navigation. James wk/Shutterstock Even advanced technology can struggle when the real world becomes unpredictable. In April 2026, a Waymo robotaxi in San Antonio, Texas, drove into a flooded lane during severe weather, prompting the company to recall about 3,800 vehicles for a software fix. No one was injured, but the […]

For years, civil society organizations, workers, journalists, and human rights experts have warned that major technology companies risk enabling grave human rights abuses when they provide cloud computing, AI, and surveillance infrastructure to governments implicated in violations of international and humanitarian law. While many companies pay lip service to evaluating customers and contracts for human […]

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”-Meta Internal Document on face recognition software for smart glasses, 2025 It’s unsurprising that a company would plan to release yet another privacy-invasive product. What is surprising is […]

Walking the dog: a US service member patrols with a Ghost Robotics Vision 60 prototype at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. Tech. Sgt. Cory Payne / US Air Force The third in a series of military AI summits was held in La Coruña, Spain in February 2026. The aim of the meeting was to […]

Africa is one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth. But much of its biodiversity remains poorly studied. Research from the continent contributes to less than 1% to global scientific output. This pattern is often explained by limited investment in research. Governments in sub-Saharan Africa allocate, on average, only about 0.4% of their gross domestic […]

We recently updated our privacy policy for the first time since 2022. Most of the changes are clarifications, reorganizations, and improvements in transparency, particularly around how third-party tools that run parts of our site operate. But one change is substantive enough that we want to address it directly. The Change You Should Know About: Opt-In […]

For most of the 20th century, the model of human origins was a tree: with the trunk dividing into branches, and then twigs. Each species of human relative (hominin) was a neat, single branch. As an undergraduate, I was taught that Homo sapiens was one of these branches that emerged in Africa, spread across the […]