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Society, Policy & Culture 517Security & Privacy 387Tech Industry & Business 163Networking & Internet 38Web & Frontend 32Tools & Productivity 16
Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal published evidence that Google has been circumventing the privacy settings of Safari and iPhone users, tracking them on non-Google sites despite Apple's default settings, which were intended to prevent such tracking. This tracking, discovered by Stanford...
Federal court records belong to everyone. But one federal court in Texas lets patent litigants treat courts like their own private tribunals, effectively shutting out the public.When EFF tried to intervene and push for greater access to a patent dispute earlier this year, the U.S. District Court...
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit today against the Justice Department to shed light on whether the government has ever used secret court orders to force technology companies to decrypt their customers’ private communications, a...
Age verification laws are proliferating fast across the United States and around the world, creating a dangerous and confusing tangle of rules about what we’re all allowed to see and do online. That's why today, we're launching EFF.org/Age, a one-stop shop for users seeking to understand what these laws actually do…
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will consider adopting a DRM non-aggression covenant at its Advisory Committee meeting in Boston next week. EFF has attended several of these meetings before as a W3C member, always with the intent to persuade the W3C that supporting DRM is a bad idea for the Web...
EFF filed an amicus brief in Arizona federal court arguing that public school students need private digital spaces beyond their school’s reach to speak freely, without the specter of constant school surveillance and punishment.
Today, we’re happy to announce that we will be accepting Bitcoin donations through our website. You can use them to make one-time donations, set up monthly donations or get an EFF membership (which includes awesome membership swag like EFF hats and digital freedom t-shirts).While we are accepting...
At stake in Apple's fight against government orders to break open locked iPhones could be the legal authorization for “virtually limitless” surveillance under the Internet of Things, according to a federal judge's order rejecting a government request in a New York drug case yesterday. Midway...
While the indictment of Julian Assange centers on an alleged attempt to break a password—an attempt that was not apparently successful—it is still, at root, an attack on the publication of leaked material and the most recent act in an almost decade-long effort to punish a whistleblower and the...
Welcome! The fact that you’re reading this means that you probably care deeply about the issue of privacy, which warms our hearts. Unfortunately, even though you care about privacy, or perhaps because you care so much about it, you may feel that there's not much you (or anyone) can really do to...
It looks like Apple, Inc., is exploring a new business opportunity: spyware and what we're calling "traitorware." While users were celebrating the new jailbreaking and unlocking exemptions, Apple was quietly preparing to apply for a patent on technology that, among other things, would allow Apple...
EFF will soon be launching the SSL Observatory project, an effort to monitor and secure the cryptographic infrastructure of the World Wide Web. There is much work to be done, and we will need the help of many parties to make the HTTPS-encrypted web genuinely trustworthy. To see why, you can read...
"Connections." It's an innocent-sounding word. But it's at the heart of some of the worst of Facebook's recent changes.Facebook first announced Connections a few weeks ago, and EFF quickly wrote at length about the problems they created. Basically, Facebook has transformed substantial personal...
Last month, EFF got an email from software developer Duane Fields of Exact Magic, asking if he could use our logo on an iPhone application that exclusively displays content from EFF's RSS feed. Sounded like a great idea to us, as long as it was clear that the app wasn't an EFF-sponsored product.But...
One of EFF's first major legal victories was Bernstein v. Department of Justice, a landmark case that resulted in establishing code as speech and changed United States export regulations on encryption software, paving the way for international e-commerce. We represented Daniel J. Bernstein, a...
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit against Apple Inc. today to defend the First Amendment rights of an operator of a noncommercial, public Internet "wiki" site known as BluWiki. EFF and the San Francisco law firm of Keker...
"Google will never sell any personal information to third parties; and you get to decide how your information is used." - Sundar Pichai Sound familiar? Although big tech companies like Google keep the lights on by harvesting and monetizing your personal data, they can be quick to mince words and deny the strawman…
In an important ruling handed down yesterday, a federal district court threw out a copyright infringement suit brought by adult video producer Io Group against Veoh, concluding that the video hosting site qualifies for the DMCA safe harbor. The ruling should be required reading for the executives...
Cory Doctorow, my former EFF colleague, now novelist and all-around-inspiration, gave a stirring speech entitled "How to Destroy the Book" in November at a Canadian conference dedicated to literacy. Fittingly, it was spontaneously transcribed and posted online at The Varsity.ca. The whole thing is...
San Francisco - "Terms of Service" policies on websites define how Internet businesses interact with you and use your personal information. But most web users don't read these policies -- or understand that the terms are constantly changing. To track these ever-evolving documents, the Electronic...
Over the past few days, EFF and one of our staff technologists, the talented Micah Lee, have had an illuminating back and forth with Canonical Ltd over the use of the Ubuntu mark. While we don’t believe that Canonical has acted with malice or intent to censor, its silly invocation of trademark law...
What is a warrant canary? A warrant canary is a colloquial term for a regularly published statement that a service provider has not received legal process that it would be prohibited from saying it had received. Once a service provider does receive legal process, the speech prohibition goes into...
When Qwest refused the NSA’s illegal request that it hand over its customers’ data without a warrant, the NSA wasn’t happy. According to former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, the government hit back for the telecom’s refusal by denying them lucrative contracts (log-in required) worth hundreds of...
Verizon users might want to start looking for another provider. In an effort to better serve advertisers, Verizon Wireless has been silently modifying its users' web traffic on its network to inject a cookie-like tracker. This tracker, included in an HTTP header called X-UIDH, is sent to every...
Yesterday, the web was buzzing with commentary about Google CEO Eric Schmidt's dangerous, dismissive response to concerns about search engine users' privacy. When asked during an interview for CNBC's recent "Inside the Mind of Google" special about whether users should be sharing information with...
“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car’s cigarette lighter.But interoperability is just the...
See part 2 of Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Full Disk Encryption. Earlier this month the eagerly awaited free software operating system Ubuntu 12.10 was released, and it includes a slew of new features (YouTube link), some of which have infuriated users because of privacy concerns. Over the last couple...
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.”…
Jailbreaking an iPhone constitutes copyright infringement and a DMCA violation, says Apple in comments filed with the Copyright Office as part of the 2009 DMCA triennial rulemaking. This marks the first formal public statement by Apple about its legal stance on iPhone jailbreaking.Apple's iPhone,...
Joe Bonneau dives deep into systems using dice to generate random passphrases and introduces EFF's three new wordlists.