Category: Technology

The Illinois legislature recently passed House Bill 5511, which imposes a sweeping, device-level age-gating framework across nearly all internet-enabled hardware, operating systems, and online services. This well-intentioned but deeply flawed piece of legislation will harm young people who rely on the internet to access essential information and find community. That’s why we’re urging the Illinois […]

You have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world, and even short-term surveillance of these movements is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in Chatrie v. United States.   The case involved geofence warrants, a form of dragnet surveillance police have […]

Generative artificial intelligence (AI), and especially large language models deployed as chatbots and digital assistants, are now part of everyday digital life. These models are being framed as a helpful assistant, a patient tutor, a customer service agent and even a source of emotional support. But what happens when even more human encounters are mediated […]

More than 500 people have been killed in Venezuela following powerful back-to-back earthquakes, with many more injured. Rescue teams have also been trying to locate people trapped in collapsed buildings. Here, Raffaele De Risi, associate professor in civil engineering at the University of Bristol, answered our questions about the role building design may have played […]

This Pride month, we’re calling on the dating app Grindr to prioritize LGBTQ+ user safety by making privacy the default across its platform. That means no more sharing personal data with advertisers or training AI on private information without users’ opt-in consent. Grindr is a dating app for the LGBTQ+ community; and for queer people, […]

Poke your head into just about any online social network—or any general conversations about internet culture—and you’ll likely find a boogieman: the algorithm. Since at least the moment Facebook introduced (and apologized for) its News Feed, “the algorithm” has been shorthand for the ways the tech giants control what we see and when we see […]

Ignoring EFF’s warnings about the dangers and impossibility of implementing a new mandate for 3D print surveillance software, the California State Assembly has signed off on legislation to do just that. In the process, legislators amended the bill to make it even more confusing, while failing to address the risks to privacy, speech, and consumer […]

Dabarti CGI/Shutterstock Investigative interviewing – the process of obtaining accurate and complete accounts from victims, witnesses and suspects – is the lifeblood of the criminal justice system. When a crime occurs, someone usually knows something. But the way a police interview is conducted doesn’t simply determine whether information is obtained. It shapes the reliability and […]

Time and time again, researchers have found numerous compromised Android devices for sale at large online retailers like Amazon. When these devices get individually reported, we have seen some noted efforts to take them down. But this is a systemic problem and Amazon and other major online retailers must make a corresponding systemic and intentional […]

Seeking transparency and accountability in Paraguay’s use of facial recognition, EFF, the Association of Technology, Education, Development, Research, Communication (TEDIC), and the Centre for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights against the state for arbitrarily denying access to information about its implementation and use of the technology […]