Category: Technology

Legal intern Suzanne Castillo co-authored this post. Playstation’s decision to kill physical game discs is the latest attack on our diminishing rights to access and engage with culture digitally. Rent-seeking corporations and negligent lawmakers share the blame–and they can do better.  We’ve seen the same playbook used in the move to digital distribution of  film, […]

Nasa is planning to build up its lunar base in stages. Nasa Sixty years ago, the United States and the Soviet Union were embroiled in a race to the Moon, which the USA won. The 21st-century lunar contest, with China stepping in for the Soviet Union, has many similarities, but key differences. The Apollo astronauts […]

Researchers developed a new way to measure snowfall which will help communities plan on how to use and capture water. Evgeni Fabisuk/Shutterstock Mountain snow and meltwater from glaciers in the Himalayas determine how much water is available for drinking, farming and hydropower for millions of people in India, Pakistan, Nepal, China and Afghanistan. This is […]

Skrypnykov Dmytro / Shutterstock Airline passengers are being warned not to pack power banks in their hold luggage ahead of the summer holiday travel period. Devices with rechargeable batteries, like mobile phones, laptops, tablets, and smartwatches can be plugged into power banks on the go, where charging sockets may not be available. However, power banks […]

Alexandros Michailidis/Shutterstock Many of the biggest online platforms have long argued they aren’t publishers of the content their users upload, merely hosts. The likes of Google, YouTube, Meta and TikTok claim they simply store and display information created by others, so should not be seen as legally responsible for it. But a recent ruling by […]

In my first weeks as Executive Director of EFF, I’ve been reminded every day how consequential this moment is in determining what kind of future we will have. We are on the edge. What each one of us steps up to do – with our expertise, energy, and resources – will determine whether our future […]

This post is part 2 in a series about automated content moderation. Read the first post here. When whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked a set of documents from Meta in 2020, among the revelations was a jarring statistic: The company’s algorithms designed to detect terrorist content incorrectly deleted nonviolent Arabic-language content 77 percent of the time, […]

Bumblebees die in extreme heat, but there are other reasons too. Jay-Dee/Shutterstock You may be spotting bodies of dead bumblebees lying across pavements near you in the summer months. There are several reasons for this, some to do with the weather and some very much due to humans. Bumblebees are social, living in colonies that […]

Last May, EFF reported that a sheriff’s office in Texas searched data from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to track down a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion. ALPRs are promoted as tools for keeping communities safe by finding missing persons and locating stolen vehicles, but this case showed how ALPRS […]

Users are always seeking more control over their social networking experience to make it better, whether to improve privacy or enhance flexibility. Interoperability between social networking platforms like Facebook and TikTok has so many benefits that solve those issues.   Say you’re on multiple platforms because you have friends you follow on different networks, but you’ve […]