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The Fight Against Government Face Surveillance: 2019 Year in Review Vendors woo law enforcement with a seemingly inexhaustible flow of new spy tech. This places concerned community members, civil society, and lawmakers in a seemingly Sisyphean struggle of trying to keep up with new technological threats to privacy, and to shepard the adoption of enforceable policy to protect essential civil liberties. If 2018 was the year of communities standing together in the fight for democratic control over whether or not police may acquire surveillance technology, 2019 was the year that many of these same communities led the charge to ban government face surveillance.  TAKE ACTION END FACE SURVEILLANCE IN YOUR COMMUNITY Local Bans  In May of this year, San Francisco became the first city in the United States to ban local government use of face surveillance technology. San Francisco’s ban was enacted with overwhelming support from the City’s Board of Supervisors as part of the ci...

Consumer Data Privacy in California: 2019 Year in Review The California Consumer Privacy Act ( CCPA ) was enacted in 2018 and goes into effect in 2020. Throughout 2019, EFF and our privacy coalition allies beat back numerous attempts by big business to block this important law before it goes into effect. We did so in the California Legislature , in Congress, and in the administrative rule-making process. We will keep doing so in 2020. In fact, we will work to make CCPA even stronger. What is CCPA? CCPA gives consumers three legal rights against businesses. First, consumers have a right to know , that is, to learn what personal information a business has collected about them. This includes access to specific pieces of data. It often includes “portability,” meaning the ability to obtain the data in a usable format. It also includes disclosure of the categories of data sources, the categories of data destinations, and the purpose of collection. Second, consumers have a right to del...

Data Privacy Scandals and Public Policy Picking Up Speed: 2018 in Review 2018 may be remembered as the Year of the Facebook Scandal, and rightly so. The Cambridge Analytica fiasco , Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony , a massive hack , and revelations of corporate smear campaigns were only the tip of the iceberg . But many more companies mishandled consumer privacy in 2018, too. From the Strava heatmap exposing military locations in January to the gigantic Marriot hack discovered in November, companies across Silicon Valley and beyond made big mistakes with consumer data this year—and lawmakers and the public have taken notice. Tech Companies Putting Their Profits Before Your Privacy The problem that came into focus in 2018 was not just hacks , breaches , or unauthorized bad guys breaking into systems. Instead, 2018’s worst privacy actors were the tech companies themselves, harvesting of mountains of users’ data and employing flawed systems to use and sha...

Wrangling With Monopolies: 2018 in Review This year has brought numerous stories of large Internet companies using their dominance of key Internet functions in ways that harm users and shut out competitors. From Google’s treatment of competing search companies in its results, to Facebook’s playing favorites with its developer APIs, to AT&T and Comcast’s ongoing quest to charge websites for the privilege of reaching you, monopoly power and its abuses are on vivid display. Worse, unlike in previous technology cycles, the dominance of these companies has proven to be sticky. The world has taken notice, with voices from across the political spectrum calling for new approaches. Market concentration and monopoly power in the online world have always shaped EFF’s work. This year, we’ve begun to tackle competition issues head-on. One focus is the legal doctrine that deals directly with problems of monopoly power—antitrust law. This year, we’ve given comment and testimony to the Fe...

Communities from Coast to Coast Fight for Control Over Police Surveillance: 2017 in Review Americans in 2017 lived under a threat of constant surveillance, both online and offline. While the battle to curtail unaccountable and unconstitutional NSA surveillance continued this year with only limited  opportunities appearing in Congress, the struggle to secure community control over surveillance by local police has made dramatic and expanding strides across the country at the local level. In July, Seattle passed a law making it the nation’s second jurisdiction to require law enforcement agencies to seek community approval before acquiring surveillance technology. Santa Clara County in California, which encompasses most of Silicon Valley, pioneered this reform in spring 2016 before similar proposals later spread across the country. Two other jurisdictions in the San Francisco Bay Area—the cities of  Oakland and Berkeley —have conducted multiple public hearings on propo...

Tipping the Scales on HTTPS: 2017 in Review The movement to encrypt the web reached milestone after milestone in 2017. The web is in the middle of a massive change from non-secure HTTP to the more secure, encrypted HTTPS protocol. All web servers use one of these two protocols to get web pages from the server to your browser. HTTP has serious problems that make it vulnerable to eavesdropping and content hijacking. By adding Transport Layer Security (or TLS, a prior version of which was known as Secure Sockets Layer or SSL) HTTPS fixes most of these problems. That’s why EFF, and many like-minded supporters, have been pushing for web sites to adopt HTTPS by default. In February, the scales tipped. For the first time, approximately half of Internet traffic was protected by HTTPS . Now, as 2017 comes to a close, an average of 66% of page loads on Firefox and are encrypted , and Chrome shows even higher numbers . At the beginning of the year, Let’s Encrypt had issued about 28 million...