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With no warrant requirements, limited guardrails, and deficient audit processes, ALPR databases have fostered a culture of unrestricted access to everyone’s location information. This culture of abuse has allowed police to treat a mass surveillance network like their own personal search engine, permitting the tracking of the movements of everyday citizens for low-level complaints, personal whims, and sometimes, seemingly, for the lols.
Governor Newsom signed a package of 12 bills yesterday aimed at “protecting children” online. One of them was AB 1709 , which EFF has opposed this legislative session and serves as a functional ban on young people under 16 using social media. However, EFF supported two of the bills signed into law, AB 2071 and AB 2298 , which require that children learn critical digital literacy and cybersecurity topics. The bills are an affirmative and constitutional way for the state...
Amazon recently debuted a new feature for its Ring cameras that the company is calling Throw Away the Key Encryption (TAKE). The idea is to cut back on the amount of video content available to the company, and thus potentially available to law enforcement. But while it might technically add a speed bump to accessing full video content, it doesn’t deliver nearly the level of privacy we should be demanding from video doorbells and other security cameras. TAKE introduces a...
