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Inside the Invasive, Secretive “Bossware” Tracking Workers COVID-19 has pushed millions of people to work from home, and a flock of companies offering software for tracking workers has swooped in to pitch their products to employers across the country. The services often sound relatively innocuous. Some vendors bill their tools as “automatic time tracking” or “workplace analytics” software. Others market to companies concerned about data breaches or intellectual property theft. We’ll call these tools, collectively, “bossware.” While aimed at helping employers, bossware puts workers’ privacy and security at risk by logging every click and keystroke, covertly gathering information for lawsuits, and using other spying features that go far beyond what is necessary and proportionate to manage a workforce. This is not OK. When a home becomes an office, it remains a home. Workers should not be subject to nonconsensual surveillance or feel pressured to be scrutinized in their own homes t

EFF to Court: Social Media Users Have Privacy and Free Speech Interests in Their Public Information Special thanks to legal intern Rachel Sommers, who was the lead author of this post. Visa applicants to the United States are required to disclose personal information including their work, travel, and family histories . And as of May 2019 , they are required to register their social media accounts with the U.S. government. According to the State Department, approximately 14.7 million people will be affected by this new policy each year. EFF recently filed an amicus brief in Doc Society v. Pompeo , a case challenging this “Registration Requirement” under the First Amendment. The plaintiffs in the case, two U.S.-based documentary film organizations that regularly collaborate with non-U.S. filmmakers and other international partners, argue that the Registration Requirement violates the expressive and associational rights of both their non-U.S.-based and U.S.-based members and par

EFF Successfully Defends Users’ Right to Challenge Patents and Still Recover Legal Fees When individuals and companies are wrongly accused of patent infringement, they should be encouraged to stand up and defend themselves. When they win, the public does too. While the patent owner loses revenue, the rest of society gets greater access to knowledge, product choice, and space for innovation. This is especially true when defendants win by proving the patent asserted against them is invalid. In such cases, the patent gets cancelled, and the risk of wrongful threats against others vanishes. The need to encourage parties to pursue meritorious defenses, is partly why patent law gives judges the power to force losers to pay a winner’s legal fees in “exceptional” patent cases. The fee-shifting allowed in patent cases is especially important because there are so many invalid patents in the possession of patent trolls, which are entities that exploit the exorbitant costs of litigating in fe

Tell Your Senator: Vote No on the EARN IT Act This month, Americans are out in the streets, demanding police accountability. But rather than consider reform proposals, a key Senate committee is focused on giving unprecedented powers to law enforcement—including the ability to break into our private messages by creating encryption backdoors. TAKE ACTION STOP THE EARN IT BILL BEFORE IT BREAKS ENCRYPTION This Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to debate and vote on the so-called EARN IT Act, S. 3398. It’s a law that would allow the government to scan every message sent online. The EARN IT Act creates a 19-person commission that would be dominated by law enforcement agencies, with Attorney General William Barr at the top. This unelected commission will be authorized to make new rules on “best practices” that Internet websites will have to follow. Any Internet platform that doesn’t comply with this law enforcement wish list will lose the legal protections of Sectio

Now Is The Time: Tell Congress to Ban Federal Use of Face Recognition Cities and states across the country have banned government use of face surveillance technology, and many more are weighing proposals to do so. From Boston to San Francisco , elected officials and activists rightfully know that face surveillance gives police the power to track us wherever we go, turns us all into perpetual suspects, increases the likelihood of being falsely arrested, and chills people’s willingness to participate in First Amendment protected activities. That’s why we’re  asking  you to contact your elected officials and tell them to co-sponsor and vote yes on the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act of 2020. Take action TELL congress: END federal use of face surveillance Three companies— IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft — have recently ended or suspended sales of face recognition to police departments, acknowledging the harms that this technology causes. Police and other go

Your Phone Is Vulnerable Because of 2G, But it Doesn't Have to Be Security researchers have been talking about the vulnerabilities in 2G for years. 2G technology, which at one point underpinned the entire cellular communications network, is widely known to be vulnerable to eavesdropping and spoofing. But even though its insecurities are well-known and it has quickly become archaic, many people still rely on it as the main mobile technology, especially in rural areas. Even as carriers start rolling out the fifth generation of mobile communications, known as 5G, 2G technology is still supported by modern smartphones. The manufacturers of operating systems for smartphones (e.g. Apple, Google, and Samsung)  are in the perfect position to solve this problem by allowing users to switch off 2G. What is 2G and why is it vulnerable? 2G is the second generation of mobile communications, created in 1991. It’s an old technology that at the time did not consider certain risk scenario

5 Serious Flaws in the New Brazilian “Fake News” Bill that Will Undermine Human Rights The Brazilian Senate is scheduled to make its vote this week on the most recent version of “ PLS 2630/2020 ” the so-called “Fake News” bill. This new version, supposedly aimed at safety and curbing “malicious coordinated actions'' by users of social networks and private messaging apps, will allow the government to identify and track countless innocent users who haven't committed any wrongdoing in order to catch a few malicious actors.  The bill creates a clumsy regulatory regime to intervene in the technology and policy decisions of both public and private messaging services in Brazil, requiring them to institute new takedown procedures, enforce various kinds of identification of all their users, and greatly increase the amount of information that they gather and store from and about their users. They also have to ensure that all of that information can be directly accessed by staf

Egypt's Crackdown on Free Expression Will Cost Lives For years, EFF has been monitoring a dangerous situation in Egypt: journalists, bloggers, and activists have been harassed, detained, arrested, and jailed, sometimes without trial, in increasing numbers by the Sisi regime. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, these incidents have skyrocketed , affecting free expression both online and offline.  As we’ve said before, this crisis means it is more important than ever for individuals to be able to speak out and share information with one another online. Free expression and access to information are particularly critical under authoritarian rulers and governments that dismiss or distort scientific data. But at a time when true information about the pandemic may save lives, instead, the Egyptian government has expelled journalists from the country for their reporting on the pandemic, and arrested others on spurious charges for seeking information about prison conditions. Shortl

Dutch Law Proposes a Wholesale Jettisoning of Human Rights Considerations in Copyright Enforcement With the passage of last year's Copyright Directive, the EU demanded that member states pass laws that reduce copyright infringement by internet users while also requiring that they safeguard the fundamental rights of users (such as the right to free expression) and also the limitations to copyright . These safeguards must include protections for the new EU-wide exemption for commentary and criticism. Meanwhile states are also required to uphold the GDPR, which safeguards users against mass, indiscriminate surveillance, while somehow monitoring everything every user posts to decide whether it infringes copyright . Serving these goals means that when EU member states turn the Directive into their national laws (the "transposition" process), their governments will have to decide to give more weight to some parts of the Directive, and that courts would have to figure out w

Your Objections to the Google-Fitbit Merger EFF Legal Intern Rachel Sommers contributed to this post. When Google announced its intention to buy Fitbit in April, we had deep concerns . Google, a notoriously data-hungry company with a track record of reneging on its privacy policies, was about to buy one of the most successful wearables company in the world —after Google had repeatedly tried to launch a competing product, only to fail, over and over. Fitbit users give their devices extraordinary access to their sensitive personal details, from their menstrual cycles to their alcohol consumption. In many cases, these "customers" didn't come to Fitbit willingly, but instead were coerced into giving the company their data in order to get the full benefit of their employer-provided health insurance . Companies can grow by making things that people love, or they can grow by buying things that people love . One produces innovation, the other produces monopolies. Last mo

EFF and Durie Tangri Join Forces to Defend Internet Archive’s Digital Library Free, Public-Service Lending Program Threatened by Baseless Copyright Lawsuit San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is joining forces with the law firm of Durie Tangri to defend the Internet Archive against a lawsuit that threatens their Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program, which helps people all over the world check out digital copies of books owned by the Archive and its partner libraries. “Libraries protect, preserve, and make the world’s information accessible to everyone,” said Internet Archive Founder and Digital Librarian Brewster Kahle. “The publishers are suing to shut down a library and remove books from our digital shelves. This will have a chilling effect on a longstanding and widespread library practice of lending digitized books.” The non-profit Internet Archive is a digital library, preserving and providing access to cultural artifacts of all kinds in electron

California Agency Blocks Release of Police Use of Force and Surveillance Training, Claiming Copyright Under a California law that went into effect on January 1, 2020, all law enforcement training materials must be “conspicuously” published on the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) website.  However, if you visit POST’s Open Data hub and try to download the officer training materials relating to face recognition technology or automated license plate readers (ALPRs), or the California Peace Officers Association’s course on use of force, you will receive only a Word document with a single sentence:  This is unlawful, and unacceptable, EFF told POST in a letter submitted today . Under the new California law, SB 978, POST must post law enforcement training materials online if the materials would be available to the public under the California Public Records Act. Copyrighted material is available to the public under the California Public Recor