The rising tide of policing by robots and drones may seem relentless or even inevitable. But activism, legislative advocacy, and public outrage can do a lot to protect our safety and freedom from these technologies. This year began with a report that elucidated what police are doing with drones....
EFF and our supporters have fought off numerous wrongheaded attempts by Congress to regulate online speech, including several that we wrote about last December.The bevy of bad internet regulation proposals coming out of Congress hasn’t stopped. In 2022, the EARN IT Act was re-introduced. This wrongheaded bill would...
EFF continued to expand our work on technology issues in the workplace in 2022. We first renewed our attention to worker privacy when the specter of “bossware”—tracking software on work devices—reared its ugly head at the start of the pandemic.Since then, EFF has joined with those in the labor community...
2022 marked an important year for digital rights across the European Union as the landmark Digital Services Act (DSA) came into force on 16 November seeking to foster a safer and more competitive digital space.The DSA overhauls the EU’s core platform regulation, the e-Commerce Directive, and is intended...
In 2022, cyber-attacks on government databases and systems broke into headlines in several Latin American countries. These attacks have exposed government systems’ vulnerabilities—including sometimes basic ones, like failing to keep software updated with critical patches—and shown how attacks can affect government data, services, and infrastructure. On the other hand, they...
Over the past few years, just like the rest of the world, EFF has had to adapt to change and face new challenges. We’ve even had to relearn how we did things before most of the world shut down for over a year. Even through all this, EFF members have...
Neal Stephenson’s classic 1992 dystopian novel Snow Crash inspired today’s tech industry in many ways. Google Earth is said to have been inspired by the novel’s “Earth” software, which lets people interactively visualize the whole world. Snow Crash is also the origin of an immersive virtual world Stephenson...
EFF’s Threat Lab is dedicated to deep-dive investigations that examine technology-enforced power imbalances in society. In 2022 we’ve sharpened our knives and honed our skills in an effort to bring down the stalkerware industry, taken aim at invasive surveillance by police, raised red flags around the security and privacy...
Your right to repair matters. When you repair a device, you can keep using it, rather than needing to throw it away—creating waste—and purchasing a new one, which uses even more resources. A right to repair creates a market for independent repair shops, encouraging competition between manufacturers and independent...
Earlier this year, a cross-team group of EFF technologists, researchers, activists, and lawyers broke the story of Fog Data Science, a secretive data broker that sells cops access to huge quantities of people's precise location data. The data they use is harvested from our phone apps, sent to data...
No year that includes tech-enabled abuse can be said to be a good year. But 2022 has certainly been an eventful year for the technologies used as instruments of coercive control domestic abuse situations, ranging from stalkerware to physical trackers. In February, EFF called for the FTC to investigate...
Do some good in the world and get an extra boost. Donate to support internet privacy & free speech by December 31, and you’ll help EFF unlock seven Year-End Challenge grants.
Last year, several parents at EFF enrolled kids into daycare and were instantly told to download an application for managing their children’s care. These applications frequently include notifications of feedings, diaper changes, pictures, activities, and who picked-up/dropped-off the child—potentially useful features for overcoming separation anxiety of newly enrolled children and...
This year has been a roller coaster for the movement to decentralize the services and tools that we rely on every day. Decentralizing internet services may help remedy concerns ranging from traditional big business competition to online privacy.In order to devote closer attention to these issues which impact user autonomy...
