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Big Tech’s Disingenuous Push for a Federal Privacy Law This week, the Internet Association launched a campaign asking the federal government to pass a new privacy law. The Internet Association (IA) is a trade group funded by some of the largest tech companies in the world , including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and Uber. Many of its members keep their lights on by tracking users and monetizing their personal data. So why do they want a federal consumer privacy law? Surprise! It’s not to protect your privacy. Rather, this campaign is a disingenuous ploy to undermine real progress on privacy being made around the country at the state level. IA member companies want to establish a national “privacy law” that undoes stronger state laws and lets them continue business as usual. Lawyers call this “preemption.” IA calls this “a unified, national standard” to avoid “a patchwork of state laws.” We call this a big step backwards for all of our privacy. The question we should b...

Don't Let Congress Hand Patent Abusers Their Ultimate Wishlist Congress is considering a bill that would throw out the best defenses against bad patents. The Senate IP Subcommittee recently had a hearing about the Stronger Patents Act, a batch of recurring terrible ideas that has been introduced by Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) for the third time in three years. The Stronger Patents Act would tear apart inter partes review (IPR), an critical tool for challenging bad patents. People who are charged with patent violations shouldn’t have to have millions of dollars in the bank to defend themselves. IPR provides a more cost-effective way of evaluating patents than expensive federal court litigation. TAKE ACTION PRESERVE OUR DEFENSES AGAINST PATENT ABUSE Patent trolls, drug companies, and IP lawyer groups have been attacking IPR for years now, and they’re all big supporters of this bill. Big patent owners have grown so used to gaming the patent system that they’re willing to throw ...

EFF's 2019 Pioneer Awards Winner Remarks and Speeches EFF’s annual Pioneer Awards ceremony celebrates individuals and groups who have made outstanding contributions to freedom and innovation on the electronic frontier. On Sept. 12, EFF welcomed keynote speaker Adam Savage, who spoke on the importance of storytelling, scientific exploration, and personal discovery . And each of our honorees had important messages to share with us: legendary science fiction author William Gibson reminded us how early science fiction shaped the world we live in now ; the inspiring anti-surveillance group Oakland Privacy showed how we can stand together to make lasting differences in how technology is used in our communities today ; and trailblazing tech scholar danah boyd  challenged everyone in the tech world to shape a better future.   Opening the ceremony was EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, who framed the evening by reminding us that we must articulate what th...

Facebook Must Better Limit Its Face Surveillance Last week, Facebook started sending a small portion of its users a new notification about its face surveillance program, which concludes with two important buttons: “keep off” and “turn on.” This is a step in the right direction : for these users, the default will be no face surveillance, unless the user gives their affirmative opt-in consent. But as EFF recently explained , Facebook will not provide this privacy-protective default to billions of its current users, and it is unclear whether the company will provide it to its new users. Facebook should not subject any of its current or new users to face surveillance, absent their informed opt-in consent. We have two additional objections. First, Facebook’s announcement of this new program fails to mention that the company is acting under FTC compulsion. Second, the notice Facebook is sending to some of its users lacks critical information about the privacy hazards of face surveil...

Victory! Individuals Can Force Government to Purge Records of Their First Amendment Activity The FBI must delete its memo documenting a journalist’s First Amendment activities, a federal appellate court ruled this week in a decision that vindicates the right to be free from government surveillance. In Garris v. FBI , the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ordered the FBI to expunge a 2004 memo it created that documented the political expression of news website www.antiwar.com and two journalists who founded and ran it. The Ninth Circuit required the FBI to destroy the record because it violated the Privacy Act of 1974, a federal law that includes a provision prohibiting federal agencies from maintaining records on individuals that document their First Amendment activity. EFF filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case that called on the court to robustly enforce the Privacy Act’s protections, particularly given technological changes in the past half century...

Encrypted DNS could help close the biggest privacy gap on the Internet. Why are some groups fighting against it? Thanks to the success of projects like Let’s Encrypt and recent UX changes in the browsers, most page-loads are now encrypted with TLS . But DNS, the system that looks up a site’s IP address when you type the site’s name into your browser, remains unprotected by encryption. Because of this, anyone along the path from your network to your DNS resolver (where domain names are converted to IP addresses) can collect information about which sites you visit. This means that certain eavesdroppers can still profile your online activity by making a list of sites you visited, or a list of who visits a particular site. Malicious DNS resolvers or on-path routers can also tamper with your DNS request, blocking you from accessing sites or even routing you to fake versions of the sites you requested. A team of engineers is working to fix these problems with “DNS over HTTPS” (or ...

EFF to Third Circuit: Off-Campus Student Social Media Posts Should be Entitled to Full First Amendment Protection Special thanks to legal intern Maria Bacha who was the lead author of this post. EFF, Student Press Law Center (SPLC), Pennsylvania Center for the First Amendment (PaCFA), and Brechner Center for Freedom of Information filed an amicus brief in B.L. v. Mahanoy Area School District urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit to close a gap in the law to better protect off-campus student speech. B.L., a student at Mahanoy Area High School, had tried out for the varsity cheerleading squad but had been placed on junior varsity. Out of frustration, she posted on Snapchat a selfie with the text “fuck school, fuck softball, fuck cheer, fuck everything” off school grounds on a Saturday. One of B.L.’s friends on Snapchat came across the “snap,” took a screen shot, and shared it with the cheerleading coaches. As a result, the coaches suspended B.L. from the junior v...