Category: Technology

Across the country, surveillance companies have spun a vast web of tens of thousands of license plate cameras. The people selling this tech want you to believe that it’s for your safety, but how are authorities really using automated license plate readers (ALPR)? In this week’s EFFector newsletter, we’re looking at how these powerful surveillance networks have […]

Some farms are looking at how best to use their lights at night. MillaF/Shutterstock Growing evidence suggests that excessive outdoor lighting at night may be harming wildlife. For generations, rural communities worked to the rhythms of daylight and darkness. Today, the amount of harsh light switched on at nightime is having profound consequences for many […]

Mauritius set out its national AI strategy in 2018, the first by an African country. Since then over a dozen African states have adopted national AI policies of some sort or another. As a national policy plan, an AI strategy typically sets out the priorities and aspirations in achieving certain policy objectives. At the continental […]

Several U.S. states are pushing to ban young people from social media entirely. This marks the latest wave of censorship bills masquerading as “children’s online safety” measures, with states like Massachusetts, Idaho, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois, and EFF’s home state of California leading the charge. Just a few years ago, lawmakers supporting age-gating […]

The Artemis III mission will involve launching the Orion spacecraft into low Earth orbit. Nasa/Esa/ATG Medialab Nasa has named the crew of its next Artemis mission, which it promised would be an “extraordinary demonstration of what is possible”. Artemis is the ambitious American-led effort to the return humans to the lunar surface by 2028. However, […]

Cape gannets colony, South Africa. Asher Pardey, Unsplash, CC BY Conservationists analyse overwhelming volumes of ecological data in their work. For example, they might need to process decades of weather data or the movements of millions of insects. Up until now, these scientists and decision makers have had to manually find and sort information, then […]

Just days after a damning WIRED report exposed that Meta had quietly embedded facial recognition technology (FRT) code into millions of phones, the tech giant has quietly acquiesced in demands to reverse course. Last week, researchers identified code in Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, that could convert images of […]

On a warm June evening in San Francisco, attorneys and other legally-minded friends of EFF gathered for our 17th Annual Cyberlaw Trivia Night, an annual test of tech-related legal knowledge, and the ability to remember some deeply obscure facts under pressure.  Returning Quizmaster Kurt Opsahl once again guided competitors through six rounds of trivia covering […]

When I talk to my son, an engineering student, and we have a question or disagreement, he immediately turns to ChatGPT as his primary source of information and confirmation. He is not alone in this. The use of generative AI tools has exploded across different demographic groups. For many people, these tools can be entertaining, […]

Astronomers using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have discovered the most distant hydroxyl megamaser ever detected, opening a new radio astronomy frontier. A hydroxyl megamaser is a natural space laser, and this one is located in a violently merging galaxy more than 8 billion light-years away. We spoke to the astronomers, Thato Manamela, […]