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After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue.

The EU’s so-called Chat Control plan, which would mandate mass scanning and other encryption breaking measures, has had some good news lately. The most controversial idea, the forced requirement to scan encrypted messages, was given up by EU member states. And now, another win for privacy: the EU Parliament has dealt a real blow to voluntary mass-scanning of chats by voting to

The UK is moving forward with its efforts to ban social media for young people. Ahead of this week’s House of Lords debate on the topic, we’re getting you situated with a primer on what’s been happening and what it all means.

She will be succeeding Cindy Cohn who has spent her career fighting the good fight. I was listening to an interview with her by Cory Doctorow, she’s had an impressive record with the EFF, and it sounds like she wants to get back to the courtroom and leave the administration to a new generation.

What’s at stake is whether “protecting children” becomes a legal pretext for embedding government control over the internet to enforce specific moral and religious judgments—judgments that deny marginalized people access to speech, community, history, and truth—into law.

When Rep. Leigh Finke spoke last month before the Minnesota House Commerce Finance and Policy Committee to testify against HF1434, a broad-sweeping proposal to age-gate the internet, she began with something disarming: agreement.

What’s at stake is whether “protecting children” becomes a legal pretext for embedding government control over the internet to enforce specific moral and religious judgments—judgments that deny marginalized people access to speech, community, history, and truth—into law.

While How to Fix the Internet is on hiatus, we wanted to share a great conversation with you from last week. EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn spoke with bestselling novelist, journalist, and EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow about Cindy’s new book, “Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against…

Rep. Finke, an openly transgender lawmaker, next raised a point that her critics have since tried to distort: age-verification laws like the Minnesota bill are already being used to block young LGBTQ+ people from exercising their First Amendment rights to access information that may be educational, affirming, or life-saving. Referencing the Supreme Court case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, she noted that state attorneys general have been “almost jubilant” about the ability to use these laws to restrict queer youth from accessing content. “We know that ‘prurient interest’ could be for many people, the very existence of transgender kids,” she added, referring to the malleable legal standard that would govern what content must be age-gated under the law.

Amazon Ring’s Super Bowl ad offered a vision of our streets that should leave every person unsettled about the company’s goals for disintegrating our privacy in public.In the ad, disguised as a heartfelt effort to reunite the lost dogs of the country with their innocent owners, the company…

February 5, 2026 - 10:00am to 11:00am PST

In the past year, ICE and CBP have descended into utter lawlessness, repeatedly refusing to exercise or submit to the democratic accountability required by the Constitution and our system of laws. These violations must stop now.

This isn’t about “owning the libs” — this is the highest office in the nation using technology to lie to the entire world.

Government invasion of a reporter’s home, and seizure of journalistic materials, is exactly the kind of abuse of power the First Amendment is designed to prevent. It represents the most extreme form of press intimidation. Yet, that’s what happened on Wednesday morning to Washington Post reporter…

EFF last summer asked a federal judge to block the federal government from using Medicaid data to identify and deport immigrants.

EFF is against age gating and age verification mandates, and we hope we’ll win in getting existing ones overturned and new ones prevented. But mandates are already in effect, and every day many people are asked to verify their age across the web, despite prominent cases of sensitive data getting leaked in the process.

A few enterprising hackers have started projects to do counter surveillance against ICE, and hopefully protect their communities through clever use of technology.

The U.S. government publishes volumes of detailed data on the money it spends, but searching through it and finding information can be challenging. This guide covers the key databases that store information on federal spending and contracts, government solicitations for products and services, and the government’s “online shopping superstore,” plus a few other deep-in-the-weeds

2025 was the year age verification went from a fringe policy experiment to a sweeping reality across the United States. Half of the U.S. now mandates age verification for accessing adult content or social media platforms. Nine states saw their laws take effect this year alone, with more coming in…

Earlier this year, both chambers of Congress passed the TAKE IT DOWN Act. This bill, while well-intentioned, gives powerful people a new legal tool to force online platforms to remove lawful speech that they simply don’t like. The bill, sponsored by Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rep….

This has me wondering what’s going to happen to platforms like this. How would age verification even work here? Would it work?

One of the issues with “age verification” is that an effect of the suggested technologies is that they ultimatively take control of your computer. In the suggested form, they require elements that are not controlled by you, the user. It is like replacing the lock to your home’s main door, for which YOU (and only you) have the keys, with an electronic, remotely controlled lock, controlled by goverments, which can lock out at any time.

Cross posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/40600495

SAN JOSE, Calif. – San Jose and its police department routinely violate the California Constitution by conducting warrantless searches of the stored records of millions of drivers’ private habits, movements, and associations, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC) argue in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

Who needs a DDoS (Denial of Service) attack when you have a new president? As of February 2nd, thousands of web pages and datasets have been removed from U.S. government agencies following a series of executive orders. The impacts span the Department of Veteran Affairs and the Center of Disease…

Following the same legislative and narrative pattern as the EU for “Chat Control”, similar laws and rhetoric are now cropping up in the US. The narrative is “save the children from porn” but the action is censorship, mass surveillance, and the elimination of privacy on the Internet.

SAN FRANCISCO – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the departments of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security (DHS) today to uncover information about the federal government demanding that tech companies remove apps that document immigration enforcement activities in communities throughout…

For more than a decade, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District coordinated with police to sift through the granular smart meter data of residents without suspicion to find evidence of cannabis growing.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/48228755

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/48228755

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/48228755

If you’ve been following the wave of age-gating laws sweeping across the country and the globe, you’ve probably noticed that lawmakers, tech companies, and advocates all seem to be using different terms for what sounds like the same thing. Age verification, age assurance, age estimation, age gating…

Unless publishing gatekeepers adopt drastically more equitable practices and become partners in disseminating knowledge, they will continue to lose ground to open access alternatives, legal or otherwise.

In the digital age, the collaborative and often community-governed effort of scholarly research has gone global and unlocked unprecedented potential to improve our understanding and quality of life. That is, if we let it. Publishers continue to monopolize access to life-saving research and increase the burden on researchers through article processing charges and a pyramid of volunteer labor. This exploitation makes a mockery of open inquiry and the denial of access as a serious human rights issue.

Both Google and Apple are cramming new AI features into their phones and other devices, and neither company has offered clear ways to control which apps those AI systems can access. Recent issues around WhatsApp on both Android and iPhone demonstrate how these interactions can go sideways, risking revealing chat conversations beyond what you intend. Users deserve better

New documents and court records obtained by EFF show that Texas deputies queried Flock Safety’s surveillance data in an abortion investigation, contradicting the narrative promoted by the company and the Johnson County Sheriff that she was “being searched for as a missing person,” and that “it was about her safety.”

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/35741152