We’re Asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to End Warrantless ALPR Searches
Today, EFF joined the ACLU of Wisconsin in filing a petition to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, asking it to rule that the state’s constitution requires a warrant for retrospective…
DHS Inspector General Finds That TSA is Not Properly Safeguarding Passenger Facial Recognition Data
EFF legal intern Gabrielle Ladun was the principal author of this post. The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) has published a summary of…
🗣 A Victory for Freedom of Speech Online | EFFector 38.18
No one should have to think twice before criticizing the government online. But a mass surveillance program known as "Catch and Revoke" was created to make millions do just that.…
As Federal Court Rules ALPRs are Mass Surveillance, EFF Gets Disappointing Ruling
In an extremely disappointing ruling , a California trial court dismissed SIREN v. San Jose , our case challenging the city of San Jose’s warrantless searches of its vast stores…
Resisting the Menace of Federal Data Consolidation
In the past two years, the federal government has unlawfully consolidated data exposing our private information. This consolidation has been chaotic but generally came in three…
Organizing in the Town at Oakland Tech Week
EFF was thrilled to join organizers, advocates, and activists in the East Bay for the second annual Oakland Tech Week last week. We are grateful to our friends at MediaJustice and…
Turkish Crackdown On LGBTQ+ Organizations Threatens Freedom of Expression and Association
EFF strongly condemns Turkey’s state-led discriminatory, oppressive attacks on feminist and LGBTQ+ organisations, media platforms, student groups, and rights defenders and…
Privacy's Defenders Podcast: No Privacy Without Encryption
When we communicate online today – from your personal emails and DMs to secure international commerce – we usually do so with encryption. Encryption converts readable data into…
When No ID Means No Internet: Age Verification and the Right to Access Information
This post was co-authored by Sheila B. Lalwani , a doctorate student and recent COMPASS Fellow hosted by EFF. Age verification proposals are often presented as a simple tradeoff:…
It's DAF Day! Wait...What's a DAF?
Today is DAF Day! This event highlights the millions of donor-advised funds (DAFs) people have set up to make charitable donations and change the world. If you have a DAF,…
Victory! California Appeals Court Refuses to Revive Surveillance Tech CEO’s Meritless Lawsuit Against Journalist
When the rich and powerful try to use the court to silence negative reporting about themselves, it’s worth calling out that behavior for what it is: an attack on free speech. This…
Privacy on the Map (Part 2): Progress, Pitfalls, and the Fight for Enforceable Location Data Protections
Regulating commercial location tracking has reached a turning point. Last year, we published our rubric for what comprehensive and protective location privacy laws should look…
Meta's $17 Billion Settlement is a Bad Deal for Teens and All Social Media Users
Meta’s settlement with 52 state attorneys general is a bad deal for all internet users, and especially for teens. That’s what we said the day the settlement was announced. In this…
Cold TAKE: Amazon's New Encryption Method Still Doesn't Deliver Real Privacy
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…
Victory! Court Rejects Government Effort to Dismiss Social Media Surveillance Lawsuit
Judge Allows Social Media Surveillance Lawsuit Against Trump Administration to Move Forward NEW YORK — A lawsuit filed by three labor unions against the Departments of State and…
EFF Statement on California Governor's Executive Order on AI
California Gov. Gavin Newsom's executive order is an opportunity for a needed, thoughtful conversation about artificial intelligence and its potential harms. Everyday Californians…
👮 Flock Searches for the LOLs | EFFector 38.16
Mass surveillance isn't a joke. But police are treating it like one when using automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks. In our latest EFFector newsletter , we're covering a…
The High Crime of “LMAO”: How Cops Are Treating Flock's Mass Surveillance As a Joke
Here's a riddle: Why did a Goshen Police Department officer search 6,474 automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks, representing data from 82,413 cameras, on May 7, 2025? If…
Cops Play Hide and Seek About Using Spy Tech to Avoid Scrutiny and Bad PR
Law enforcement agencies across the country are increasingly relying on spying technologies— automated license plate readers (ALPR), cell-site simulators , and facial recognition…
California’s “Addictive Feeds” Law Violates Teens’ First Amendment Rights
A California law that prohibits teens from receiving recommended social media content from other social media users violates their First Amendment rights, EFF argued this week.…
EFF to San Francisco Police: Drones are Powerful Surveillance Tools That Require a Robust Policy
The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) began regularly deploying drones two years ago and has since expanded their use in a way that has outpaced its documented policy and…
While the Country Rejects ALPR Mass Surveillance, SF Settles for Weak Safeguards
San Francisco's decision to retain its use of Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) surveillance cameras belies what we know about this spying technology tool: it endangers…
Judge Rules DOD Unlawfully Retaliated Against Anthropic
A federal judge has sided with Anthropic on its claims that the Department of Defense illegally retaliated against Anthropic’s protected speech by labeling the AI company a…
How the Meta Settlement Silences Youth Activism
Since its integration into our digital world, social media has played a pivotal role in youth organizing and social mobilization. Yet, people’s access to these platforms is…
Victory! Appeals Court Rejects Expansive New Copyright Claim
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit handed internet users and programmers a big win today, by rejecting an attempt to stretch a narrow provision of the Digital…
EFF to Court: Trump's Use of Truth Social's Pay-To-See-Posts-First Scheme Violates Americans' 1st Amendment Equal Access Rights
EFF legal intern Simar Kaur also contributed to this article. Americans’ First Amendment right to equal access to official government statements is violated by the Trump…
EFF to Governor Newsom: Veto California’s AB 1709
The California legislature passed Assembly Bill 1709 (A.B. 1709) today, which functions as a sweeping ban on social media use for young people under the age of 16. This…
Doxxing Safety Part II: Incident Response
Doxxing, also known as the deliberate sharing of personal information to harass or endanger someone, is a tricky thing to protect against. It often happens by some ill-intentioned…
Texas and Florida Step Back from ALPRs
Within the last few days, two important state actions have dealt a big blow to automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks. This is just the latest proof of the growing tide of…
EFF Welcomes Alexander Macgillivray to its Board of Directors
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce today that Alexander “ amac ” Macgillivray — a former White House official who also served in top legal capacities…
How to Limit What Apple’s New Siri AI Can Access in iOS 27
Apple’s new operating system is here, and along with it comes a new version of Siri, dubbed with two very familiar letters: AI. As the name suggests, this Siri power-up resembles…
California: Tell the Governor to Stand Up for Net Neutrality, Affordability, and Public Safety
The federal government has inserted a provision into a funding deal with the state of California that would make the state abandon its gold standard net neutrality law, broadband…
New Records Reveal Problems with Medicare’s AI Prior Authorization Experiment
EFF sued the government back in March for information about the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) model , a new Medicare program that uses AI to evaluate prior…
Congress Has Another Site-Blocking Bill, And This One Targets VPNs
Congress is taking another run at site-blocking, a deeply flawed concept that would undermine basic internet infrastructure. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has introduced the American…
Doxxing Safety Pt I: Prevention and Footprint Management
Doxxing is the deliberate disclosure of personal information in order to bully, harass, intimidate, or instigate a chain of harms against someone. It's a tricky thing to protect…
We Demand More Information on How Marin Cops Illegally Shared Flock ALPR Data
The Marin County Sheriff’s Office is the latest California law enforcement agency to get caught sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) data from their Flock Safety system…
Court Rules Against Citizen Journalists in DMCA Takedown Case—EFF Will Appeal
A federal court in Massachusetts has ruled that copyright holders can issue online takedown notices based on a subjective belief of copyright infringement, even when that belief…
Secure Messaging and AI Remain In Conflict Despite the Promise of TEEs
Secure messaging platforms, like Signal, WhatsApp, and recently, encrypted RCS , operate on a straightforward assumption: the content at each end of a conversation is private to…
Governor Newsom Signs Student-Backed Digital Literacy Bills Alongside Misguided Bans
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…
EU Kids Act Won't Keep the Internet Accountable and Trustworthy
The EU Commission draft law to restrict young people’s access to the internet that it presented last week will come at a high cost: it will put online services behind age gates,…
EFF to Courts: Don’t Rewrite Copyright Over AI Hype
The history of technology is rife with copyright panics. In the 1980s, major rightsholders ran to Congress and the courts, claiming that videotape recorders (VTR) were “to the…
EFF to Lawmakers: Ground AI Cybersecurity Rules in Best Practices
With doomsday AI scenarios dominating the news, lawmakers are rightly concerned about reports concerning security breaches at major US AI labs, such as the OpenAI–Hugging Face…
Court Agrees with EFF: Utah’s VPN Law Demands a Technical Impossibility
When state lawmakers attempt to rewrite how the internet works, users rely on courts to recognize that laws can’t make technical impossibilities a reality. That’s why we were…
Happy Opt Out October! Let’s Find Real Alternatives to the Tech Giants
Over the years, the major tech companies have found all sorts of ways to embed themselves into our lives. We often use their software, their AI tools, their social media, and…
📱 Hey Siri, How Do I Limit AI Data Access? | EFFector 38.17
With the launch of iOS 27, Apple is rolling out a variety of new AI features to its familiar voice assistant, Siri. But how are AI tools like these handling our data? In our…
We All Deserve a Better Internet, Not A Smaller One
Bans Like California’s Don’t Fix What’s Wrong With Social Media Companies SAN FRANCISCO - Technology and the laws that regulate it should support and empower young people.…
Ola Bini Ordered to Leave Ecuador Under Obscure Accusations
In a new blow to Ola Bini’s legal guarantees, Ecuadorean authorities retained the free software developer and security expert yesterday in Quito and ordered his immediate…
Digital Sovereignty: What It Is, What It Could Be
The term “digital sovereignty” has become ubiquitous. European officials invoke it in debates about cloud infrastructure, AI , semiconductors , and platform regulation.…
Site-Blocking Will Not Defend IP, No Matter the Bill’s Name
There has been a raft of site-blocking bills in the latest Congress, and the latest is called the “Deterring Extraterritorial Foreign Exploitation of Networks Damaging…
Privacy’s Defenders Podcast: Cowboys, Cypherpunks and Visionaries
People are increasingly concerned about the ways in which mass surveillance is tracking our every move: from Flock license plate readers to face recognition to creepy ads that –…
D.C. Circuit Must Vacate a Drone Flight Restriction That Criminalized Recording Immigration Agents
EFF joined an amicus brief with ACLU, ACLU of D.C., National Press Photographers Association, and Professional Photographers of America to urge the D.C. Circuit to vacate an FAA…
Challengers Approach: Third Party App Stores Arrive to Google Play
If you are an Android user, you may have noticed it already: Google has begun allowing rival, third-party app stores to be distributed through the Google Play Store. And if you…
2026 EFF Award Winners: Access Now, 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, DeFlock, and New Media Rights
EFF is pleased to announce that Access Now, 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, DeFlock, and New Media Rights have received 2026 EFF Awards for their…
Victory: Court, Using a New Test, Rules Embedding Links is Legal
Courts have for two decades found that linking and embedding someone else’s web content, be it a photo, music, or an article, doesn’t violate copyright law–the entity that…
DraftKings Is Using AI to Supercharge the Harms of Online Behavioral Advertising
Online sports betting company DraftKings is using AI to target customers who are most likely to place losing bets and respond to gambling promotions. This kind of targeting is a…