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Deeplinks Blog

Deeplinks Blog by Dave Maass, Jennifer Pinsof | October 31, 2023

VICTORY! California Department of Justice Declares Out-of-State Sharing of License Plate Data Unlawful

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has issued a legal interpretation and guidance for law enforcement agencies around the state that confirms what privacy advocates have been saying for years: It is against the law for police to share data collected from license plate readers with out-of-state or federal agencies.

Press Release | October 31, 2023

EFF Unveils the Red Flag Machine, Exposing Deep Flaws in Student Surveillance Software

SAN FRANCISCO—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today unveiled the Red Flag Machine: an interactive quiz and report demonstrating the absurd inefficiency—and potential dangers—of student surveillance software that schools across the country use and that routinely invades the privacy of millions of children. The Red Flag Machine...

Deeplinks Blog by Cory Doctorow | October 31, 2023

You Wanna Break Up With Your Bank? The CFPB Wants to Help You Do It.

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has proposed a new “Personal Financial Data Rights” rule that will force your bank to make it easy for you to extract your financial data so that you can use it to comparison shop for a better offer, and switch to another bank with...

Deeplinks Blog by Jason Kelley | October 30, 2023

Young People May Be The Biggest Target for Online Censorship and Surveillance—and the Strongest Weapon Against Them

Over the last year, state and federal legislatures have tried to pass—and in some cases succeeded in passing—legislation that bars young people from digital spaces, censors what they are allowed to see and share online, and monitors and controls when and how they can do it. EFF and many other...

Deeplinks Blog by Jason Kelley | October 30, 2023

How GoGuardian Invades Student Privacy

GoGuardian is a student monitoring tool that watches over twenty-seven million students across ten thousand schools, but what it does exactly, and how well it works, isn’t easy for students to know. To learn more about its functionality, accuracy, and impact on students, we filed dozens of public records requests...

Deeplinks Blog by Jacob Hoffman-Andrews | October 26, 2023

Passkeys and Privacy

This is part 2 of our series on passkeys. See part 1 here.In our previous article we described what a passkey is: a few hundred bytes of data stored in your password manager, security key, or elsewhere, which allows you to log in to a specific website without a...

Deeplinks Blog by Jacob Hoffman-Andrews | October 26, 2023

What the !#@% is a Passkey?

A new login technique is becoming available in 2023: the passkey. The passkey promises to solve phishing and prevent password reuse. But lots of smart and security-oriented folks are confused about what exactly a passkey is. There’s a good reason for that. A passkey is in some sense one of...

Deeplinks Blog by Christian Romero | October 26, 2023

Celebrating the Internet Freedom Movement at the EFF Awards

“It would be easy to see the world as all doom and gloom when you're tackling these issues… But we do this work because we CAN fix the internet. Our dream is that everyone in this room will not only stand up for their rights but find ten other friends...

Deeplinks Blog by Corynne McSherry | October 25, 2023

Access to Law Should Be Fully Open: Tell Congress Not to Be Fooled by the Pro Codes Act

It’s Open Access Week in the United States, which means it’s a chance to celebrate the accomplishments of the Open Access movement—and reinforce the need to keep fighting. We’ve come a long way, with governments, universities, and research funders all successfully pressuring publishers to improve access...

Deeplinks Blog by David Greene | October 24, 2023

Speaking Freely: Nadine Strossen

Nadine Strossen is a leading voice for freedom of speech as a scholar and an activist in the US and globally. She is a constitutional law professor at New York Law School, a Senior Fellow with FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and was the President of the...

Deeplinks Blog by Veridiana Alimonti | October 24, 2023

What’s the Goal and How Do We Get There? Crucial Issues in Brazil’s Take on Saving the News from Big Tech

Amidst the global wave of countries looking at Big Tech revenues and how they relate to the growing news media crisis, many are asking whether and how tech companies should compensate publishers for the journalism that circulates on their platforms. This has become another flash point in Brazil’s ...

Deeplinks Blog by Corynne McSherry, Paige Collings | October 20, 2023

Internet Access Shouldn't Be a Bargaining Chip In Geopolitical Battles

We at EFF are horrified by the events transpiring in the Middle East: Hamas’ deadly attack on southern Israel last weekend and Israel’s ongoing retributive military attack and siege on Gaza. While we are not experts in military strategy or international diplomacy, we do have expertise with how human rights...

Deeplinks Blog by Thorin Klosowski | October 20, 2023

What to Do If You're Concerned About the 23andMe Breach

In early October, a bad actor claimed they were selling account details from the genetic testing service, 23andMe, which included alleged data of one million users of Ashkenazi Jewish descent and another 100,000 users of Chinese descent. By mid-October this expanded out to another four million more general accounts....

Deeplinks Blog by Alexis Hancock | October 18, 2023

Privacy Advocates to TSA: Slow Down Plans for mDLs

A digital form of identification should have the same privacy and security protections as physical ones. More so, because the standards governing them are so new and untested. This is at the heart of comments EFF and others submitted recently. Why now? Well, in 2021 the ...

Deeplinks Blog by Matthew Guariglia | October 18, 2023

Adtech Surveillance and Government Surveillance are Often the Same Surveillance

In the absence of comprehensive federal privacy legislation in the United States, the targeted advertising industry, fueled by personal information harvested from our cell phone applications, has run roughshod over our privacy. Worse, the boundaries between corporate surveillance and government surveillance are eroding. Unless your data...

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