People are increasingly concerned about the ways in which mass surveillance is tracking our every move: from Flock license plate readers to face recognition to creepy ads that – based on what we see and do online – seem to know everything we’re thinking and planning. It didn’t have to...
In addition to mission creep, the SFPD has steadily and exponentially increased the number of drone flights, from roughly 350 deployments in 2024, to over 1,100 from January to August 2025, to over 3,500 in just the first five months of 2026.
Americans’ First Amendment right to equal access to official government statements is violated by the Trump administration’s use of Truth Social’s preferential treatment scheme, which blocks people who won’t pay Trump’s company up to $100,000 a month for early access to government news, EFF told a federal court.
Online sports betting company DraftKings is using AI to target customers who are most likely to place losing bets and respond to gambling promotions. This kind of targeting is a form of online behavioral advertising, which is when companies personalize the ads they show you based on the...
EFF joined an amicus brief with ACLU, ACLU of D.C., National Press Photographers Association, and Professional Photographers of America to urge the D.C. Circuit to vacate an FAA drone flight restriction that violated the First Amendment right to record law enforcement. This is an important case—Levine v....
The EU Commission draft law to restrict young people’s access to the internet that it presented last week will come at a high cost: it will put online services behind age gates, expand the use of intrusive age verification, and undermine the privacy of all users. The EU...
It's an opportunity for a needed, thoughtful conversation about artificial intelligence and its potential harms. Everyday Californians are feeling real anxiety about the risks of artificial intelligence, and as an organization that works to ensure technology empowers people, EFF welcomes this order as a way for California to lead a...
Apple’s new operating system is here, and along with it comes a new version of Siri, dubbed with two very familiar letters: AI. As the name suggests, this Siri power-up resembles an AI chatbot more than the oftenderided voice assistant you might be used to. It has...
Secure messaging platforms, like Signal, WhatsApp, and recently, encrypted RCS, operate on a straightforward assumption: the content at each end of a conversation is private to the participants in the conversation. End-to-end encryption helps provide the mathematical guarantees that the companies who operate these messaging platforms cannot access the...
Technology should empower people, not control them. In 2025, that core belief faced unprecedented challenges. But with the support of our members, donors, partners, and communities, we fought back and made meaningful progress. Today, we’re proud to share our 2025 Annual Report, highlighting the people, cases, campaigns, and advocacy...
With doomsday AI scenarios dominating the news, lawmakers are rightly concerned about reports concerning security breaches at major US AI labs, such as the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident and the many others reported in its aftermath. As they consider potentially regulating frontier AI, they should focus any new legislation on the...
A California law that prohibits teens from receiving recommended social media content from other social media users violates their First Amendment rights, EFF argued this week.The case, Meta v. Bonta, challenges SB 976, which requires that teen social media users get their parents’ permission before seeing other users’ recommended...
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit handed internet users and programmers a big win today, by rejecting an attempt to stretch a narrow provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into a new source of copyright liability. The case involves Section 1202 of the DMCA,...
Courts have for two decades found that linking and embedding someone else’s web content, be it a photo, music, or an article, doesn’t violate copyright law–the entity that controls the server that hosts a copyrighted work, not the user or website that merely directs others to it, is directly liable...