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Australian Government Ignores Experts in Advancing Its Anti-Encryption Bill The Australian government has ignored the expertise of researchers, developers, major tech companies, and civil liberties organizations by charging forward with a disastrous proposal to undermine trust and security for technology users around the world. On September 10, the Australian government closed the window for receiving feedback about its anti-encryption and pro-surveillance “Access and Assistance” bill . A little more than a week and more than 15,000 comments later, the Minister for Home Affairs introduced a largely-unchanged version of the bill into the House of Representatives. The issue isn’t whether the Australian government read the 15,000 comments and ignored them, or refused to read them altogether. The issue is that the Australian government couldn’t have read the 15,000 comments in such a short time period. Indeed, the bill’s few revisions reflect this—no security recommendations are inc...

EFF Opposes Industry Efforts to Have Congress Roll Back State Privacy Protections The Senate Commerce Committee is holding a hearing on consumer privacy this week, but consumer privacy groups like EFF were not invited . Instead, only voices from big tech and Internet access corporations will have a seat at the table. In the lead-up to this hearing, two industry groups (the Chamber of Commerce and the Internet Association ) have suggested that Congress wipe the slate clean of state privacy laws in exchange for weaker federal protections . EFF opposes such preemption, and has submitted a letter to the Senate Commerce Committee to detail the dangers it poses to user privacy. Current state laws across the country have already created strong protections for user privacy. Our letter identifies three particularly strong examples from California’s Consumer Privacy Act , Illinois’ Biometric Privacy Act , and Vermont’s Data Broker Act . If Congress enacts weaker federal data privacy legi...

Facebook Warns Memphis Police: No More Fake “Bob Smith” Accounts Facebook has a problem: an infestation of undercover cops. Despite the social platform’s explicit rules that the use of fake profiles by anyone—police included—is a violation of terms of service, the issue proliferates. While the scope is difficult to measure, EFF has identified scores of agencies who maintain policies that explicitly flaunt these rules. Hopefully—and perhaps this is overly optimistic—this is about to change, with a new warning Facebook has sent to the Memphis Police Department. The company has also updated its law enforcement guidelines to highlight the prohibition on fake accounts. This summer, the criminal justice news outlet  The Appeal  reported on an alarming detail revealed in a civil rights lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Tennessee against the Memphis Police Department. The lawsuit uncovered evidence that the police used what they referred to as a “Bob Smith” account to befriend and ga...

ESNI: A Privacy-Protecting Upgrade to HTTPS Today, the content-delivery network Cloudflare is announcing an experimental deployment of a new web privacy technology called ESNI . We’re excited to see this development, and we look forward to a future where ESNI makes the web more private for all its users. Over the past several years, we at EFF have been working to encrypt the web . We and our partners have made huge strides to make web browsing safer and more privacy through tools like HTTPS Everywhere and the Let’s Encrypt Certificate Authority . But users still face many kinds of online privacy problems even when using HTTPS. An important example: a 15-year-old technology called Server Name Indication (SNI) , which allows a single server to host multiple HTTPS web sites. Unfortunately, SNI itself is unencrypted and transmits the name of the site you’re visiting. That lets ISPs, people with access to tap Internet backbones, or even someone monitoring a wifi network collect a l...