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Deeplinks

EFF"s Deeplinks Blog: Noteworthy news from around the internet

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Victory! Pen-Link's Police Tools Are Not Secret

Deeplinks ·

2025/08/19

In a victory for transparency, the government contractor Pen-Link agreed to disclose the prices and descriptions of surveillance products that it sold to a local California Sheriff's office.The settlement ends a months-long California public records lawsuit with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office. The settlement provides further proof that the surveillance tools used by governments are not secret and shouldn’t be treated that way under the law. Last year,

Victory! Ninth Circuit Limits Intrusive DMCA Subpoenas

Deeplinks ·

2025/08/18

The Ninth Circuit upheld an important limitation on Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) subpoenas that other federal courts have recognized for more than two decades. The DMCA, a misguided anti-piracy law passed in the late nineties, created a bevy of powerful tools, ostensibly to help copyright holders fight online infringement. Unfortunately, the DMCA’s powerful protections are ripe for abuse by “copyright trolls,” unscrupulous litigants who abuse the system at everyone else’s expense. The

From Book Bans to Internet Bans: Wyoming Lets Parents...

Deeplinks ·

2025/08/18

If you've read about the sudden appearance of age verification across the internet in the UK and thought it would never happen in the U.S., take note: many politicians want the same or even more strict laws. As of July 1st, South Dakota and Wyoming enacted laws requiring any website that hosts any sexual content to implement age verification measures. These laws would potentially capture a broad range of non-pornographic content, including classic literature and art, and expose a wide range of

New Documents Show First Trump DOJ Worked With...

Deeplinks ·

2025/08/15

In the wake of rolling out its own proposal to significantly limit a key law protecting internet users’ speech in the summer of 2020, the Department of Justice under the first Trump administration actively worked with lawmakers to support further efforts to stifle online speech. The new documents, disclosed in an EFF Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, show officials were talking with Senate staffers working to pass speech- and privacy-chilling bills like the EARN IT Act and PACT Act (neither

President Trump’s War on “Woke AI” Is a Civil...

Deeplinks ·

2025/08/14

The White House’s recently-unveiled “AI Action Plan” wages war on so-called “woke AI”—including large language models (LLMs) that provide information inconsistent with the administration’s views on climate change, gender, and other issues. It also targets measures designed to mitigate the generation of racial and gender biased content and even hate speech. The reproduction of this bias is a pernicious problem that AI developers have struggled to solve for over a decade. A new executive order called

🫥 Spotify Face Scans Are Just the Beginning |...

Deeplinks ·

2025/08/13

Catching up on your backlog of digital rights news has never been easier! EFF has a one-stop-shop to keep you up to date on the latest in the fight against censorship and surveillance—our EFFector newsletter. This time we're covering an act of government intimidation in Florida when the state subpoenaed a venue for surveillance video after hosting an LGBTQ+ pride event, calling out data brokers in California for failing to respond to requests for personal data—even though responses are

Torture Victim’s Landmark Hacking Lawsuit Against...

Deeplinks ·

2025/08/13

EFF is Co-Counsel in Case Detailing Harms Caused by Export of U.S. Cybersurveillance Technology and Training to Repressive RegimesPORTLAND, OR – Saudi human rights activist Loujain Alhathloul’s groundbreaking lawsuit concerning spying software that enabled her imprisonment and torture can advance, a federal judge ruled in an opinion unsealed Tuesday. U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut of the District of Oregon ruled that Alhathloul’s lawsuit against DarkMatter Group and three of its former

Podcast Episode: Separating AI Hope from AI Hype

Deeplinks ·

2025/08/13

If you believe the hype, artificial intelligence will soon take all our jobs, or solve all our problems, or destroy all boundaries between reality and lies, or help us live forever, or take over the world and exterminate humanity. That’s a pretty wide spectrum, and leaves a lot of people very confused about what exactly AI can and can’t do. In this episode, we’ll help you sort that out: For example, we’ll talk about why even superintelligent AI cannot simply replace humans for most of what we do,

Fake Clinics Quietly Edit Their Websites After Being...

Deeplinks ·

2025/08/12

In a promising sign that public pressure works, several crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs, also known as “fake clinics”) have quietly scrubbed misleading language about privacy protections from their websites. Earlier this year, EFF sent complaints to attorneys general in eight states (FL, TX, AR, and MO, TN, OK, NE, and NC), asking them to investigate these centers for misleading the public with false claims about their privacy practices—specifically, falsely stating or implying that they are bound

Americans, Be Warned: Lessons From Reddit’s Chaotic...

Deeplinks ·

2025/08/08

Age verification has officially arrived in the UK thanks to the Online Safety Act (OSA), a UK law requiring online platforms to check that all UK-based users are at least eighteen years old before allowing them to access broad categories of “harmful” content that go far beyond graphic sexual content. EFF has extensively criticized the OSA for eroding privacy, chilling speech, and undermining the safety of the children it aims to protect. Now that it’s gone into effect, these countless problems have

EFF to Court: Chatbot Output Can Reflect Human...

Deeplinks ·

2025/08/05

When a technology can have a conversation with you, it’s natural to anthropomorphize that technology—to see it as a person. It’s tempting to see a chatbot as a thinking, speaking robot, but this gives the technology too much credit. This can also lead people—including judges in cases about AI chatbots—to overlook the human expressive choices connected to the words that chatbots produce. If chatbot outputs had no First Amendment protections, the government could potentially ban chatbots that

No Walled Gardens. No Gilded Cages.

Deeplinks ·

2025/08/05

Sometimes technology feels like a gilded cage, and you’re not the one holding the key. Most people can’t live off the grid, so how do we stop data brokers who track and exploit you for money? Tech companies that distort what you see and hear? Governments that restrict, censor, and intimidate? No one can do it alone, but EFF was built to protect your rights. With your support, we can take back control. Join EFF With 35 years of deep expertise and the support of our members, EFF is delivering bold

Blocking Access to Harmful Content Will Not Protect...

Deeplinks ·

2025/08/05

The UK is having a moment. In late July, new rules took effect that require all online services available in the UK to assess whether they host content considered harmful to children, and if so, these services must introduce age checks to prevent children from accessing such content. Online services are also required to change their algorithms and moderation systems to ensure that content defined as harmful, like violent imagery, is not shown to young people. During the four years that the

EFF at the Las Vegas Security Conferences

Deeplinks ·

2025/08/05

It’s time for EFF’s annual journey to Las Vegas for the summer security conferences: BSidesLV, Black Hat USA, and DEF CON. Our lawyers, activists, and technologists are always excited to support this community of security researchers and tinkerers—the folks who push computer security forward (and somehow survive the Vegas heat in their signature black hoodies). As in past years, EFF attorneys will be on-site to assist speakers and attendees. If you have legal concerns about an upcoming talk or

Digital Rights Are Everyone’s Business, and Yours Can...

Deeplinks ·

2025/08/04

Companies large and small are doubling down on digital rights, and we’re excited to see more and more of them join EFF. We’re first and always an organization who fights for users, so you might be asking: Why does EFF work with corporate donors, and why do they want to work with us? SHOW YOUR COMPANY SUPPORTS A BETTER DIGITAL FUTURE JOIN EFF TODAY Businesses want to work with EFF for two reasons: They, their employees, and their customers believe in EFF’s values. They know that when EFF

Data Brokers Are Ignoring Privacy Law. We Deserve...

Deeplinks ·

2025/08/04

Of the many principles EFF fights for in consumer data privacy legislation, one of the most basic is a right to access the data companies have about you. It’s only fair. So many companies collect information about us without our knowledge or consent. We at least should have a way to find out what they purport to know about our lives. Yet a recent paper from researchers at the University of Californian-Irvine found that, of 543 data brokers in California’s data broker registry at time of publishing,

No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children...

Deeplinks ·

2025/08/01

Young people should be able to access information, speak to each other and to the world, play games, and express themselves online without the government making decisions about what speech is permissible. But in one of the latest misguided attempts to protect children online, internet users of all ages in the UK are being forced to prove their age before they can access millions of websites under the country’s Online Safety Act (OSA). The legislation attempts to make the UK the “the safest place”

TechEd Collab: Building Community in Arizona Around...

Deeplinks ·

2025/07/31

Earlier this year, EFF welcomed Technology Education Collaborative (TEC) into the Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA). TEC empowers everyday people to become informed users of today's extraordinary technology, and helps people better understand the tech that surrounds them on a daily basis. TEC does this by hosting in-person, hands-on events, including right to repair workshops, privacy meetups, tech field trips, and demos. We got the chance to catch up with Connor Johnson, Chief Technology Officer

👮 Amazon Ring Is Back in the Mass Surveillance Game |...

Deeplinks ·

2025/07/30

EFF is gearing up to beat the heat in Las Vegas for the summer security conferences! Before we make our journey to the Strip, we figured let's get y'all up-to-speed with a new edition of EFFector. This time we're covering an illegal mass surveillance scheme by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, calling out dating apps for using intimate data—like sexual preferences or identity—to train AI , and explaining why we're backing the Wikimedia Foundation in their challenge to the UK’s Online

Podcast Episode: Smashing the Tech Oligarchy

Deeplinks ·

2025/07/30

Many of the internet’s thorniest problems can be attributed to the concentration of power in a few corporate hands: the surveillance capitalism that makes it profitable to invade our privacy, the lack of algorithmic transparency that turns artificial intelligence and other tech into impenetrable black boxes, the rent-seeking behavior that seeks to monopolize and mega-monetize an existing market instead of creating new products or markets, and much more.

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