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EFF to Appellate Court: Protect Biometric Privacy Big tech companies are surveilling your face for profit. Fortunately, Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act ( BIPA ) prohibits companies from harvesting and monetizing your biometrics, including a scan of your face measurements, without your informed opt-in consent. But now Facebook is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to defang BIPA, by narrowly interpreting its enforcement tool and thus depriving injured parties of their day in court. EFF has joined an amicus curiae brief urging the Ninth Circuit to properly interpret BIPA to provide strong protection of biometric privacy. Our fellow amici are ACLU, CDT, and PIRG. The case on appeal is In re Facebook Biometric Information Privacy Litigation , which is sometimes called Patel v. Facebook . The plaintiffs challenge Facebook’s “tag suggestions” feature, which uses powerful face recognition technology to identify the people in images uploaded to the pla...

FOSTA Would Be a Disaster for Online Communities Frankenstein Bill Combines the Worst of SESTA and FOSTA. Tell Your Representative to Reject New Version of H.R. 1865. The House of Representatives is about to vote on a bill that would force online platforms to censor their users. The Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865 ) might sound noble, but it would do nothing to stop sex traffickers. What it would do is force online platforms to police their users’ speech more forcefully than ever before, silencing legitimate voices in the process. Back in December, we said that while FOSTA was a very dangerous bill, its impact on online spaces would not be as broad as the Senate bill, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA, S. 1693 ). That’s about to change. The House Rules Committee is about to approve a new version of FOSTA [.pdf] that incorporates most of the dangerous components of SESTA. This new Frankenstein’s Monster of a bill woul...