Defending your rights in the digital world
Visit eff.org → On Hacker News Aug 2008 – Oct 2026
Society, Policy & Culture 517Security & Privacy 387Tech Industry & Business 163Networking & Internet 38Web & Frontend 32Tools & Productivity 16
Apple has announced impending changes to its operating systems that include new “protections for children” features in iCloud and iMessage. If you’ve spent any time following the Crypto Wars, you know what this means: Apple is planning to build a backdoor into its data storage system and its messaging system.
Today EFF is pleased to announce Let’s Encrypt, a new certificate authority (CA) initiative that we have put together with Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, IdenTrust, and researchers at the University of Michigan that aims to clear the remaining roadblocks to transition the Web from HTTP to HTTPS.Although...
In 2025, Google gave Amandla Thomas-Johnson's data to ICE without giving him the chance to challenge the subpoena, breaking a nearly decade-long promise to notify users before handing their data to law enforcement.
EFF is deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Mark Klein, a bona fide hero who risked civil liability and criminal prosecution to help expose a massive spying program that violated the rights of millions of Americans.Mark didn’t set out to change the world. For 22 years, he was a...
ICE is using a Palantir tool that uses Medicaid and other government data to stalk people for arrest. This is exactly the kind of data privacy abuse that EFF has been warning about.
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.
In a free society, people should not have their private correspondence constantly examined. U.S. lawmakers, we would hope, understand that individuals have the right to a private conversation without the government looking over their shoulder. So it’s dismaying to see a group of U.S. Senators...
Apple announced today that it would “take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements” to a program that will weaken privacy and security on iPhones and other products. EFF is pleased Apple is now listening to the concerns of customers, researchers, civil liberties...
Today, the Guardian newspaper confirmed what EFF (and many others) have long claimed: the NSA is conducting widespread, untargeted, domestic surveillance on millions of Americans. This revelation should end, once and for all, the government's long-discredited secrecy claims about its dragnet...
With United States v. Smith (S.D.N.Y. May 11, 2023), a district court judge in New York made history by being the first court to rule that a warrant is required for a cell phone search at the border, “absent exigent circumstances” (although other district courts have wanted to do so).EFF is...
In a moment of clarity after initially moving forward a deeply flawed piece of legislation, the French National Assembly has done the right thing: it rejected a dangerous proposal that would have gutted end-to-end encryption in the name of fighting drug trafficking.
Phoenix, Arizona—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit today against Proctorio Inc. on behalf of college student Erik Johnson, seeking a judgment that he didn’t infringe the company’s copyrights when he linked to excerpts of its software code in tweets criticizing the software...
In a win for digital rights, a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking Utah’s SB 73, the state’s draconian anti-VPN age verification law. The decision comes as EFF submitted our comments to the Utah Department of Commerce, detailing how forcing platforms to detect and block privacy-preserving tools…
Oakland - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will argue on Friday before a federal court that the National Security Agency (NSA) is violating the Fourth Amendment by copying and searching data that it collects by tapping into the Internet backbone. The hearing on a motion for partial summary...
Earlier today, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance the dangerous EARN IT bill. We’re disappointed to see the committee advance this misguided bill. If enacted, EARN IT will put massive legal pressure on internet companies both large and small to stop using encryption and instead scan...
EFF is fighting another attempt by a giant corporation to take advantage of our poorly drafted federal computer crime statute for commercial advantage—without any regard for the impact on the rest of us. This time the culprit is LinkedIn. The social networking giant wants violations of its...
Like FLoC and Privacy Sandbox before it, Google Chrome’s Manifest V3 is another example of the inherent conflict of interest that comes from Google controlling both the dominant web browser and one of the largest internet advertising networks.
In Passing SESTA/FOSTA, Lawmakers Failed to Separate Their Good Intentions from Bad LawToday was a dark day for the Internet.The U.S. Senate just voted 97-2 to pass the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865), a bill that silences online speech by forcing...
Update: You did it! After a forceful debate on Monday 26 January, in which many peers protested the introduction of these amendments, Lord Blair withdrew them from consideration. Directly after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, we cautioned the public and politicians to be "wary of any attempt to rush...
Today, we’re pleased to announce Cover Your Tracks, the newest edition and rebranding of our historic browser fingerprinting and tracker awareness tool Panopticlick. Cover Your Tracks picks up where Panopticlick left off. Panopticlick was about letting users know that browser fingerprinting was...
It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians have now discovered that people are using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to protect their privacy and bypass these invasive laws. Their solution? Entirely ban the use of…
Good news out of the Ninth Circuit: the federal court of appeals heeded EFF’s advice and rejected an attempt by Oracle to hold a company criminally liable for accessing Oracle’s website in a manner it didn’t like. The court ruled back in 2012 that merely violating a website’s terms of use is not a...
We have a problem when it comes to stopping mass surveillance. The entity that’s conducting the most extreme and far-reaching surveillance against most of the world’s communications—the National Security Agency—is bound by United States law. That’s good news for Americans. U.S. law and the...
The U.K. Parliament has passed the Online Safety Bill (OSB), which says it will make the U.K. “the safest place” in the world to be online. In reality, the OSB will lead to a much more censored, locked-down internet for British users. The bill could empower the government to undermine not just the privacy and security…
I’m old enough to remember when age verification bills were pitched as a way to ‘save the kids from porn’ and shield them from other vague dangers lurking in the digital world (like…“the transgender”). We have long cautioned about the dangers of these laws, and pointed out why they are likely to...
Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications. While supporters continue to claim this bill protects minors online, its…
Since senators introduced the EARN IT Act (S. 3398) in early March, EFF has called attention to the many ways in which the bill would be a disaster for Internet users’ free speech and security. We’ve explained how the EARN IT Act could be used to drastically undermine encryption. Although the bill...
Automakers argue that it’s unlawful for independent researchers to look at the code that controls vehicles without the manufacturer’s permission. We’ve explained before how this allows manufacturers to prevent competition in the markets for add-on technologies and repair tools. It also makes it harder for watchdogs to…
In a big win for protesters’ rights, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit overturned a lower court’s dismissal of a challenge to sweeping warrants to search a protester’s devices and digital data and a nonprofit’s social media data.The case, Armendariz v. City of Colorado Springs, arose...
There's heartening news for our location privacy out of Massachusetts this week. The Supreme Judicial Court, the state's highest court, ruled that police access to real-time cell phone location data—whether it comes from a phone company or from technology like a cell site simulator—intrudes on a...