Deeplinks

LGBT Q&A: How Can I Wipe Online Data That Points To My Queer Identity?

Paige Collings — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:52:20 +0000

This Pride, we’re answering all your digital rights questions in season two of our initiative, LGBT Q&A.

You Asked: Is there a way for me to wipe data about me online that could point to my queer identity?

EFF’s Answer: You cannot protect everything all the time, but there are ways to wipe information about yourself online.

Most information available about you online will typically be found in two places:

The site where you voluntarily posted the data, such as your pictures and videos on social media, comments in user reviews and forums, and even classified postings for items you’ve sold.
A data broker. These companies collect personal information, repackage it, and sell it to the highest bidders. This information often includes your address, phone number, details about your family members, and more.

So you might not want this information out there, especially if it points to your queer identity.

The best time to take steps to protect yourself is before anything bad happens, because once this information is in the hands of bad actors you have fewer options.

To see what information people might find about you online, you can look for it for yourself. This is as simple as opening up a search engine and entering your name, nickname, handle, avatar and seeing what comes up. It can also be worth searching for your address, phone number, and email addresses to check what's out there.

Do this in a private browsing window or a separate browser than the one you normally use to ensure you’re not logged into any accounts that might skew the results, like a Google account.

It’s also best to try to make a lot of your information hard to find in the first place—and we’ve got you covered on how to do this.

Establish a strong security baseline: use unique passwords (a password manager helps simplify this) and set up two-factor authentication for your online accounts to add an extra layer of protection when logging into your accounts.
Add our install-and-forget tracker blocking tool, Privacy Badger, which lets you browse in peace and stops the sorts of web trackers that compile information about your habits for advertising purposes and for data brokers.
Remove your advertising ID on your phone to help prevent some tracking there, too (directions for Android or iPhone). This way less information about you is available for purchase, making it harder for corporations to profit from your online activities.
Ask data brokers to delete your personal data. You might spend the time doing it yourself. If you’re in California, you can use the Privacy Protection Agency’s tool for this. You also might use professional services like EasyOptOuts and Optery to help minimize the information available about you online from data brokers and similar sources.
You can remove yourself from Google results by heading to the “Results about you” page, then entering your information. Once set up, you’ll get notifications if some new types of information about you appear in Google Search. Just remember that this will not remove the information from the internet, it just won’t show up in Google’s search.

You also should consider auditing your digital footprint on public-facing social media and forums. Different people have different tolerance for risk when it comes to announcing who we are and what we are doing in these online spaces. You can make a list of every social media or forum account you’ve had over the years, and review the public-facing content about you, including your name, contact information like email addresses or phone numbers, and pictures that might show your home or workplace. You can also review the account settings to ensure you’re comfortable with the privacy options and that you’ve got strong login credentials.

For more in depth advice check out our Surveillance Self Defense guide on managing your digital footprint.

EFF and Allies: X’s FTC Petition to Waive Privacy Violation Order Should be Rejected

Bill Budington — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:04:54 +0000

X Corp. should not be able to escape privacy compliance because it changed its name.

On May 15, X Corp. filed a petition before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to set aside or modify an order issued in 2022 requiring the company to report regularly to the FTC for its violations of user data. The order or “consent decree” is a result of misleading the platforms’ 140 million users by using private information given to secure accounts, like phone numbers and email addresses, for targeted advertising. It also fined the company $150 million for the infraction. As part of an open comments period, EFF and allies including Demand Progress Education Fund (DPEF), National Consumers League (NCL) and Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) call on the FTC to reject this petition.

The 2022 order was a renewal of an order stemming from a previous violation. Back in 2011, Twitter (now X) reached a settlement with the FTC after the regulator found Twitter had failed to secure users’ personal information, resulting in exposure of that data to hackers. The settlement banned the company from misrepresenting its data protection measures, required it to set up safeguards on user data, and regularly report its security posture for twenty years. The renewal updated the expiration of X’s obligations to 2042, but if the FTC accepts X's petition, it would end much sooner.

In arguing to set aside the order, X remarks that since the order in 2011 it has “built an entirely new privacy and information security program staffed by new personnel operating under new leadership with a … philosophy grounded on the importance of privacy and information security.”

These sweeping assurances that corporate restructuring led to a fundamental change in X’s policy and practices around user data should be met with a healthy dose of skepticism, given evidence to the contrary. For example, the company’s quiet rollout integrated its AI model Grok with the platform in 2024, trained (without meaningful consent) on X user data. The company was also subject to a massive data breach in 2025. Even if a rotation of leadership led to prioritizing privacy and information security, our letter highlights that this would not be sufficient grounds to remove the order, “because the FTC orders bind the corporate entity. Those obligations do not dissolve when the employees who negotiated or administered it depart.”

X argues that its entry into the AI space should be reason not to continue the oversight, claiming that “terminating the Order is critical to advancing American leadership in artificial intelligence.” Here again, broad-stroke claims that the guardrails in place “[diverts] engineering resources from innovation to compliance paperwork” ignores the dangers that AI introduces to user data. Far from being a reason to waive the order, clever attacks on models trained on user data has the ability to supercharge the types of secondary use violations that led to the 2022 order renewal. After all, an entire art has been developed around engineering LLM prompts to reveal the data a model was originally trained on.

Our response to X’s petition debunks many claims the company uses in its arguments. For example, there’s little evidence the order placed an undue financial burden on X. In our letter, we note that the compliance cost is merely “a rounding error against the $200 billion valuation of X Corp. following the xAI merger.”

Strong safeguards on our information require eagle-eyed oversight when that data is abused and misused for profiteering ventures. X’s actions not only showed us this in the past, but continue to do so in the present day. We and our civil society partners urge the FTC to take the clear, sensible path and reject X’s petition.

LGBT Q&A: What Data Are Companies in the UK Collecting When Verifying My Age?

Paige Collings — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 08:08:47 +0000

This Pride, we’re answering all your digital rights questions in season two of our initiative, LGBT Q&A.

You Asked: I live in the UK, and we have age verification now on a bunch of websites (including Reddit) and now on iPhones. Can you explain what sort of data companies are actually collecting when they check for age and whether there are any real threats to my safety?

EFF’s Answer: Age verification is a process where a website or service checks your age to determine whether a user is over a certain age, in the UK this age is 18.

As of July 2025, all platforms in the UK that host content considered by the UK government and the country’s telecommunications regulator Ofcom to be harmful are legally obligated to check that their users are over the age of 18. If not, users cannot access the content.

There are various privacy implications for data sharing with age verification. Unfortunately, because services may use different methods to verify users’ ages, you’ll usually have to do a little digging to learn how each provider you have verifies their users, and consider what information might be harmful to your personal safety:

The data itself: What info does each method require users to disclose?
Access: Who can see the data during the course of the verification process? Does anything other than the age result leave your phone or device? Is the provider told your date of birth, or just if you’re over 18? Which third party services see the information you send?
Retention: Who will hold onto that data after the verification process, and for how long? Sometimes it’s deleted immediately. Sometimes it hangs around forever, waiting for a data breach.
Audits: How sure are we that the provider’s stated claims around data access and retention will happen in practice? For example, are there external audits confirming that data is not accidentally leaked to another site along the way? Ideally these will be in-depth, security-focused audits by specialized auditors like NCC Group or Trail of Bits, instead of audits that merely certify adherence to standards.
Visibility: Who will be aware that you’re attempting to verify your age, and will a third party provider know which platform you’re trying to verify for? Will they hang onto that data to build a profile of you?

Last year, Ofcom outlined a number of methods for online services and platforms to check users' ages. Let's look at some methods in more detail.

Facial Age Estimation

First up we have facial age estimation, where you show your face via photo or video, and a technology provided by a company like Yoti or Persona analyses it to estimate your age. Most of these third-party verification services upload your photo to their servers during this process. Yoti claims that “as soon as an age has been estimated, the facial image is immediately and permanently deleted.”

You might not want to use facial age estimation if you’re worried about a current picture of your face accidentally leaking—for example, if elements in the background of your selfie might reveal your current location. Some services like k-ID and Private ID will analyse your face directly on the device, so only the age result will leave your phone.

If you do choose (or are forced to) use the face check system, be sure to snap your selfie without anything in the background that you'd be concerned with identifying your location or embarrassing you, in case the image leaks.

Photo-ID Matching

Photo-ID matching checks whether your photo matches a document that confirms your identity, such as a driving license or passport. This is usually considered the most sensitive, since your ID has quite a bit of information on you. For example, if you upload an image of a document that shows your face and age, and an image of yourself at the same time, these are compared to confirm they match. Like with facial age estimation services, you’ll usually be sent to a third-party provider, such as Yoti or Incode. You’d hope that they’d delete the data immediately, but that’s not always the case. Incode for example doesn’t automatically delete the data you give it once the process is complete; though if you’re reaching them through TikTok, TikTok does claim to “start the process to delete the information you submitted,” which should include telling Incode to delete your data once the process is done.

If you want to be sure, you can ask Incode to delete that data yourself. But you’re relying on a service you don’t generally have a choice about doing the right thing, and we’ve already seen how that can fail. A previous system that Discord used to verify age had you send a picture to their general help forum, where all of the IDs sat around forever, until they got exposed in a massive data breach. Discord no longer uses that system to verify users’ ages. So, it might be fine, but unless you look into the exact company and all their practices, it’s hard to know. You can check out EFF’s guide for a few of the major platforms.

Open Banking

Next is open banking, where you give permission for the age-check service to securely access information from your bank about whether you are over 18. The age-check service then confirms this with the online service. The user's full date of birth is not shared. Credit card age checks are also used for pornography services, where you provide your credit card details and a payment processor checks if the card is valid. As you must be over 18 to obtain a credit card in the UK, this shows you are over 18 and can therefore access a service.

Email Verification

Email-based age estimation is also quite prevalent, where users provide an email address, and a third party technology analyses other online services where it has been used—such as banking or utility providers—to estimate your age. That third party will aggregate some data on you in the process, but the only new information they’ll find out is that you want to verify your age using a particular email address.

Mobile Operator Checks

Mobile network operator age checks give your permission for an age-check service to confirm whether or not your mobile phone number has age filters applied to it. If there are no restrictions, this confirms you are over 18.

There is no perfect, privacy protecting verification service

Unfortunately, none of these verification options are perfect in terms of protecting information, especially when this is compounded by the additional risks that LGBTQ+ people face with data sharing. The data can reveal someone’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status that can be used by employers, governments, family members, scammers, or bad actors to inflict harassment, discrimination, arrest, or violence.

There is still no widely available way to verify age online without compromising privacy—but even if there were, broad restrictions on social media will inevitably limit access to lawful speech, and valuable online communities, and arts and culture. These are just a few of the reasons that EFF is against age-gating mandates and is working to stop and overturn them in the UK and around the world.

EFF to Gov. Pritzker: Veto Illinois’ HB 5511

Hayley Tsukayama — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 18:23:38 +0000

The Illinois legislature recently passed House Bill 5511, which imposes a sweeping, device-level age-gating framework across nearly all internet-enabled hardware, operating systems, and online services. This well-intentioned but deeply flawed piece of legislation will harm young people who rely on the internet to access essential information and find community. That’s why we’re urging the Illinois governor to veto the measure.

Under this new regime, digital platforms are forced to collect and share users' ages to platforms and websites. It also strips away basic, everyday features like personalized content feeds and overnight notifications for young people unless they can secure "verifiable parental consent."

H.B. 5511 is a massive privacy and free speech nightmare. That’s why we sent a letter to formally urge Governor J.B. Pritzker to veto the bill.

Much of H.B. 5511 is modeled after controversial legislation passed in California (A.B. 1043) and New York’s Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act, both of which have already drawn immense blowback from open-source communities, privacy advocates, and tech stakeholders. For Illinois to copy this suspect age-bracketing regime before either law has even gone into effect, been tested in court, or proven functional is premature, economically risky, and legally wasteful.

H.B. 5511 is a massive privacy and free speech nightmare. That’s why we sent a letter to formally urge Governor J.B. Pritzker to veto the bill. Far from protecting children, the bill will effectively dismantle online anonymity, jeopardize data security, and severely restrict access to constitutionally protected speech for young people and adults alike. Finally, these schemes cut off vital lifelines for vulnerable youth in non-traditional families and pose an existential threat to the open-source ecosystem that underpins the modern internet.

For a deeper look at the constitutional, policy, and technological concerns with H.B. 5511, you can read our full letter here.

Victory! Supreme Court Says Constitution Protects People’s Location Data

Andrew Crocker — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 17:25:22 +0000

You have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world, and even short-term surveillance of these movements is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in Chatrie v. United States.

The case involved geofence warrants, a form of dragnet surveillance police have used to vacuum up location data from electronic devices of people who happen to be in the vicinity of a crime. EFF had joined the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Virginia, and the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law in filing an amicus brief in the case.

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The decision in Chatrie is important: It is the first digital surveillance decision by the Court since its landmark 2018 ruling Carpenter v. United States, which involved prolonged tracking of people’s movements using cell phone location data. The new case expands that ruling by confirming that even shorter-term surveillance of location data can constitute a search because it can still reveal “private matters,” including “a wealth of detail about a person’s familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”

The case is also important because the Court also recognized the records generated by the apps on a user’s phone—records we necessarily share with third-party tech company—are a user’s “own” and require Fourth Amendment protection. This is true, regardless of whether those records are “emails, documents, photographs, [ ] calendars” or location data. This will likely have broad implications for data generated by other apps on our phones, even if we click “agree” to sharing that data with third-party tech companies.

Geofence warrants don’t name a suspect or a specific individual or device the way typical warrants do. Instead, they compel companies—almost always Google—to provide information on every electronic device in a given area during a given time period. This creates a high risk of suspicion falling on innocent people and can reveal sensitive and private information about where individuals have traveled in the past.

Geofence warrants are the digital equivalent of police going person to person, home to home, without suspicion that any device holder has a connection to a crime. This turns innocent bystanders into suspects, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

In Chatrie, a 2019 geofence warrant compelled Google to search the accounts of all its hundreds of millions of users to see if any one of them was within a radius police drew around a Northern Virginia crime scene. This area amounted to several football fields in size and encompassed numerous homes, businesses, and a church.

A federal district court in Virginia in 2022 held that the geofence warrant plainly violated the Fourth Amendment. If the police want to get information on every device in the area, they must also establish probable cause to search every person in the area, the court said. The judge noted the government lacked particularized probable cause as to every individual within the geofence, which swept up innocent people and covered over 70,000 square meters in a busy area.

The decision set an important precedent in finding the warrant overbroad and unconstitutional and was later followed by a 2024 federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling holding that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” However, the Chatrie lower court allowed the government to use the evidence it obtained because it relied on the warrant in “good faith.” A much divided en banc panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 2025 affirmed this “good faith” finding in the lower court’s opinion.

Google in 2023 announced changes to how it stores location data, with the effect of eventually making it impossible for the company to respond to geofence warrants. Since July 2025, mass geofence searches of Google users’ location data have not been possible.

However, Google is not the only company collecting location data, nor the only way for police to access mass amounts of data on people with no connection to a crime. As we’ve written about extensively, data brokers collect and aggregate location data from many different apps on our phones and provide that data to police. And police can use “cell tower dump” warrants to get access to data on everyone within range of specific cell towers. Suspicionless searches like these drag a net through vast swaths of information in hopes of identifying previously unknown suspects—ensnaring innocent bystanders along the way.

Chatrie could have wide-ranging implications beyond location data as well. The Supreme Court affirmed that app data is subject to the Fourth Amendment, because users “reasonably view” it as their own and reasonably expect it “to be shielded from the ‘inquisitive eyes’ of the government.” Justice Gorsuch, in an opinion concurring in the judgment, called location data a user’s “personal property,” no different from myriad other “effects” explicitly protected by the text of the Fourth Amendment. As the Court concluded, “the point of carrying smartphones is to use is to use what is on them,” so the Fourth Amendment has to protect more than just location data generated by the act of carrying the phone itself.

The Court ultimately did not decide whether the particular warrant at issue in Chatrie was “reasonable” or whether the “good faith” doctrine applied. The case now heads back to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to address these questions.

But regardless of how the Fourth Circuit rules on remand, this Chatrie opinion will shape how lower courts address police access to location and other data going forward. We look forward to citing Chatrie to press future courts to recognize broad Fourth Amendment protections for user data.

EFF to Grindr: This Pride Month, Put Safety and Privacy Over Profits

Lena Cohen — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 16:18:00 +0000

This Pride month, we’re calling on the dating app Grindr to prioritize LGBTQ+ user safety by making privacy the default across its platform. That means no more sharing personal data with advertisers or training AI on private information without users’ opt-in consent.

Grindr is a dating app for the LGBTQ+ community; and for queer people, privacy violations can have life-altering consequences. Information that reveals someone’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status can be used by employers, governments, family members, scammers, or bad actors to inflict harassment, discrimination, arrest, or violence. For example, data from Grindr and other gay dating apps was sold by data brokers and used to 'out' (the act of disclosing someone's sexual orientation without permission) a gay priest in 2021.

Despite being the world's most popular gay dating app, Grindr has repeatedly mishandled users' sensitive data. Grindr has been caught sharing users' HIV status and precise location with advertisers without obtaining valid consent, resulting in reprimands and fines in several countries. Its former Chief Privacy Officer even sued, alleging the company fired him for raising concerns about Grindr prioritizing “profit over privacy."

Grindr ended several of its most egregious data sharing practices after they were exposed. But more changes are needed if Grindr wants to earn back trust and prove its commitment to users’ privacy and safety. This Pride month, we’re calling on Grindr to make privacy the default and ensure the immediate implementation of two changes to better protect its users:

Opt Users Out of Behavioral Advertising by Default

Grindr currently allows users to opt out of behavioral advertising, but that protection is not enabled automatically (except in some unspecified regions). As we’ve long warned, behavioral advertising relies on the collection and sharing of personal data across a vast network of advertisers, intermediaries, and data brokers. Once information enters this ecosystem, users have little control over where it goes or how it is used: people’s most private and intimate information can be aggregated, sold, and combined with information from other sources to create detailed personal profiles.

By default, Grindr appears to share data with numerous advertising and tracking companies. Using TrackerControl, an app developed by privacy researcher Konrad Kollnig, we recorded Grindr contacting 20 third-party tracking domains during 15 minutes of app activity (see Grindr_TrackerControl_06-23-2026.csv for exported results). TrackerControl observed Grindr contacting Big Tech companies and ad-tech intermediaries, many of which have faced significant legal scrutiny for privacy violations. Several of these companies auction off ad space through a process called “real-time bidding,” which can expose user data to hundreds of additional companies and be exploited by data brokers.

The dangers of Grindr’s default settings exposing users’ personal data to this ecosystem are not hypothetical. Between approximately 2017 to 2020, a location data broker collected the precise movements of millions of Grindr users from digital advertising networks and made them available for sale. The commercially available data was allegedly so detailed that, in some cases, it could be used to infer romantic encounters between specific Grindr users.

Although Grindr has stated that it no longer shares precise location data or profile information with advertisers, it acknowledges sharing other personal data, including mobile advertising identifiers (MAIDs)—unique, persistent device IDs that allow advertising companies and data brokers to connect data about the same individual across different sources. MAIDs are not anonymous, and an entire industry exists to link them to more directly identifying information, like emails and phone numbers. According to Grindr’s privacy policy, companies receiving users’ MAIDs “are aware that such data is being transmitted from Grindr,” which could expose a users’ sexuality to the advertising and data broker ecosystem.

Opt Users Out of AI Training on Personal Data by Default

Grindr should stop training its AI models on users’ personal data without opt-in consent.

Grindr has been investing heavily in AI features as its CEO strives to make Grindr an “AI-first business.” New AI features include a wingman chatbot, profile recommendations based on users’ inferred “type”, summaries of previous interactions with other users, and AI-generated insights about other profiles (like responsiveness, typical online hours, and engagement patterns). By default, Grindr uses its users’ personal data to train the AI models behind these features.

Grindr claims to never use sensitive health information for AI training and requires users to opt-in to AI training on “special-category” data, which includes chat content and precise location. But Grindr automatically enrolls users in AI training on other private information, including profile photos, age, taps, and display names. Users must navigate several levels of Grindr settings to prevent these personal details from being used to train Grindr’s AI.

AI systems trained on personal data create new privacy risks, including the possibility that personal information may be retained, reproduced, or exposed in unexpected ways. For example, researchers have been able to extract training data from AI systems like ChatGPT.

Beyond AI training, Grindr enables AI-powered features by default and allows both “special-category” data and other personal information to be processed by those features. Even users without access to premium-subscription AI features could have their data automatically used to power those features for other users. “Behavior-based profile insights” (pictured below) could expose information that users would never choose to share publicly, like the types of people they interact with on Grindr, their typical online hours, and how often they initiate conversation with other users.

Image of the “Profile Insights” feature from a Grindr blogpost promoting its premium, AI-first subscription

Regardless of whether new AI features leak private information, users deserve meaningful control over how their personal data is used and by whom. Grindr notifies users that their personal information may be used to train AI and that they can opt out on a separate settings page, but this notice does not specify the type of data used (i.e. profile photos, taps) and it is unlikely that people carefully read or understand it. Closing the notice or clicking its only button (which is “Proceed”) maintains Grindr’s default of using personal information for AI training. To respect users’ autonomy, Grindr should require opt-in consent before training AI models on personal data.

Notice displayed in the Grindr app about the use of personal data for new AI features

Celebrate Pride by Demanding Better Privacy

Grindr must immediately stop prioritizing profits over users’ safety. The ability to opt-out is not an acceptable substitute for opt-in consent, especially given the added risks of data sharing for LGBTQ+ users. Defaults matter—studies show that most people cannot or do not change the default settings of technologies they use.

If Grindr wants to back up its claim that it “takes user privacy very seriously,” it should make privacy the default across its platform, rather than something users need to go through complicated processes to opt in to.

Hate “The Algorithm?” RSS Is One of the Tools You’ve Been Looking For

Thorin Klosowski — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 16:06:49 +0000

Poke your head into just about any online social network—or any general conversations about internet culture—and you’ll likely find a boogieman: the algorithm. Since at least the moment Facebook introduced (and apologized for) its News Feed, “the algorithm” has been shorthand for the ways the tech giants control what we see and when we see it. In the age of enshittification, there is a push to reclaim our feeds and networks. Good news: there’s a tool that’s been around for decades that can help wrangle many of your feeds into something manageable: Really Simple Syndication, more commonly known as RSS.

What’s RSS and How Do I Use It?

RSS has been around since 1999, but its real publicity glow-up came from Google Reader, a newsreader service that Google offered between 2005 and 2013. Despite the alarm bells people rang at the time, the death of Google Reader wasn’t the death of RSS, and many replacements have come and gone over the years.

RSS may seem complicated, but it boils down to one general concept: when websites publish new content, like news articles, blog entries, webcomics, videos, or podcasts, that content gets added to an RSS feed, where your RSS reader (aka newsreader, feed reader, or aggregator) will show you that content in chronological order. If you’ve ever used a podcast player like Apple Podcasts or Spotify to follow different podcasts, you’ve used RSS. You can think of it like an internet-wide “follow” button, where you can track the contents of websites, users, and more.

People talk about RSS like it’s a power user’s secret trick to making the internet more usable, but the real secret is that it’s not that hard to set up and use. Here’s what you need to do:

Find an RSS reader: RSS readers come in many forms. Feedly, NewsBlur, or The Old Reader, are web-based, but have their own apps (though they also support third-party apps). Others, like NetNewsWire, are app-based, and support either using a web-based RSS reader like Feedly, or a local file. Some live in browsers or web extensions. There’s an abundance of choice in RSS readers, and part of the fun is finding one that best accomplishes what you want to do. But don’t worry about finding the right RSS reader right away. One of the many magic tricks of RSS is that it is platform agnostic, and nearly every RSS reader—whether it's a website or an app, supports importing and exporting a list of the sites you subscribe to. This means you can change RSS readers in a couple minutes. If you need some help finding an RSS reader, Wired, The Verge, and Privacy Guides all have useful roundups.
Collect your feeds: As for adding websites to your feeds, the process is straightforward. Most RSS readers are designed to help find the feed for a site for you, so you don’t need to go hunting down a special link. Just drop the URL of what you want to follow in your reader, and if an RSS feed exists, it should be able to find it. If not, some sites, including ours (and our current podcast, EFFector as well as our last series, How to Fix the Internet), provide direct links to our RSS feeds.
Sort, filter, and build your feed: Adding a bunch of new feeds can be overwhelming, particularly for news sites. RSS readers typically include folders, which let you group similar feeds together and can be great for lifting up low-traffic updates you don’t want to miss. Your reader may also have different filters, like the option to block any article that contains “sponsored post.”

RSS Is the Best Way to Follow the News

It can be very difficult to follow the news, whether that means politics, tech policy, or your hobbies. Solutions like Google News or Apple News have tried to make this simpler, but many find that their algorithmic feeds are as often a source of frustration and annoyance as they are genuinely useful. And no matter how often you tap on news stories that matter to you from publications you respect, there may always be stories that refuse to bubble up.

RSS can make reading the news much easier, reliable, and more private. The vast majority of news sites have RSS feeds you can subscribe to, and many, including CNN, The New York Times, BBC, Wired, Politico, and many others, offer RSS for specific sections or special feeds that include the full text of articles for subscribers, so you aren’t just pummeled with a firehose of news all day long (we’ll get to a tip below in the next section that tackles this problem if they don’t have separate feeds, though). In many cases, you can read articles right in your RSS reader, never being forced to engage with wonky comments sections or poor design choices on websites.

Of course, the news isn’t just general news sites, it also includes hobbyist or more niche sites, local news offerings, and blogs. Most of these sorts of websites also offer RSS feeds, as do newsletter platforms like Substack or Ghost.

RSS Offers One Way to Fix Some Social Feeds

Decentralized social media like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads, use RSS for user feeds, so you can follow your friend’s posts on Bluesky or Mastodon without actually having an account on either. This can be especially helpful for news sources, too—where you likely wouldn’t want to subscribe to a feed of everything a national news organization publishes because that would include dozens if not hundreds of stories a day, you can instead subscribe to their social media posts, which often get you the most breaking or important news.

The internet is more than just Facebook.

Some legacy social media works with RSS, too, including YouTube, Reddit (though that is currently at risk), and Tumblr. But others, like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, wall off posts behind account requirements that seem to pop up if you simply look at an account page for too long, let alone come in from an RSS feed. These walled gardens prevent information from getting out there, which ranges from annoying, like when your favorite local brewery only posts their food truck schedule on Instagram, to dangerous, like when local public services only post to a Facebook page.

The internet is more than just Facebook. It’s more than Mastodon or Bluesky, too. It’s a decentralized smorgasbord of websites, tools, feeds, newsletters, social profiles, and more, and treating it as such will help us wrangle the information we want and trust.

Other Surprising Places You’ll Find RSS Feeds

When in doubt, try copying and pasting the URL for a site into your RSS reader of choice, you might be surprised to find a feed that proves useful to you. Many places on the internet may offer RSS feeds without you even realizing it. For example, if you want to keep an eye on an artist’s prints that you like, but they don’t have Instagram where they usually post, you might be able to subscribe to their webstore, as some shopping platforms, like Big Cartel, create an RSS feed automatically. And for something even more tweakable, even Google Alerts can be turned into RSS feeds.

RSS is one of the best examples we have of the open web, where we can design and customize how we experience the internet, not the other way around.

If you prefer to track policy over products, then you’ll be happy to know that government sites often support RSS, including most U.S. government sites, many of which break them into different sections like the U.S. Department of State’s various feeds. Many local governments or other public services, like fire departments may offer the same. Some universities (and university newspapers) also sometimes offer some RSS feeds.

And even if a website doesn’t have an RSS feed, there are workarounds from tools like RSSHub, RSS-Bridge, and RSS.app that require varying levels of technical expertise or a willingness to pay subscription fees.

RSS is one of the best examples we have of the open web, where we can design and customize how we experience the internet, not the other way around. RSS has come in and out of fashion, been declared dead, and has come back, every time. Open systems are the best way forward to a free, equitable internet, and the resilience and continued reinvention of RSS has shown just how creative the web community can be with open protocols.

Lawmakers Must Act Now to Prevent Armed Police Drones

Matthew Guariglia — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:22:40 +0000

This is not science fiction. It’s not premature. If towns, cities, states, or the federal government want to act to reign in the emergence of armed police drones and robots, we have precious little time. In the absence of substantial regulation around when and how domestic law enforcement in the United States can deploy force using drones, the companies that markets technology to law enforcement have been moving. It’s past time concerned people take notice. Cities should not procure weaponized drones or robots, and multi-purpose drones and robots should be restricted from causing harm.

This month, two disturbing developments raised concerns that we might be on the verge of a larger trend of drone militarization. The first is that the CEO of Skydio, one of the most prolific vendors of police drones in the United States, signaled that the company has a more permissive attitude toward arming their drones in some contexts than many people expected. When asked on a podcast about the public perception that the company had restrictions around letting the military arm their drones, CEO Adam Bry said, “This is an area where I’ve gotten some things wrong. We said some things previously that led folks externally and internally to believe that, for example, we would prevent the military from putting weapons on our drones […] It’s very easy to sit back in a Silicon Valley office and think that we’re very smart, that we know the technology, and the idea of using it for X, Y, or Z thing seems evil or bad, so we’re going to write a policy or ban people from doing it. I think that’s ultimately misguided.”

Simply put: he is signaling that Skydio will not implement restrictions on their customers’ use of their devices.

Bry was specifically asked about the military arming drones but the question reveals a disturbing truth: whether police arm drones domestically is currently based more on the internal ethical commitments of companies than it is any laws created by elected officials. Combining Skydio’s huge amount of police contracts, including supplying entire fleets for Drone as First Responders (DFR) programs, and the tendency of military technologies like surveillance aerostats to get redeployed on U.S. soil, creates a real recipe for the emergence of armed police drones.

The other piece on the chess board to keep our eye on is the introduction of weaponized drones as a tool of school safety. A company called Campus Guardian Angel will run pilot programs in schools in Georgia and Florida in Fall 2026 to introduce drones that are designed to swarm, distract, crash into, and even shoot irritants at potential school shooters. This comes just years after a large national backlash that got the large police tech company Axon to pause its development of drones armed with tasers as a solution to school shootings.

Although it may be obvious to some people, it’s worth saying again: antagonizing an active shooter with a small drone is a dangerous idea. In chaotic situations, deploying physical harm via drone is likely to get bystanders or good samaritans hurt by accident. It is also unproven that this technology will work to distract or deter an actual school shooter–especially when the demonstrations we see online revolve around crashing drones into stationary mannequins in pristine, controlled conditions. Another important question: What would happen if a potential shooter shoots at the small moving drone and endangers the people fleeing behind it? After all, in the demonstrations we’ve seen it is unclear if these drones have the ability to see what is behind them. This is an unproven and potentially dangerous method of combating the very serious problem of gun violence in schools, and it’s one that helps to normalize armed drones as a solution to other policing problems as well.

These developments also mean It’s not enough to follow San Francisco’s lead, which became the first city to change its policy regarding how robots could be used in order to ban police from using deadly force via robots in 2022. A robust and effective policy must include both drones and robots (not one or the other), and it has to explicitly prevent drones and robots from deploying any body harm — including deadly force and less-lethal measures like kinetic strikes, pepper spray, rubber bullets, or tasers. In addition, cities and states should not procure weaponized drones and robots.

Since 2021, EFF has been advocating against the use of armed robots or drones by law enforcement. This call has become more urgent as companies are moving in to take advantage of the lax regulatory landscape. We cannot continue to rely solely on the good will of companies that make their money selling technology to police departments to protect us from dangerous police technology. Lawmakers need to act now.

We Can Still Stop California’s 3D Printer Surveillance Scheme

Rory Mir — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:05:16 +0000

Ignoring EFF’s warnings about the dangers and impossibility of implementing a new mandate for 3D print surveillance software, the California State Assembly has signed off on legislation to do just that. In the process, legislators amended the bill to make it even more confusing, while failing to address the risks to privacy, speech, and consumer rights. We must renew our call on legislators to drop this bill as it heads to the state senate, and protect the tools of creators in the state.

Take action

Tell CA Senators to stand with creators

What’s changed about the bill?

Since we first wrote about AB 2047, a bill targeting 3D printers for the rare, impractical, and already outlawed practice of manufacturing firearms without a license, it has picked up several amendments. Some are welcome changes, but most have only highlighted the technocratic absurdity of the proposed scheme. Our core concerns—that this mandate censors lawful speech, builds out corporate surveillance, and criminalizes open source experimentation—have not been remedied.

Removes criminalization of resale

Starting with one silver lining, the current bill includes a carveout for the private resale of devices. The original bill would have made it a criminal offense for an individual to resell 3D printers purchased before this mandated censorship and surveillance software. This is a clear win for the 3D-printing community, but it is unfortunately not enough.

Ineffective carveouts for open source

One of the most dangerous aspects of the bill is that it criminalizes individual users for common practices, like creating and using alternative open source programs with their 3D printer. New amendments provide a carveout for the use of an open source tool, but only if it includes compliant censorship software. The bill burdens open source developers with ambiguous and unrealistic standards for print blocking, and continues to create a chilling effect for open source users.

Removes any actual requirement to work

To reiterate—there is no world where the mandated technology actually works as intended. It will both block lawful use of 3D printers, and allow firearms to be printed by anyone determined to do so. There is no amendment that can change this reality.

Instead, the current bill simply drops the pretense that this mandate is expected to work. The performance standard of algorithms changed from “effectively prevent[ing] a technically skilled user from evading [the algorithm]” to “substantially reduce the likelihood of foreseeable circumvention attempts…” The bill will still require all prints to be surveilled, but instead of testing efficacy against a skilled user, it just plays whack-a-mole with the (literally) infinite number of circumventions that any user can employ.

Further, the bill now leaves us with an unclear process that relies on non-governmental third parties to define standards, and now relies on manufacturers and resellers to self-police.

Hollywood gets a cut

The bill includes yet another carve out for commercial users. This time for the entertainment industry, which makes extensive use of 3D printers for props and costumes.

That’s fine for big studios, but it leaves out indie filmmakers, cosplayers, and many other small creators.

This is simply a defensive edit to limit corporate opposition. There isn’t a clear division in 3D-printing between consumer and commercial tools. These are general purpose tools which might be picked up by a prop department of a big studio, or an artist getting ready for Comic Con. Indeed consumer level products are not only used by amateur artists and engineers developing their skills. Commercial 3D printers, like their traditional 2D equivalents, are frequently used in workplaces, as well as by professionals honing their skills or just trying to get some work done at home.

Commercial carveouts hands printer manufacturers the ability to sell a more expensive tier of printers, locking-in and up-charging their commercial customers. Some of those customers will choose to buy general retail versions, but that carries its own price: increased risk of IP theft as all printed files are surveilled the same way they are for hobbyists. That means a real risk of businesses leaking any prototypes or new designs to not only the printer manufacturer, but potentially snooping governments and/or the general public through data breaches.

Demand your senator oppose AB 2047

This updated version of AB 2047 downgrades performance standards and removes oversight while still threatening privacy and choice for users of 3D printers. A printer surveillance system won’t work for its intended purpose, and will only harm law abiding users.

Act now to demand your senators to vote no on this ineffective and invasive bill.

Take action

Tell CA Senators to stand with creators

Primed for Malware: Stop Selling Compromised Android Devices

Alexis Hancock — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 23:39:34 +0000

Time and time again, researchers have found numerous compromised Android devices for sale at large online retailers like Amazon. When these devices get individually reported, we have seen some noted efforts to take them down. But this is a systemic problem and Amazon and other major online retailers must make a corresponding systemic and intentional effort to stop these devices from entering people’s homes and ultimately their networks.

As a refresher: Last year, Google wrote that one major campaign, deemed BADBOX, affected 10 million uncertified devices that were running Android’s open-source software (Android Open Source Project or AOSP). These devices span from TVs and streaming devices to digital picture frames. Even now, someone can go on Amazon and Walmart and buy one of these devices. Not all of them come from Amazon and Walmart, but it’s fair to assume since they have the lion’s share of the market.

Most well-known Android-based devices don’t come with just “stock Android.” The operating system is usually Android plus additional features that the manufacturer wanted. These custom versions of Android often come with pre-installed applications that range from useful to innocuous bloatware to actual malware. Many Android OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) pre-install apps that may not be visibly represented by an icon in your list of installed apps. This obscurity makes the issue particularly hard for users to identify any potential threats.

Since the initial BADBOX analysis, there have been more reports of large campaigns and clusters of different devices participating in malicious activities that utilize people’s home networks to engage in illegal activity. Task forces in the private sector have made an effort to take down these existing Command and Control structures, but these actors may pivot and evolve to flood the market with more devices.

Online retailers can stop this cycle. A multi-billion dollar company like Amazon should offer more resources, like their anti-fraud efforts, given that these products may have facilitated conditions for large scale attacks and illegal activity. It would also be helpful if they communicated malware-related take downs in a more visible way to consumers who are seeking very similar devices with shared characteristics.

Identifying these devices can be tricky, but it’s not impossible because they tend to follow a pattern. For example, the FBI warned consumers this year to avoid TV streaming devices that claim to provide free sports, tv shows, and movies, a common tactic used by the makers of these malware-filled Android devices that leverages people’s exhaustion from spending money on countless streaming services. We detailed what sorts of indicators to look for on a device you’ve purchased.

But it’s not just the storefronts. There are other parts of this ecosystem that need to improve too, like increased engagement in firmware transparency and the actual manufacturers of the devices themselves being held accountable for these malware laced products.

On Prime Day, we urge retailers like Amazon to better empower users with information they need to make safe and smart decisions.

EFF, TEDIC and CEJIL Challenge Secrecy in the Use of Face Recognition in Paraguay

Karen Gullo — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:15:53 +0000

Seeking transparency and accountability in Paraguay’s use of facial recognition, EFF, the Association of Technology, Education, Development, Research, Communication (TEDIC), and the Centre for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights against the state for arbitrarily denying access to information about its implementation and use of the technology as a tool for mass surveillance that erodes people’s privacy rights.

The case involves the Ministry of the Interior and National Police’s installation in 2019 of surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology in Asunción. Maricarmen Sequera, a lawyer and executive director of TEDIC, filed an information request with the ministry seeking details and protocols about the implementation and use of facial recognition systems and the personal data processing involved.

The request sought information about, among other things, whether the state had conducted human rights or data protection impact assessments, as well as if it had developed measures and protocols for avoiding abuses, illicit uses of personal data, and other risks in the deployment of the facial recognition system.

The state denied most of the information requested, arguing that implementation details, protocols, and the processing of individuals' personal data were confidential security information. TEDIC contested the secrecy in courts, but the analyses lagged and ultimately sustained the denial of information.

The petition filed last Friday (19) cites Inter-American standards upholding the public’s right to access information, particularly in relation to national security, that the Paraguayan authorities disregarded in denying TEDIC’s information request. The petition also argues that the refusal of information violated privacy and the right to informational self-determination.

The petition asks the Commission to recognize a violation of those rights and require the state to deliver the information requested. Further, the petition seeks an order compelling the state to adopt mandatory permanent mechanisms of active transparency regarding the acquisition, contracting, implementation, financing, functioning, and use of surveillance technologies by public bodies, especially those that incorporate processing of biometric data or artificial intelligence systems.

It also asks the Commission to order the state to mandatory procedures for human rights impact assessments prior to acquiring and using surveillance technologies, particularly those that collect biometric data or use artificial intelligence.

The state’s lack of transparency in this case is not an isolated incident, both in Paraguay and in Latin America, where opacity in matters of security and surveillance is the unsettling rule. The situation gets worse with the increasing normalization of intrusive surveillance technologies by states in the region.

The Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission emphasized that states should disclose surveillance capabilities and contracts, and acknowledge state use of surveillance technologies at a meaningful level of detail, to facilitate essential public debate on the necessary limitations of surveillance in democratic societies and ensure compliance with international human rights law.

We hope that the Inter-American Commission upholds the robust safeguards in the Inter-American System and advances access to information and privacy rights in a case that can set a crucial precedent for the region.

Four Years After Dobbs, Anti-Abortion Lawmakers Keep Coming for Online Speech

Lisa Femia — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 20:49:25 +0000

This week marks four years since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade’s constitutional protections for people seeking abortion care. Anniversaries are a moment to take stock, and over the last four years, EFF has seen firsthand how digital rights and reproductive rights have become increasingly intertwined. One major way this has happened: the fight over abortion has also become a fight over online speech and government censorship as a steady stream of proposed laws, cease-and-desist letters, lawsuits, and government investigations have targeted the websites and online resources that help people find and learn about reproductive healthcare.

This is an effort by anti-abortion government officials to mold the information ecosystem, restrict what people can read, and cut off the ways people communicate with one another. We’ve watched this build for years, and the encouraging news is that many of these efforts have failed. The worrying news is that they keep coming. And if they’re allowed to succeed, this could have repercussions for freedom of expression online beyond reproductive rights.

Targeting Sites That Just Share Information

The clearest tell that this is also a war on speech is that officials have aimed their efforts not just at abortion providers or the entities that prescribe and sell medication abortion, but also at websites that do nothing more than tell people what their options are, how to find a doctor, and where abortion remains legal.

Cease-and-Desists & Takedown Demands

State attorneys general have been hitting these online information hubs with cease-and-desist letters and takedown demands. Just this month, for example, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall sent cease-and-desist letters to multiple groups with abortion-related websites, including Plan C, a public health campaign that provides educational resources and research on abortion access. Plan C doesn’t sell or ship abortion pills. It simply provides information. Marshall’s office nonetheless claimed Plan C’s website “facilitates, aids, and abets” illegal abortion. The Arkansas attorney general similarly sent out cease-and-desists to several organizations regarding their websites, including Mayday Health, which, like Plan C, provides only information and does not directly prescribe or mail pills.

What’s especially concerning is that the state doesn’t have to win, or even file, a lawsuit to get what it wants.

In another example from earlier this year, North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley threatened legal action and ordered the Prairie Abortion Fund to scrub information off of its website, not because the fund sold pills, but because its site linked to several outside informational resources. The Attorney General primarily focused on the fund’s link to Plan C, meaning the biggest alleged issue was a link to a website that links to other websites where pills can be accessed.

What’s especially concerning is that the state doesn’t have to win, or even file, a lawsuit to get what it wants. Especially for smaller organizations and funds, a letter threatening legal action can be enough to chill their speech, causing them to remove important content and go quiet.

Censorship Mandates

Legislators in multiple states have also attempted to make it illegal to share resources on how to obtain an abortion, including on purely informational websites with a national or global audience. South Dakota recently passed a law making it a felony to “advertise” anything “described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing an abortion.” Language this broad can easily apply to websites that simply engage in First Amendment-protected advocacy or provide educational resources. Mayday Health, which operates one such website, has since sued the state in federal court to block the law. The lawsuit argues the law could reach something as small as wearing a sweatshirt that carries Mayday’s web address.

Other state legislatures have made similar efforts. Last year, for example, Texas introduced a bill that would have made it illegal to “provide information” on how to obtain an abortion-inducing drug. If you exchanged emails, had an online chat, or created a website that shared information about legal abortion services in other states, you could have violated this bill. Luckily this particular bill did not pass, but Texas has attempted to pass similar laws for several years now.

Dressing Censorship Up as Consumer Protection

A major way anti-abortion officials are targeting online speech is by weaponizing consumer protection and deceptive advertising laws, claiming that providing information about abortion violates them. This tactic is a threat to free speech rights. The First Amendment protects publishing truthful information on a public issue, and the Supreme Court has expressly said that includes providing information about legal abortion in a state where it is illegal.

Yet states like South Dakota have continued to use deceptive advertising claims to go after abortion speech. Last year, South Dakota sent a cease-and-desist and then filed a lawsuit against Mayday Health for running ads that simply read: “Pregnant? Don’t want to be?” with a link to Mayday’s website. The state claimed the ads were “deceptive.” Mayday then counter-sued in federal court, challenging South Dakota’s actions under the First Amendment. Though the federal judge ultimately declined to step in while the parallel state case was pending, she made a point of saying she believed Mayday’s website constitutes “speech subject to protection under the First Amendment.”

Other states have attempted to run the same play. Missouri sued Planned Parenthood in 2025 under its consumer-protection statute, calling a webpage that says abortion pills are safe an “unfair and deceptive” trade practice. Florida went even further, invoking its RICO law—a law typically used for organized crime—over the same kind of statement. Florida leaned heavily on a single study funded by an anti-abortion think tank, even as major medical organizations and decades of research put the serious-complication rate below half a percent. States should not be able to cherry-pick studies in order to erase online speech.

Going After Intermediaries & Erasing Whole Websites

Some officials aren’t content to restrict only certain abortion-related content—they want the websites gone entirely.

Take, for example, the cease-and-desist letters sent by the Arkansas attorney general last year. Letters were sent directly to internet intermediaries (entities that facilitate use of the internet, such as internet service providers, web-hosting providers, or things like search engines and social media platforms). The letters demanded that both a domain registry company and a web host stop supporting a site that discusses abortion drugs. But as we know, if we cut off the host or the domain, the speech disappears for everyone—not just for people in Arkansas.

Likewise, Texas’s 2025 bill would have required intermediaries to take down abortion-related content. It’s worth remembering that the imposition of civil and criminal liability on intermediaries also conflicts with a federal law that protects online intermediaries’ ability to host user-generated speech, 47 U.S.C. § 230 (“Section 230”), including speech about abortion medication.

The push has gone federal, too. In March 2026, Senator Bill Cassidy and colleagues on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee pressed the FDA to use every tool it has against online sellers, including leaning on the domain registrars that keep these sites online.

Why This Should Worry Everyone

It’s tempting to see this as limited to the fight over reproductive rights. That would be a mistake. For people seeking care, the immediate harm is obvious: the internet is often the only place to find accurate, potentially life-saving information, and every letter, lawsuit, and takedown threat makes that information harder to find and riskier to share.

But the damage doesn’t stop there. We’re witnessing a live experiment in how to use consumer-protection laws, criminal statutes, and pressure on intermediaries to suppress a disfavored viewpoint, pull information offline, and make websites disappear. To think these tactics can only be used against abortion speech would be naïve.

We hope courts and legislatures will continue to protect free speech online. But the continued drumbeat of threatening letters, lawsuits, and investigations is its own kind of harm. Here at EFF, we’ll keep defending the right to share and read information online—about abortion, and about everything else.

The FCC’s Spam Call Proposal Is Just a Data Collection Scheme

Chao Liu — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:28:13 +0000

The Federal Communications Commission wants to require telecommunications providers to collect vast amounts of personal information from every person who wants a phone number in the name of combatting scam and spam calls. This plan will fail to combat the deluge of unwanted calls people in the United States receive every day while giving untrustworthy companies a gold mine of information that would harm everyday consumer’s privacy, access to communications, and ability to speak freely.

The requirement to provide ID and an address would completely cut off the ability to have an anonymous phone line, which would mean many people in the most precarious situations imaginable: domestic violence and human trafficking survivors, unhoused people, and children without stable homes, would not be able to gain access to a crucial lifeline. EFF, along with ACLU, has submitted comments advising the FCC to abandon this proposal entirely.

This Rule Will Not Decrease Spam Calls

Requiring phone providers to collect consumers’ information will not appreciably decrease or eliminate unwanted calls. The FCC knows this because it confesses in its own rulemaking that “the most effective way to prevent unwanted calls from reaching American consumers is by ensuring they never enter the network.” Further, the Federal Trade Commission found that “a significant proportion, if not the majority, of unwanted robocalls originate from overseas.” Collecting the personal information of everyone who wants to make a phone call will not put a dent in fraudulent calls.

What will address unwanted calls is the FCC’s STIR/SHAKEN technical standards, which already exist. While STIR/SHAKEN is not perfect, it is actually a technical solution to the problem of spam calls. And where less than 50% of American telecommunication providers have fully implemented the protocol, the FCC should put its energy toward 100% compliance to reduce the scale of unwanted calls, instead of collecting consumer’s private information.

The FCC gives away the true reason for this proposal in their own comments: this is a move to shut down the very existence of anonymous phones, aka burner phones. FCC says in their comments:

“Enhanced KYC information can assist law enforcement to more easily identify callers that use the network to perpetuate crimes by ensuring that voice providers have accurate and complete customer information. The KYC information gathered and verified would help ensure that law enforcement gets accurate information in response to subpoenas when investigating crimes. For example, can enhanced KYC rules assist law enforcement in investigating organized criminal groups that use the network to facilitate illegal activities? Can they be used to deter or detect trafficking operations that use communication networks to buy and sell illicit goods?”

Anonymous phones are not just used by people to break the law, they are also used by activists who wish to remain anonymous, privacy conscious consumers, people escaping domestic violence, people escaping human trafficking, journalists who need to reach out to confidential sources, and other people in desperate situations. Anonymous phone lines are a lifeline to many, one which this proposal would cut off without any alternative.

Mass Data Collection Makes Us All Less Safe

Mass data collection of individuals does not address unwanted calls, but it does

make us all less safe online. The telecommunications industry has proven time and again that they’re poor stewards of personal information. They’ve been at the center of several large-scale data breaches in recent years and their data practices leave much to be desired.

In 2024, AT&T disclosed two large data breaches. One in which 7.6 million existing account holders and more than 65 million former customers had their information leaked onto the dark web, and another in which more than 100 million customer account call and text logs were downloaded. Another large provider, Comcast, suffered a data breach in 2023 where nearly 36 million account holder’s information was stolen, including the last four digits of their Social Security Number and date of birth.

In 2024, the nation’s CALEA infrastructure, which law enforcement uses to tap and trace calls, was breached in the Salt Typhoon attacks. Experts maintain that U.S. communications networks remain vulnerable, and even this administration acknowledges these attacks as an ongoing threat.

If telecoms can’t even protect the most sensitive communications infrastructure in the nation how can we expect that they will protect our identities?

In addition to their poor cybersecurity practice, these providers themselves abuse the information in their possession. In Scott v AT&T, AT&T, among others, made consumer information available to hundreds of third parties without the consumer’s express consent. Though the case was dismissed because AT&T forces its consumers to sign arbitration agreements, it shows the complete lack of care for their consumers' privacy.

A Lack of Anonymity Silences People

Mass data collection of individuals just to have a phone number will also harm and silence people. Anonymity in calls provides people the safety they may require to organize themselves, speak freely, and seek services. Anonymous phone calls give people the courage to participate in politics, organize themselves, reach out to a suicide or sexual-assault hotline, an addiction-recovery sponsor, seek medical care, seek escape from a violent and coercive situation, and do much more. Without this anonymity, people may otherwise not do any of these things.

It will prevent many from obtaining phone numbers at all.

Not everyone has all the information the FCC wants to require. The FCC wants people’s physical addresses, defined so narrowly that it’s essentially a home address. Not everyone has a stable home address, so those individuals would be not able to get phone service.

FCC suggests that a government-issued identification should be required for any phone service. About 15 million adult U.S. citizens do not have a driver’s license, while about 2.6 million do not have any form of government-issued photo ID. Others don’t have access to their identifying documents, they may be controlled by an abusive spouse or parent, human trafficker, cult, or someone else from whom a secondary phone line could help a person escape. Estimates show another 21 million adult U.S. citizens do not have a non-expired driver’s license, and over 34.5 million adult citizens have neither a driver’s license nor a state ID card with their current name or address.

These numbers do not include non-U.S. citizens who do not have current government-issued identification, including undocumented immigrants who cannot obtain a state ID or driver’s license. Black American and Hispanic Americans are disproportionately less likely to have current drivers’ licenses, and Americans with disabilities and Americans with lower annual incomes are also less likely to have current driver’s licenses.

The FCC’s proposal will not decrease the amount of unwanted calls. All it will do is set up a data collection regime that harms everyday, law abiding Americans. This proposal makes us less secure online, strips away our right to anonymous speech in calls, and actively disconnects those Americans who are already at the margins. EFF recommends the FCC discard this proposal in its entirety.

The window for reply comments can still be filed until July 26th. Express comments, which are appropriate for most individuals, can be filed on the FCC website. See the suggested language below to help you get started.

Are Your Local Police Using Flock Safety ALPRs to Scan for Immigrants?

Dave Maass — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 16:00:37 +0000

When a car passes an automated license plate reader (ALPR), its plate is captured and instantly compared against a list of vehicles that police are actively looking for or that police have identified for real-time surveillance. These are called “hotlists,” and EFF has learned that one used by agencies across the country targets immigrants on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Agencies using Flock Safety ALPR systems commonly allow the plates their cameras collect to be compared against the FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC) hotlists. These hotlists are broken into "topics," such as "Gang or Suspected Terrorist," "Stolen Vehicle," and "Missing Person."

Flock Safety told EFF via email: "Local agencies add/remove license plates from the NCIC list. The FBI curates the NCIC list, and pushes it out to local agencies. Once the list leaves the FBI, they do not see any agency alerts. They only see when a local agency adds or removes plates from the list."

But one list is different: The "Immigration Violator" hotlist is populated exclusively by ICE, and it is the only agency authorized to enter or maintain records in this system, according to the NCIC operator manual. It includes license plates associated with administrative warrants, which are issued by ICE agents without judicial review. The manual further describes the data:

The Immigration Violator File contains records on criminal aliens who have been deported for drug trafficking, firearms trafficking, or serious violent crimes and on foreign-born individuals who have violated some section of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

And:

If the ICE has reasonable grounds to believe that the subject may be operating a particular vehicle or a vehicle bearing a particular license plate, the vehicle and/or license data may be included in the record.

Buried in the Flock Safety administrative interface, there is a drop-down menu where agencies select which NCIC topics to subscribe to. If Immigration Violator is selected, the local agency will receive an alert that a vehicle ICE is looking for has been sighted. According to Flock Safety, ICE itself does not get an alert, although the local agency may contact ICE to let them know. Many agencies also participate or collaborate with immigration enforcement (through, for example, 287(g) agreements) and may take steps to stop a vehicle based on one of these alerts.

In many places, using ALPRs for immigration enforcement is against city or state law–or at minimum, against agency policy. But using this hotlist is immigration enforcement.

For example, Sparks Police Department's ALPR transparency portal lists immigration enforcement among the "prohibited uses." Yet, records show Sparks utilizes ICE's Immigration Violator hotlist.

Many agencies publicly acknowledge using NCIC hotlists, but don't publish which ones. So, EFF filed public records requests with agencies around the country to figure how to identify at least which agencies may be using the Immigration Violator hotlist. Here are links to the documents from the 13 agencies that have responded so far.

Agencies with the Immigration Violators Hotlist Enabled

Agencies Using NCIC Hotslists, But Immigration Violators Is Disabled

Knowing whether your agency has this box checked isn't just useful information—it's the kind of evidence that can change how officials vote when a contract comes up for renewal. So, how can you find out if your local agency is using the Immigration Violator list? It takes some digging, and you may not be successful. But here's what has worked for us in some instances.

STEP 1: Conduct background research.

The first questions you want to try to answer are:

Does your local agency use Flock Safety ALPRs, and if so,
Are they using NCIC hotlists?

To answer the first question, here are two sites to try:

AtlasofSurveillance.org - This is an EFF project to catalog the technologies law enforcement agencies use. You can search for your agency to see if they use ALPR.

EyesonFlock.com - This site includes an index of every agency that maintains a Flock Safety "Transparency Portal." These portals often disclose what hotlists an agency uses. You'll want to look for your agency, then click the outbound link to their transparency portal, if they have one.

Once you're on the transparency portal, you'll want to look for two things.

Is "immigration enforcement" a prohibited use? If it is, you might find that the agency is violating its own policies.

Does the agency list "NCIC" as one of its hot lists?

Not all agencies disclose this information, so even if you don't find anything, you can move on to these next steps.

STEP 2: File a public records request.

Every state has a law that allows the public to request information from the government. This can often be done by emailing the police department or sheriff’s office, using the agency's online public records portal. You can usually find these emails or portals quickly online by searching for the agency's website and contact information. You can also subscribe to a service like MuckRock, which is how we filed these requests.

We have developed language to request the hotlist topics. It doesn't always work, due to differences in how agencies interpret public records laws, but it is still worth a shot.

Note: This is template language. A Google doc version is available here (Google's Privacy Policy applies).

To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to the [INSERT LOCAL PUBLIC RECORDS LAW - FIND THAT HERE], I hereby request the following information:

- The NCIC topics that the agency has selected.

Within the Flock Safety ALPR administrative controls for hotlists, there is an NCIC drop-down menu to allow an agency to choose which NCIC "Topics" it will alert on. For example, "Gang or Suspected Terrorist" or "Missing Person."

You may provide this as a print out or a screen grab, or simply copy-paste the selected items. If you'd prefer to do a full CSV export, that is also acceptable but may take more effort.

I leave the format at your discretion, but I would prefer to use as little of your agency's resources as possible for this request. You can see an example here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28277589-20260414084201725/

The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or CD-ROM if not.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions at [CONTACT DETAILS].

Sincerely,

[Your Name]

STEP 3: Wait for a response.

Depending on the agency and the state law, it may take anywhere from days to weeks to receive a response.

If the agency provides the records, they might look something like this:

If "Immigration Violator" is checked, then yes–police are scanning vehicles for immigration enforcement.

You can then put this information to work, sharing it with local reporters or bringing it directly to city officials who have the authority to modify, restrict, or cancel your agency's Flock contract. This is especially important if the agency has the box checked but also claims ALPR data is not used for immigration enforcement. Government officials like easy fixes, and "uncheck the box" is about as easy as it gets. But remember: If that's where it stops, the infrastructure for immigration surveillance stays fully intact, and the system is one policy, personnel change, or error away from being switched back on.

In many cases, you will not receive records. The agency may claim it's protected under legal exemptions or that it is not actually a public record under state law. For example, we received rejections from the Abington Police Department in Massachusetts and the Akron Police Department in Ohio.

If that happens, push back politely. You can explain that many other agencies across the country have produced this information and that it would greatly help inform the public. You can try contacting the police department's public information officer. Another option is alerting local press that the agency is refusing to disclose basic information about a public surveillance system, shutting residents out of decisions about how that system is being used. If you have the resources and time, you may also consider litigating a denial or lack of response.

You can also email your city council or board of supervisors member. Explain why this matters: The law enforcement agency may be facilitating immigration enforcement in secret, potentially in violation of its own policies. Ask them to use their oversight authority to demand answers from the agency, including pressing the vendor directly. Elected officials hold real leverage here: In most cities, either the council or the city manager controls the contract, and both are accountable to the public. If your agency's contract is up for renewal—or if a new pilot program is on the horizon—this is exactly the kind of information that should be part of that public debate before officials sign anything.

While we have filed dozens of these requests, we need locals to help gather even more. Drop us a line with the records you receive (or don't) at aos@eff.org.

The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online

Joe Mullin — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 06:40:07 +0000

Within the next week, Congress is preparing to vote on the KIDS Act, a sprawling package of legislation that seeks to control Americans’ web browsing and private messaging. The package includes a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, combined with a collection of other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements, and new regulations. Instead of debating any of these proposals on their merits, lawmakers are attempting to move them all at once under an ultra-expedited process.

The package of cobbled-together bills is a mess, with different age-gating schemes for different services, using different standards. It’s a lot of complexity, and a lot of legal risk. Faced with that, many companies will conclude that the safest option is restrictive age-checking practices across their entire platforms.

Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications. While supporters continue to claim this bill protects minors online, its requirements come at the expense of privacy, free expression, and the ability of people of all ages to use the internet without revealing sensitive data.

Take action

Tell Congress to reject this age-gating bill

The KIDS Act Pressures Platforms to Check Everyone's Age

Supporters of KOSA have said the bill doesn’t require age verification. And technically, the KOSA section of the bill does say that KOSA shouldn’t be read to require age verification.

But if you read the rest of the bill, that disclaimer starts to look hollow.

Throughout the KOSA section of the legislation, special protections, controls, messaging settings, and parental tools are required whenever a website or app “knows or should have known” a user is a child (defined in the bill as anyone under 13) or a teen (defined as anyone between 13 and 16 years old).

The problem is a website operator doesn’t need actual knowledge that a user is a minor to get in legal trouble. It applies when a platform “knows or should have known” a user’s age—a low, negligence-style standard of knowledge. If an online service gets it wrong, it’s going to be up to courts and regulators to decide, after the fact, if an online service “should” have known a user was 16.

To try to avoid liability, services will have to determine which users are teenagers and which are not. Most won’t be able to simply trust their users. They’ll have to collect more information about age, before any lawsuit or government action arises. Some companies may respond by requesting driver's licenses or passports. Others will rely on age-estimation systems that attempt to guess users' ages by looking at existing activity or doing facial scans. Existing estimation systems make mistakes when estimating children’s ages correctly, which is a big problem when that is the population KOSA is trying to protect. And the systems fail more frequently for people of color, people with disabilities, and trans and nonbinary people.

The bill’s authors seem to know this is a problem. On the one hand, the new KOSA section says age verification is not required. On the other, it repeatedly imposes obligations that depend on knowing whether a user is under 17. But a disclaimer doesn’t magically eliminate legal risk, especially for smaller services and startups that can’t afford to defend lawsuits or fight regulators.

Take action

The "KIDS Act" Is an Age Surveillance Bill

KOSA is not the only part of this package that creates age-verification pressure. The SAFE BOTS Act, like KOSA, goes back to the standard that if a service “knows or should have known” that a user is a minor it can’t offer certain chatbot features.

The SCREEN Act requires services that host sexually explicit content to determine whether users are “more likely than not” under the relevant age limit, before allowing access to certain content.

The consequences of this liability will not be limited to minors. If websites and apps are expected to reliably identify teenagers, adults will be asked to prove they are adults. The result is a less private internet for everyone.

The KIDS Act Pressures Platforms To Police Lawful Speech

The new version of KOSA removes the bill’s infamous "duty of care" provision, a significant change. The revised KOSA requires covered platforms to "establish, implement, maintain, and enforce" policies and procedures addressing several categories of content and conduct.

Some categories, such as true threats and sexual exploitation, involve unlawful activity. Others are much broader. The bill specifically requires policies addressing the "sale or use" of narcotic drugs, tobacco products, cannabis products, gambling, and alcohol. It also restricts discussions around financial fraud.

Sounds straightforward enough. Then you remember how people actually talk—online and off. Can teens discuss addiction and recovery? Can a 15-year-old post that she’s worried she has a friend who is drinking too much? Can they seek advice about a parent’s gambling problem, or get help if they or a family member have been scammed? Can they participate in harm-reduction communities or discuss substance abuse treatment? All of these young people would be engaging in lawful speech when discussing topics covered by KOSA’s enumerated harms.

The bill does not directly ban those conversations. But it places platforms under huge pressure to create and enforce moderation policies around broad categories of lawful speech. Faced with legal risk, many services will inevitably choose to remove that speech or restrict those discussions to spaces where they know only adults can participate. We’ve seen this movie before. When legal risk goes up, platforms will take down more speech.

The KIDS Act Regulates Private Messages, Too

Several provisions of the bill create new rules around direct messages, disappearing or “ephemeral” messages, and AI chat services.

The bill includes language stating that certain KOSA requirements should not be construed to override strong encryption. But the protection is incomplete. The carve-out applies to certain features and messaging controls, but doesn’t apply to KOSA’s separate requirement that platforms "address" a list of harms to minors.

The KIDS Act never answers an obvious question: how exactly is a platform supposed to address those activities if they’re inside encrypted communications that it can’t read? That will create pressure for providers to weaken private communications or limit features on encrypted private services.

That approach is especially troubling when it comes to ephemeral messaging. Disappearing messages are not a “loophole” or a dangerous design trick. They are a useful privacy feature that allows online conversations to function more like ordinary real-world conversations, which are not preserved forever in a permanent database.

Like many other parts of the KIDS Act, these private messaging provisions also depend on websites and apps knowing who is a minor and who is not. The result is more age checks, more restrictions, and less privacy online.

Take action

Tell congress: no online age checkpoints

🦅 Domestic Spying Takes an L | EFFector 38.12

Christian Romero — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 16:20:33 +0000

Sold to the public as a foreign surveillance tool, Section 702 is the law has let intelligence agencies spy on millions of Americans’ private conversations without a warrant. Despite years of revelations about this law's misuse, Congress has repeatedly reauthorized Section 702 without meaningful reform. Until this month, that is, when it finally lapsed in a major victory for privacy. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're covering the expiration of Section 702 and what happens next.

JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER

For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This issue covers a disastrous plan to overhaul the U.S. Copyright Office, why the UK's social media ban will cause more harm than it prevents, and a new Senate bill taking aim at government pressure to silence lawful speech online.

Prefer to listen in? EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms. This time, we're chatting with EFF Senior Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia on what the expiration of Section 702 means for warrantless domestic spying. You can find the episode and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice:

Privacy info. This embed will serve content from simplecast.com

Want to protect your private conversations? Sign up for EFF's EFFector newsletter for updates, ways to take action, and new merch drops. You can also fuel the fight for privacy and free speech online when you support EFF today!

The UK’s New Under-16 Social Media Ban Will Cause More Harm Than It Prevents

Paige Collings — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:45:31 +0000

This week, politicians in the UK pushed forward with plans to eviscerate privacy and free speech on the internet by announcing a ban on social media for users under 16 that is set to take effect in Spring 2027.

The UK government continues to falsely characterize this policy as a necessary response to growing concerns about online harms for young people. In reality, much like the Online Safety Act, it will cause more harm than it will prevent.

Users of all ages are burdened with proving their age before accessing content, with social media platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X included in the ban. There remains no reliable, privacy-preserving method of verifying the age of every internet user and methods vary from one platform to the next.

Young people will not simply be protected from being contacted by adults or endlessly scrolling—they’ll also lose access to educational videos on YouTube, local events on Facebook, and potentially cut off from distant friends and family.

Public policy must be effective, proportionate and respectful of fundamental rights. Young people deserve better than a policy built on panic, and all internet users deserve a safe and free internet. A social media ban generates headlines, but it will not solve the problem.

A Brief History of Age-Gating in the UK

Age restriction proposals in the UK date back to a decade ago, when the proposed Digital Economy Bill was put forth to (among other things) restrict young people from accessing pornographic websites. While the Digital Economy Act of 2017 passed without age-based restrictions, it laid the groundwork for later age verification measures.

Over the next few years, age checks for porn websites were announced then delayed several times. But it wasn’t until a consultation under the 2016-2019 May government and the 2020 publication of the Online Harms Whitepaper that age verification became a broader idea.

In 2023, the UK passed the controversial Online Safety Act, establishing powers that could weaken privacy protections and freedom of expression for internet users worldwide. In July 2025, the government implemented age assurance measures on sites hosting “harmful” content.

And despite politicians affirming repeatedly that the Online Safety Act would solve all of the problems with online safety, this year they decided it in fact did not go far enough. American social psychologist and The Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt—who has called for age-related social media bans around the world, despite significant scientific doubt about his research—met with the UK Health Secretary in February to push for the ban.

In March, politicians introduced plans for a social media ban into the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to “prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users” of “all regulated user-to-user services,” to be implemented by “highly-effective age assurance measures”—effectively banning under-16s from social media.

When this proposal came before the House of Commons, MPs defeated and proposed their own amendment: enabling the Secretary of State to introduce provisions “requiring providers of specified internet services” to prevent access by children, under age 18 rather than 16, to specified internet services or to specified features; and to restrict access by children to specified internet services which ministers provide.

But the social media ban does not stop there. The provision also requires internet service providers to limit the time kids spend online, and has rules about who can contact them online. These extreme rules will take decisions about using technology away from families and put them in the hands of government regulators.

The history of this proposal shows that the UK government has repeatedly returned to the same flawed idea: restricting access to online services by requiring age checks for everyone. But the fundamental problems have not changed. There is still no widely available way to verify age online without compromising privacy—but even if there were, broad restrictions on social media will inevitably limit access to lawful speech, and valuable online communities, and arts and culture.

EFF Joins 60+ Groups Urging the UK to Halt Face Estimation at the Border

Paige Collings — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:35:31 +0000

This week, EFF joined Foxglove, Human Rights Watch, and 60 other organizations in writing to the UK’s Minister of State for Border Security and Asylum, Alex Norris, raising serious concern about the Home Office’s decision to deploy Facial Age Estimation (FAE) to assess asylum-seeking children from 2027.

The letter points to four key concerns:

Discrimination

As with most face estimation and recognition tools, there is ongoing bias in the deployment of these technologies. With FAE, many have highlighted its baked-in failures and discrimination, particularly in relation to women and people of color. Evidence shows that FAE is most accurate for estimating the ages of Eastern European men, but even then it consistently produces errors. The Home Office itself noted “that FAE performance can vary depending on ethnicity” and skin tone.

Inaccuracy

The Home Office has admitted that FAE systems are imprecise for analyzing 16-to 18-year-olds, with even the “top systems” having an “error margin of around 2.5 years here.” This is exactly the age range for which the Home Office has chosen to deploy this technology. And this error margin will be widened yet further because children seeking asylum often suffer from trauma-induced aging.

Lawfulness of Use of Children’s Data

Major concerns exist around the lawful basis on which the Home Office, or its chosen third-party FAE vendors, could have sought consent to collect and process photographs or data from asylum-seeking children to train this system. Further, there is no clarity on the images and/or data that this technology has been trained on.

Lack of Necessary Disclosure

The Home Office claims “extensive testing has already been carried out across diverse groups, including different ethnicities, genders and age ranges, indicating promising performance and accuracy.” But these purported “promising” results have not been published, nor have any Equality or Data Protection Impact Assessments.

The letter continues by requesting clarification on several key questions regarding these concerns. EFF and partners have provided the UK government 21 days for a response, and we urge the Home Office to take on this uphill task in good faith and release the information.

You can read the letter in full here.

Canada Is Forging Ahead with Its Dangerous Surveillance Bill

Thorin Klosowski — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 22:34:07 +0000

With no serious debate, including on proposed amendments, Canada is blazing full speed ahead with Bill C-22, which would threaten encryption and increase surveillance. Also known as the Lawful Access Bill, Bill C-22 is currently moving forward quickly to a vote despite the many, many criticisms civil liberty groups and the tech industry have hurled at it.

As we’ve discussed before, Bill C-22 is dangerous on multiple levels. It pushes for requirements for metadata retention, expands information sharing with foreign governments, and establishes a mechanism that allows Canada’s Ministry of Public Safety to demand that companies create backdoors, effectively breaking encryption. That mechanism was a key facet of Part 2 in Bill C-22, and the government prevented it from being independently debated.

In a deep analysis of the bill, Citizen Lab and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association detail every one of flaws of this proposal, concluding that most elements are unsalvageable.

A wide range of tech companies agree. Signal, Apple, Google, and several VPN providers oppose the bill, and some have said they’d likely be forced to either cut Canadians off from certain features or shut down services in Canada altogether.

The Canadian government wants this dangerous, complicated, overreaching bill passed before June 19. Bill C-22 is riddled with privacy problems that affect millions of people. It should be debated and studied fully, not jammed through on an arbitrary deadline.

OpenMedia is offering a tool for Canadians to contact their elected representatives about the bill. Actions taken on OpenMedia's website are governed by OpenMedia's privacy policy, not EFF's.

EFF Thanks SerpApi For Helping Us Protect Free Speech Online

Tierney Hamilton — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:56:22 +0000

EFF is grateful for SerpApi’s generous support, helping us fight for your rights to speak and access information online. SerpApi has been giving to EFF every year since 2018, and alongside our 32,000 individual donors, their gift is critical to keeping up the fight.

Whether in the courts, halls of power, or broader policy debates, we appreciate the work this support has made possible over the years. Some examples:

We sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Department of State to stop an unconstitutional social media surveillance program to identify and punish individuals who express viewpoints the government disagrees with.
We helped develop the Santa Clara Principles, a framework to reign in overbroad content moderation so that all users are treated fairly and offered consistent tools for recourse if their speech is censored by tech companies.
In the whitepaper Unfiltered: How YouTube’s Content ID Discourages Fair Use and Dictates What We See Online, we pushed back on YouTube for silencing individual creators in the interest of protecting a small number of giant copyright holders.
We stood with whistleblowers and dissidents persecuted for their online speech.
We continued the fight to protect Section 230.

We live in an era when lawful speech and the right to access information are being targeted by Big Tech and governments around the world that are hostile to dissent. Free speech online is core to EFF’s mission, and SerpApi’s support will help us continue the fight to protect everyone’s right to free expression.

Call for Submissions: Digital Pride

Paige Collings — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:46:02 +0000

This Pride season, join EFF and the Queer Arts Collective in building a creative space at the intersection of digital justice and artistic expression.

We’re looking for fresh, untold, historically censored takes on digital liberation.

Whether it’s pointing the lens towards an issue you feel is underrepresented in digital justice efforts; sharing personal accounts of joy, pleasure, or sorrow under surveillance; painting your widest imagination for our communities using technology for good instead of carcerality and doom—we want to see it and we want it to expand our own understanding of what’s important and beautiful.

We’re going to be curating between five and nine art pieces across writing (fiction, nonfiction, poetry) and visual arts (photography, drawing, painting). We welcome fluidity in medium and genre, and cross-genre works of all kinds, such as graphic storytelling and collaborations.

We are looking for works that convey the importance of digital liberation and ways of achieving it, particularly from under-represented perspectives. Pieces will be selected based on interpretation of the theme, emotional resonance (does it surprise, move, frighten, delight?), and overall curatorial cohesion for each issue.

Submissions that adhere to the following length guidelines are preferred:

(NON)FICTION - max 1500 words
POETRY - max 2 poems
VISUAL ARTS - max 1 artwork, which can be a serialized collection.

Please submit to paige+pride@eff.org by June 30, 2026, including your piece as an attachment and a short bio in the body of the email, alongside anything else we should know about your submission. You can expect to hear back from us around July 31, and we aim to have the first issue published in September. If we select your submission for publication on both EFF and Queer Arts Collective websites, we will compensate you between $25 - $50, depending on the number of pieces published.

There is no fee for entry. Please only submit one piece or a contained series for this call, and wait for us to get back to you before submitting again. If you plan to submit both individually and as part of a collective, one submission in each of these categories applies.

Your submission must be your original work and you must have the legal right to authorize us to publish it, but it need not be created specifically for this project; you may submit a work you have published previously. Please disclose any use of AI in a note in your application—this will not disqualify your entry, though we value transparency of labor exchange.

As attempting to witness art is a highly subjective endeavor, please don't consider not being selected as anything other than circumstantial. We are looking to foster a community of artists working for digital justice, and would love to see more from you in the future.

You will retain all legal rights to your work, but agree to provide EFF and Queer Arts Collective with a non-exclusive and non-time-limited license to publish your work on their websites and other promotional materials, such as in zines.

Meet the Judges

Kit Walsh is an EFF attorney who works to protect the rights of activists, journalists, researchers, and dissenters in order to build a better world. She is also a Nebula-award-winning author and is best known for her tabletop roleplaying game Thirsty Sword Lesbians.

Paige Collings is an EFF activist working to dismantle systems of oppression and advance collective liberation. Her work focuses on highlighting how state surveillance and corporate restrictions stifle marginalized communities and perpetuate historic injustices and harm. She works with activists across the globe to facilitate systemic change by speaking truth to power and creating spaces for alternative imaginations.

The Queer Arts Collective is an NYC-based collective run by queer and racialized artist-activists, looking to make space for art that is deliberately disruptive of structural hierarchies that power the status quo.

A New Bill Takes Aim at Government Pressure to Silence Lawful Online Speech

India McKinney — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:38:21 +0000

Last week, Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Wyden introduced the Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression, or JAWBONE Act. The bipartisan legislation creates a federal cause of action against government officials who coerce or attempt to coerce broadcasters, interactive computer services, or AI providers into taking actions against lawful, First-Amendment-protected speech, and establishes a transparency system for government communications with those intermediaries about user expression.

We thank the Senators for their leadership on this important issue. Jawboning occurs when the government pressures private companies to censor speech protected by the First Amendment, and it’s not always obvious to the public or to the victims what has actually happened. Deleting posts or cancelling accounts because a government official or agency demanded it or even made threats in making those demands—just like spying on people’s communications on behalf of the government—raises serious free speech concerns. Among other things, this bill would provide a new legal right to bring claims against the government in federal court, in addition to what the First Amendment provides.

At EFF, we’re continuing to fight back on behalf of those censored by government coercion. One recent example: we represent the creator of ICEBlock, an app that allows the public to report immigration enforcement activity in their communities. In June 2025, high-ranking federal officials began threatening to investigate and prosecute the creator of ICEBlock, Joshua Aaron. In October 2025, the U.S. Attorney General demanded Apple remove ICEBlock from the App Store, and the company complied. The government’s coercion violated Aaron’s First Amendment rights.

We’ve also filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the same government agencies that threatened Aaron and other services that provided forums to report ICE activity. The lawsuit seeks the disclosure of the government’s communications with Apple, Google, and Meta that forced the services to remove lawful speech.

When federal officials pressure private companies into censoring protected speech, it can violate the First Amendment. But, not every communication from a government agency to a platform is unconstitutionally coercive. Treating legitimate communication and information-sharing between the government and private actors as though it were always unconstitutional would chill the valuable, good-faith engagement that supports a healthier and safer internet and nation for all Americans. This is a complex issue, and one that is important for Congress and the courts to get right.

Finally, contrary to what many in Congress have been saying, social media platforms and other internet intermediaries have their own First Amendment rights to decide how they moderate users’ speech. They are not “state actors” and do not have an obligation under the First Amendment to allow all user speech on their platforms. EFF filed an amicus brief setting out our position in 2018, and we’ve said it in many cases since. The Supreme Court recognized again in the Netchoice cases that these services have a right to curate and edit their users’ speech, whether or not it aligns with the government’s position. And, it’s important to defend that First Amendment right so that governments cannot dictate how to edit a company’s site according to the government’s wishes and desires. To prevent jawboning by default, companies must be free to curate their platforms as they wish.

EFF applauds Senators Cruz and Wyden for taking this critical issue seriously, and we look forward to working with Congress on this bipartisan bill as it moves through the process. We hope it lands on the right balance to provide additional protections for everyday users around freedom of expression.

Court Records Should Be Free

Joe Mullin — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:36:10 +0000

Court records belong to the public. Yet anyone seeking access to federal court filings through PACER, a government software system that stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, is usually required to pay hefty fees to search for and view documents. PACER’s fees have long acted as a barrier that makes it hard, especially for low income people, to see and understand the work produced by our own public servants.

That's why EFF joined a broad group of organizations supporting the Open Courts Act of 2026, legislation that would modernize the federal courts' electronic filing systems and eliminate PACER fees.

Public access to the courts is a cornerstone of democratic accountability.

The bill would replace the aging PACER and CM/ECF systems with a modern, unified platform designed to improve public access, strengthen cybersecurity, and reduce long-term costs. Supporters note that PACER currently collects more than $150 million annually in fees from the public, despite court records being public documents.

The Open Courts Act would also make court records easier to find, access, and understand. The legislation builds on a similar proposal, also supported by EFF, that previously won bipartisan support in the Senate Judiciary Committee but did not become law before the end of the congressional session.

This is not a new issue for EFF. More than a decade ago, we criticized PACER's paywalls and the removal of some court records from online access, arguing that the public should not have to pay to read the law and the judicial decisions that shape it. The Open Courts Act would move U.S. courts a big step closer to that goal.

In addition to EFF, the bill is supported by Fix the Court, the group pushing this bill forward; the Free Law Project, which maintains RECAP, software that has created a large archive of legal opinions and other court records; as well as civil society groups, open government watchdogs, and media groups.

Public access to the courts is a cornerstone of democratic accountability. Let’s eliminate unnecessary barriers to court records, and bring the federal judiciary’s tech into the modern era.

Read the full letter supporting the Open Courts Act of 2026

Field Notes from a Year of OPSEC Training

Daly Barnett — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:00:21 +0000

Late last year, as part of our annual “Year in Review” series, we summarized our efforts providing digital privacy and security advice to at-risk communities. OPSEC trainings (short for operational security, a catch-all term we use to describe any kind of workshop, advising session, assessment, or presentation about operational security for individuals and organization) are something we've long provided, but until recently, something we’ve never broadcasted.

This has become a critical aspect of our work over the years, keeping us grounded and in touch with the realities of tech-enabled violence as well as evolving resistance strategies used by movement workers. Hoping other security trainers and organizers copy our homework, here’s a more thorough breakdown.

NOT TRADITIONAL PENTESTING

To be clear, we're not a 'pentesting' company, which refers to the methodological process of testing a person or organization's security and privacy posture, nor an information security (infosec) firm that offers anything within scopes of traditional security assessments. Infosec companies almost always adhere to a cycle of: discovery/reconnaissance; > vulnerability scanning and testing; > exploitation of vulnerabilities found; > and a reportback of recommended mitigation strategies. Such full-spectrum audits can run the gamut of testing network security, physical security, organization posture against phishing or ransomware attacks, web app security, and more. For many organizations, the value of such engagements is immeasurable.

Such companies—although equipped with the technical sophistication to do full-spectrum digital security auditing and testing—often lack the critical points of view of human rights defenders and activists. Many human rights defenders and liberation movement workers are critically under-resourced and unable to meet the high costs of engagement with such infosec companies. But that’s not what we offer. Our trainings center the needs of people on the ground, and offer this work pro bono.

The cycle of engagement our work tends to take is similar to the lifecycle of pentesting outlined above, but with some key differences better suited to people-powered movements.

We begin with a period of discovery about the organization we’re engaging with, learning about their work, the issue space they’re working in, and the types of threats their peers have faced in the past. Relying on our knowledge of known threat actors (state-operated threats, non-state actors, surveillance mechanisms, and more), we conduct a thorough threat modeling and risk assessment exercise, surfacing critical pieces of information about what we ought to prioritize protecting and from what. Sometimes that’s enough for a group to get started on improving their security plans, and we send them on their way.

After receiving consent from the group to do so, we may perform some OSINT (open source intelligence) investigation and map out a sketch of their digital footprint. This often looks like some combination of discoverability through public records, data broker ecosystems, and breach databases, as well as risks they may incur through the services they rely on for their web presence. That latter part can be done with typical pentesting reconnaissance tools, as well as our own project Privacy Badger for mapping the trackers on their website, which pose them and their users some amount of risk. Working from this sketch of their digital footprint, opportunities to lessen the reach of their data exposure, or at least the more sensitive areas they ought to be aware of, become apparent.

For a more in-depth engagement, we take the information gathered from the guided threat modeling exercises, as well as the digital footprint we’ve developed for them, and we move on to training the participants on what they need to address their threats. Sometimes that looks like a deep dive on encryption and how it can be used to protect data backups and secure communications. Other times it looks like getting very knowledgeable and practiced on the various ways to stay safe from surveillance threats encountered at a protest. Often though, our engagement with those asking for advice on how to strengthen their OPSEC is as simple as presenting materials covered in our Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) project, but with EFF staff to help apply those lessons to their context.

MOVEMENTS AND COMMUNITIES ADVISED

Requests for such training mostly arise organically, either via referral, from our participation in external media, or driven by an interest in SSD. Naturally, the demand for accessible OPSEC advice escalates along with the general sophistication and reach of surveillance technology. And as authoritarianism creeps and continues to threaten the movement workers fighting against it, there's a marked urgency for that demand.

The types of communities and liberation movement workers that reach out run a wide array of experiences, but some commonalities stick out. Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, we've seen a huge uptick in abortion access activists like clinic escorts and information distribution networks reaching out. So too are providers of criminalized healthcare services, both abortion services and gender affirming care alike. The list goes on: advocates for transgender rights such as art collectives and archivists, sex worker rights activists, survivors of intimate partner violence, climate justice activists, legal defense groups focusing on immigrant justice and Black liberation. And many, many others, often stemming from experiences of distinct marginalization and state-powered violence.

We’re dressing the wounds the violence of surveillance inflicts.

TAXONOMY OF THREATS

When there's a cast of common threat actors that so often emerge during risk assessment (ideologically motivated harassers, lawmakers, cops, negligent leadership at large tech platforms, etc) there is a level of predictability about their capabilities. We use that information to make knowledgeable risk assessments for those we’re working with, determining the means that threat actors have to cause them harm, as well as the likelihood.

For community organizers and grassroots activists we most often see concerns around doxxing (and harassment driven by OSINT), social media monitoring, content suppression on tech platforms, and insider threats such as infiltration within trusted communication channels. Often this comes with a tension between publicity and privacy—needing to spread their message and further their cause, while recognizing that digital privacy has a profound impact on their personal safety. Some activists may instead hope to organize other more covert forms of direct action. They're more likely to be concerned about the types of street level surveillance that they may encounter.

Small organizations nonprofit and otherwise may share the concerns around doxxing, as well as traditional digital security concerns around their web presence. Website defacement and data exfiltration are particular concerns for organizations that don't have the resources to commit to IT security staff. And for those that do have meager budgets for such things, organizational compliance and ease-of-use regarding privacy and security technologies are a whole other concern. The question then becomes how to manage a system of distributed devices that are uncontrolled by the organization, but operationally necessary for each member of their community.

Generally speaking, the threats most commonly encountered in these spaces have to do with the opacity and unchecked reach of surveillance systems. With every single individual or group that we encounter in this type of work, threat modeling comes number one in terms of priority. There is no way to protect against every theoretical threat. Instead, we walk others through the process of identifying and then prioritizing known and perceived threats, based on their specific context and the type of work that they do, before moving on to recommended mitigation and resistance strategies.

STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE

Developing a threat model without a course of action often does more to stoke privacy nihilism than remedy the risks communities face. The more we engage with at-risk communities and offer reasonable, accessible OPSEC advice, the greater our instinct develops for recognizing such strategies. At the core of these recommendations lie the backbones of privacy and security fundamentals, such as encryption, access controls, sophisticated backup plans, OSINT skills, and resistance to online tracking.

Over the years, we've found it easiest to begin with non-technical recommendations first. These strategies often mesh well with the community's extant organizing procedures, such as designating team roles and thought out contingency plans for specific risks. This may look like identifying those extant plans and tacking on responsibilities like data backups, code words for community vetting, and developing workarounds or contingency plans for if they lose access to specific technologies.

Eventually, though, the strategies must become more technical, like switching to more private and secure technology alternatives, developing a sophisticated and encrypted data backup plan, and having technical contingency plans in place for if/when they are deplatformed or their services interrupted. Developing patience and compassion when walking groups through unfamiliar technologies is an essential tool of this work. So too is the habit of checking ourselves, as privacy and security nerds, to know the difference between the most secure technologies and those which will actually be used by at-risk community members. Any step towards more thoughtful OPSEC is better than one too difficult to use. The last thing we want is a recommendation that results in people frustratedly giving up on doing anything at all. After all, the whole point of this is to empower movement workers, not inhibit them.

HOLISTIC MITIGATIONS

It is painfully obvious how many identified threats could be protected against if there were comprehensive data privacy legislation protecting all people. The lack of such is an existential threat to everyone. Bills that undermine peoples' right to privacy are never clear about what they're doing, and often come wrapped in some paternalistic guise of addressing some other harm elsewhere. They often use confusing, oblique language that preys on the public's interest to correct the course of other social harms. The reality is that when it’s clearly explained, every person online wants better privacy. And as we know, every individual's personal security and wellbeing are entwined with their access to privacy. The capacity with which a person can decide what to share online, rather than have sensitive information non-consensually taken from them by creepy surveillance technologies, is a matter of self-determination. And it's in all our best interests to fight for the right to self-determination.

WHAT WE GET BACK

An unexpected outcome of identifying so many common threat actors across such varied issue spaces is revealing potential avenues of collaboration and camaraderie. Some movements are already keen on this allyship, such as those focusing on various aspects of bodily autonomy and self-determination. Abortion access activists and trans liberation activists are often in concerted allyship. Other less obvious connections are legal defense groups that offer "know-your-rights" style educational materials and other issue-specific activists who have questions about the legal threats they're facing while fighting for their cause.

Recognizing the common threat actors across different issue spaces begins to highlight opportunities for collective action against those threats. As a digital rights organization, this is very much our wheelhouse, and precisely why our technologist team is self-described as one working toward the public interest. It’s also from this point of view that we continue to win. And why it’s critical for lawmakers to pay attention when we say particular pieces of bad legislation are harmful to public safety. And finally, why it is necessary for public interest technologists and digital rights activists to connect with other communities to learn about the specific technology risks they’re worried about. As Mariame Kaba says, “Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone.” This very blog post is in an effort to provoke thought for digital security trainers, so that we as a community don’t work atomized and alone, reproducing the same work, exhausting ourselves and creating unnecessary redundancy.

We do what we can to keep up. And thankfully, we participate within an ecosystem of digital security providers that have a keen mind towards fighting for digital rights. We share resources, referrals, and expertise. Our Surveillance Self-Defense project is stress-tested by the experiences shared by the liberation movement workers we engage with and provide this work to. If you’re interested in becoming a digital security resource for your community, start with the SSD. If you’re a human rights defender with questions about how to stay safe, reach out. And if you’re not sure what else to do, you can always help us keep it going.

AI Regulation Should Be Rational, Not Retaliatory

Tori Noble — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:45:40 +0000

The Trump administration’s approach to AI safety, particularly the generative AI models that regularly grab headlines, has been haphazard at best. At worst, it’s unconstitutional. As EFF and our allies explained in an amicus brief, the Pentagon’s actions against one company, Anthropic, violate the First Amendment because they were motivated by the administration’s desire to punish an uncooperative company, not legitimate concerns about national security.

By and large, the Trump administration’s AI strategy has minimized regulation in the name of “winning” the global “race” to develop leading frontier models. It has pared back regulations intended to address even the most serious AI threats—like AI-enabled cyberattacks on government systems—to protect AI innovation.

Yet it has repeatedly singled out one AI company for arbitrary, heavy-handed rules and sanctions. For years, the federal government relied on Anthropic’s models for use in its classified systems. But after Anthropic resisted the government’s demands to use Anthropic’s models to autonomously kill people or spy on Americans, the government declared war on the “woke” company. It designated the company a “supply chain risk,” effectively banning agencies and government contractors from doing business with the company.

A court issued a preliminary injunction preventing these sanctions from taking effect, as EFF and other civil liberties organizations urged it to do in an amicus brief filed earlier this year. But absent judicial action, these sanctions would’ve cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars. Either way, it sent a clear signal that companies must adhere to the government’s wishes or face similar consequences.

As we explained in our brief filed today, these sanctions were clear retaliation for the company’s public refusal to allow the Pentagon to use its models to develop fully autonomous weapons and spy on Americans. This kind of retaliation is unconstitutional.

In a recent executive order, the Trump administration took its war on Anthropic even further, by imposing “export controls” that ban any foreign nationals from using Anthropic’s new Mythos and Fable models. To comply with this order, Anthropic shut down the models altogether.

These extreme measures were purportedly justified by security concerns. The administration said it feared that Anthropic’s Mythos-class models could be used to find and exploit existing vulnerabilities in software code—hardly a new feat for an LLM. Anthropic itself has contributed to public anxieties about its Mythos-class models, initially claiming that Mythos was too dangerous for public release and restricting access to a handful of partners. The company’s CEO called for a pause on AI development, citing fears that the technology was becoming too powerful.

But regulators should be cutting through the hype, not feeding it. Even if Mythos’s capabilities were a modest improvement over existing technology, others are already closing the gap. In other words, nothing about Mythos is so uniquely dangerous that it warrants exceptional export controls to protect the public. Yet other LLMs with similar offensive cybersecurity capabilities are not subject to export controls. Instead, the government has embraced a voluntary system in which companies are encouraged to submit models to the government for cybersecurity testing 30 days before releasing them to the public.

AI policy should be reasonably responsive to real-world risk, grounded in the realities of the technology, and no more burdensome than necessary to protect the public. But the government’s haphazard decision to impose export controls on Mythos-class models, while subjecting other AI models to nothing more than a voluntary, light-touch framework, meets none of these criteria. As leading cybersecurity experts and executives recently explained in an open letter, these sanctions prevent developers and security teams from using the best models to find and fix vulnerabilities before adversaries, armed with nearly as capable AI, can exploit them.

Decades Later, Code Is Still Speech

More importantly, export controls on important software tools like LLMs can undermine the free flow of digital communications and technologies that activists, innovators, and ordinary users desperately need. Freedom of expression requires access to these tools. Depriving the public of the best AI threatens our rights without making us any safer.

EFF has long opposed government efforts to restrict the publication of non-classified software to the general public. In the 1990s, EFF challenged export controls on encryption software, helping establish the principle that “code is speech,” protected by the First Amendment. Courts recognized that software is not just a functional tool—it’s a means of ideas, knowledge, and technical know-how. And they recognized that the government was overreaching in trying to restrict private developers from sharing their improvements in computer security with the public.

While AI models raise new questions, efforts to restrict access to them implicate the same constitutional and speech concerns as older efforts to restrict encryption. Export controls are uniquely susceptible to abuse. And they are especially suspect when they are unilaterally imposed without clear and fair standards.

Whether these export controls were another attempt to punish Anthropic or simply a misguided security measure, the public loses. The real cybersecurity risks of advanced AI may ultimately justify limited regulations to protect the public from legitimate threats. But whether the government ultimately chooses to heavily regulate the technology or hold off to promote innovation, its rules must be rational and evenhanded.

Read EFF's Amicus Brief in Anthropic v. Department of War

The Free and Open Web Is Under Attack at the IETF

Tori Noble — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 21:26:08 +0000

The ability to access publicly available information using automated tools is a central value and benefit of a free and open internet. Automated access—often called crawling or scraping—powers important, useful tools for locating, preserving, and analyzing online information. For example, crawling and scraping helps journalists, researchers, and watchdog organizations report the news, find security flaws, and investigate discrimination. Crawling the web allows non-profits like the Internet Archive to preserve historical copies of websites. Tools for automated comparison shopping allow consumers to find the best deals on items they want to buy. And so on.

Yet the open internet access is increasingly under threat from publishers and Big Tech companies alike. Fearing lost advertising and licensing revenues, website operators increasingly claim that they need to lock down their sites from bots that crawl public web content to train or operate AI models. Some companies are even trying to embed their business models into internet standards by changing Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) technical standards that shape much of the internet.

Many of their economic anxieties are understandable. AI bots can strain websites’ infrastructure, in some cases, degrading site performance or taking them offline altogether. Upgrading systems costs money that some sites may not have. And AI is likely to disrupt the business models many publishers adopted in response to the rise of the internet, if users rely on AI overviews instead of visiting source websites.

However reasonable these fears may be, the answer is not to change the IETF standards from neutral protocols that encourage openness to restrictive requirements designed to monetize internet access.

The worst of these proposed standards would give websites far greater ability to automatically block legitimate, lawful scraping and crawling. For example, the AI Preferences working group is working on proposals to give publishers a way to express “preference signals” against crawling web data for AI-related purposes, including to train models, generate outputs, and help users search the web. These preference signals would be expressed through robots.txt and could potentially become legally binding in some jurisdictions.

Another working group, called Web Bot Auth, is pursuing efforts to protect sites from overly-aggressive bots that strain website resources—a positive goal that could meaningfully improve the internet in the AI era. But Web Bot Auth is simultaneously pursuing a much more dangerous path as well: standards changes that would enable sites to cryptographically identify bots so that they can more easily block anyone they wish—not just “bad” actors, but competitors, dissidents, or anyone who hasn’t paid for the right to access sites using automated tools. If sites restrict crawling to a preapproved list of cryptographically authenticated bots, they could require licensing payments from those wishing to crawl their sites. This would close off the open web to researchers, archivists, and startups without the ability to pay for automated access.

Websites may have legitimate reasons to worry about AI’s impacts on their traffic and advertising revenue, but those reasons must be weighed against the benefits of the open web. These proposals would effectively give website operators veto power over a wide range of important uses—from the investigations and archival works described above to accessibility tools for people with disabilities, to research efforts aimed at holding governments accountable.

That is why we are fighting back against these threats to open access. EFF and our allies in the open internet community have successfully resisted some of the most dangerous IETF proposals thus far—and won’t stop working to protect the open web from efforts to manipulate internet standards to undermine the right to freely access the internet in any legal way, including with automated tools.

The NO FAKES Act Could Silence Satire, Commentary, And News

Joe Mullin — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 20:33:28 +0000

The NO FAKES Act is supposed to target harmful AI-generated impersonations. But in reality, it will make it easier to suppress commentary, satire, and other lawful speech. That's why EFF has signed a letter urging the Senate Judiciary Committee not to advance the bill in its current form.

Take action

Tell Congress to Say No to NO FAKES

In the letter, EFF joins a coalition of civil society groups in pointing out that the bill would import many of the worst features of the DMCA notice-and-takedown system into an even broader range of online expression. Faced with a “heckler’s veto” over legal speech, platforms will have incentives to remove content first and ask questions later.

The bill offers no protection for a platform’s judgment about an often difficult question—whether a particular piece of content is satire, parody, commentary, or news. Any platform that guesses wrong faces penalties of up to $750,000 per work.

NO FAKES could also undermine the rights of the people it is supposed to protect. The new federal “likeness” right could be licensed or transferred to others, so individuals will lose control over the use of their own face and voice. That’s not theoretical—workers in the entertainment industry are routinely asked to sign broad contracts about the future use of their likenesses.

As the letter notes:

A background actor who signs a release on set or an ordinary person who clicks through a platform's terms of service could end up with the right to their own face and voice in someone else's hands, for years, with federal enforcement behind it.

EFF and the other signatories urge Congress to examine existing legal remedies and pursue narrowly tailored solutions to genuine harms. The last thing we need is a sweeping new intellectual property right that threatens free expression.

In addition to EFF, the letter is signed by the Center for Democracy & Technology, the American Civil Liberties Union, Fight for the Future, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Organization for Transformative Works, Public Knowledge, the R Street Institute, The Future of Free Speech, and the Woodhull Freedom Foundation. Read the full letter here.

Take action

Tell Congress to Say No to NO FAKES

Onward, Friends

Cindy Cohn — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:56:00 +0000

After 26 years, today is my last day at EFF. It's been a terrific and wild ride — the organization has grown from a tiny band of fighty people trying to plant a flag for freedom and justice in the coming digital world into a large, established band of fighty people doing, well, much the same. The world around us has changed enormously. Our core values haven't budged.

I'm proud of what we've achieved: freeing encryption, defending coders, pushing to rein in government and corporate surveillance and ensure the right to have a private conversation online, standing up for free speech and anonymous speech, fighting for network neutrality and safe voting machines, busting stupid patents, and making sure copyright didn't become the one law that rules the internet. That's only the start. We've stopped more bad legislative, regulatory, and legal ideas than I can count, built tools that millions rely on to protect their privacy, and helped encrypt the web. I've long said EFF is the plumber of the internet — finding the clogs and barriers that prevent technology from serving freedom, justice, and innovation for everyone.

In addition to presenting cases in courts across the land, testifying in Congress and in California, in the European Parliament and at the United Nations, I went onto the internet with Stephen Colbert and engaged in a healthy disagreement with Jon Stewart. I wrote a lot of it down in a book, hoping to recruit others to the cause. The work has been hard and often frustrating at times. But looking back, the fun parts are what I remember most.

None of it would have been possible without EFF’s stalwart members. More than 30,000 people, some with big wallets and some with small ones, give us what we need to stand up to bullies and fight for the long haul. EFF has always served as a beacon for people who know that for technology to support freedom, justice, and innovation for all the people of the world, we need a dedicated band of folks working overtime on behalf of users, innovators, and creators.

There's still plenty left to do. We haven't killed the third-party doctrine, tamed the surveillance business model, or gotten metadata the constitutional protection it deserves. Stupid patents persist as does the overreach of DMCA section 1201 and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The government is now the largest purchaser of data from shady brokers, communities everywhere are fighting license plate readers and other street-level surveillance, and we haven't reined in NSA and FBI spying nearly enough. Meanwhile, the rise of AI is supercharging problems we've fought against for years.

But I'm proud of what we've built together. I'm grateful to every EFFer — past, present, and future — who threw in with us when the odds were long and the pay was much better elsewhere. I'm grateful to the EFF Board and especially to my mentors and friends Pam Samuelson and Shari Steele, along with my longtime partner in justice, Lee Tien, who has been working with me since the Bernstein case. Fighting for justice is easier when you have a posse: coworkers, co-counsel, coalitions, interns, volunteers, and the heroic clients who trusted us to steward their cases in ways that bent the law toward everyone's benefit. Twenty-six years later, EFF is part of a global diaspora of organizations defending internet freedom — and I'm proud of that too.

I'm stepping down because good leaders should make way for new ones, and the time feels right. EFF is strong and full of fight. My successor Nicole Ozer — a longtime friend and collaborator — is exactly the right person for this moment. She understands EFF's role and values at a deep level and will protect them while helping the organization rise to meet what's coming.

As for me, I'm not going far. After a few months off to reflect and walk dogs, I plan to get back into the fight for justice — likely heading back into the courtroom. And I'll be watching, cheering, donating, and wearing the merch from EFF, just like the rest of you.

EFFecting Change: LGBTQ+ Solidarity Against the Tide of Surveillance

Melissa Srago — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:35:43 +0000

LGBTQ+ communities are facing an escalating wave of censorship and targeted surveillance, but we can push back through mutual solidarity. Join us live to learn how safer virtual spaces get built, how platform policies and government pressure are reshaping the digital landscape, and what platform accountability actually looks like. Our panel will share ideas for direct action and concrete strategies you can bring back to your community. Whether you’re an activist, an ally, or just paying attention, this conversation is for you. Join the livestream online followed by live Q&A.

EFFecting Change Livestream Series:
LGBTQ+ Solidarity Against the Tide of Surveillance
Wednesday, June 17th
9:00 am - 10:00 am Pacific - Check Local Time
Livestream followed by Q&A

This event is LIVE and FREE!

About the Speakers

Paige Collings
As a lawyer, digital policy activist and community organizer, Paige works to dismantle systems of oppression and advance collective liberation. Her work focuses on highlighting how state surveillance and corporate restrictions stifle marginalized communities and perpetuate historic injustices and harm. She has worked with activists across the globe to facilitate systemic change by speaking truth to power and creating spaces for alternative imaginations; and her writing on digital justice has been featured in Wired, Politico, Teen Vogue, the Daily Beast and more.

Jillian C. York
Jillian is EFF's Director for International Freedom of Expression, based in London. Her work examines state and corporate censorship and its impact on culture and human rights, with a focus on historically marginalized communities. At EFF, she organizes coalitions, writes about and researches topics related to freedom of expression, leads the Speaking Freely interview series, and contributes to various other areas of the organization's work. Jillian is the author of Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism (Verso, 2021), a contributor to several academic volumes, and has written for MIT Technology Review, The Guardian, and WIRED, among others. She is also a visiting professor at the College of Europe Natolin in Warsaw, and a regular speaker at global events.

Soatok Dreamseeker
Soatok Dreamseeker is a gay furry security engineer. He blogs about applied cryptography on his blog, Dhole Moments, and is developing key transparency to enable end-to-end encryption on the Fediverse. His puns are 100% whole groan.

Luísa Franco Machado
Luísa Franco Machado is an award-winning international expert in digital rights and data justice. She has also been a technical advisor in data governance and AI ethics for governments, NGOs, and international organizations worldwide, including the UN, OECD.AI, GIZ, and others. Luísa has carried on policy research at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Sciences Po Paris on the intersection between technology and socio-economic development. In 2022, the United Nations recognized them as a global Young Leader for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) among more than 6,500 advocates. In 2025 she was featured in Apolitical's Government AI 100 list as a rising star.

Victory! 702 has Expired!

India McKinney — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 23:49:27 +0000

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lets US intelligence agencies collect communications from foreigners abroad without a warrant, and routinely sweeps in Americans’ emails, messages, and calls in the process.

The authority for this program is set to expire Friday, June 12th, 2026, at midnight. As we wrote earlier this week, Congress has been kicking the ball down the road for months now—temporarily postponing the expiration of the mass surveillance authority Section 702 of FISA in hopes that some consensus on a longer reauthorization could be reached.

EFF has said for decades, every time this program is up for renewal: Section 702 should require a warrant before the Federal Bureau of Investigation can look at digital communications collected from Americans. If not, we should let the whole thing expire. And this time, it has, at least for a little while.

Ironically, we have Bill Pulte to thank for this (probably temporary) reprieve. Earlier this month, Trump on Tuesday named Pulte – currently director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – to replace current DNI Tulsi Gabbard, who announced her resignation last month. As has been widely reported, Pulte lacks any intelligence, military, or congressional experience. Senate Democrats responded by refusing to move forward with their version of a bill to reauthorize Section 702. Similarly, the House refused to approve even a short-term renewal of the program.

However, the potential for abuse of this program is not limited to one individual or one administration. And if Congress is this concerned about one particular individual having access to Americans’ most sensitive information, the responsible thing to do is to put more transparency, accountability, and oversight into the structure of this program.

Members on both sides of the aisle understand this. As we have seen several times this year already, the appetite for reform is stronger than ever. We hope to continue to see strong bipartisan opposition in Congress to renewing Section 702 without a warrant requirement for backdoor searches. Until then, the authority for this program should remain expired.

Yes to California's Bill to Ban Surveillance Pricing

Adam Schwartz — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:56:39 +0000

Corporations harvest and monetize ever-growing amounts of our personal data, such as our browsing history and physical location. One bitter fruit of this poisonous tree is known as “surveillance pricing”: corporations offer the same product to two different people at two different prices, based on scrutiny of these people’s respective personal data.

Surveillance pricing is bad for privacy, equity, and price transparency. So EFF supports a California bill, S.B. 2564, which would ban this creepy practice.

How Surveillance Pricing Works

In 2025, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a report about the practices of six companies that provide surveillance pricing services to hundreds of other companies, including grocery stores and apparel retailers. The report found that surveillance pricing draws upon customers’ browsing history, physical location, and shopping transaction history. Customers’ data can come from the vendor itself, from its surveillance pricing service provider, or from third-party data brokers. Customers are sorted into groups based on their personal data, as is done for targeted ads. As a result of surveillance pricing, a business might offer two customers different prices for the same product, based for example on whether they are a new parent, or whether they live near a business’s competitor.

As former FTC Chair Lina Khan explained:

Initial staff findings show that retailers frequently use people’s personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services – from a person’s location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage.

Unfortunately, the current FTC chair closed the FTC’s portal for public comments regarding surveillance pricing. Fortunately, the California Attorney General has initiated its own investigation of this practice.

Researchers have identified many examples of surveillance pricing:

The Princeton Review offered people who lived in some zip codes a higher price for test prep services, compared to people in other zip codes. As a result, Asians were twice as likely as non-Asians to be offered a higher price.
In a year-long study of tens of millions of rides in Chicago, Uber and Lyft offered a higher price for trips that ended in neighborhoods with high non-white populations.
Tindr offered older people (aged 30 to 49) higher prices for Tindr Plus, compared to younger people (aged 18-29).
Orbitz offered people who used Apple computers a higher price for hotel rooms, compared to people who used other types of computers.
Hotel booking sites offered people from San Francisco a higher price for hotel rooms, compared to people from other cities.
Target offered a higher price to people physically located at the store, compared to people located elsewhere.
Staples offered a higher price to customers who lived further from the company’s competitors, compared to customers who lived closer.

Why EFF Hates Surveillance Pricing

This practice is harmful in many ways. First, surveillance pricing invades our privacy. Vendors offer us a price only after scrutinizing our personal data about what we’ve clicked online and where we’ve travelled offline. Moreover, surveillance pricing incentivizes all businesses to harvest as much of our personal data as possible. Some businesses will use it for their own surveillance pricing. Other businesses, which might not themselves use it this way, will sell it to data brokers, which in turn will sell it to others for use in surveillance pricing.

Second, surveillance pricing can disparately burden people of color and other vulnerable groups. For example, as described above, surveillance pricing led to Asian people paying more for test prep services, older people paying more for dating services, and people living in non-white neighborhoods paying more for a ride home.

Third, surveillance pricing is opaque. Many people don’t even know when they’ve been subjected to it. Those that do often cannot determine the unknown reasons for the price they’re offered. As a result, consumer advocates will be less able to publish meaningful price comparisons to help consumers make choices. And regulators will be less able to identify unlawful pricing practices.

Thus, EFF and many other groups object to surveillance pricing.

Its defenders sometimes argue that surveillance pricing benefits consumers because it can lead to lower prices. But while some consumers some of the time might get lower prices because of surveillance of their personal data, other consumers will get higher prices, as shown by the examples above. Some recent studies indicate there will be losers and winners based on factors like whether a consumer is willing or able to switch products. Who loses or wins also will turn on the accuracy of the underlying data – yet surveillance pricing is often based on false information.

In any event, both losers and winners of this price discrimination are harmed by surveillance. Privacy is a human right, not a property to be bought and sold on a market. For this reason, EFF has long opposed pay-for-privacy schemes, in which a company charges a higher price to a customer who refuses to submit to processing of their personal data. Thus, even if surveillance pricing sometimes leads to lower prices (and again, it often will not), we oppose it as just another way that corporations try to make customers pay for their privacy.

What the California Bill Would Do

The key term of California’s S.B. 2564 is short and sweet: “a retailer shall not engage in surveillance pricing.”

The banned practice is defined as: “[i] a customized price for a good for a specific consumer or group of consumers, [ii] based, in whole or in part, on personally identifiable information collected through electronic surveillance,” including if that information is “acquired from a third party.” In other words, “surveillance pricing” is a customized price based on personal information.

The bill has two enforcement methods. First, state and local government may bring enforcement actions, and seek all manner of remedies including monetary penalties. Second, individual consumers may bring their own enforcements lawsuits, and seek the remedies of an injunction and attorney fees. We are pleased the bill provides this private right of action, which is the most important method of enforcement (we’d be even more pleased if the private remedies included liquidated damages).

The bill has three exemptions where surveillance pricing is allowed:

First, for price differences “based solely on costs associated with providing the good to different consumers.”
Second, for a discount offered to a consumer who is taking steps to terminate a service.
Third, for a discount, conspicuously posted on a retailer’s website, that is uniformly available based on (1) criteria anyone can meet, such as signing up for a mailing list, (2) membership in a broadly defined group, such as seniors, or (3) participation in a loyalty program.

The bill’s author is California Assembly Member Chris Ward. Its co-sponsors are Consumer Reports and TechEquity. Its supporters include Consumer Federation, EPIC, Kapor Center Advocacy, Oakland Privacy, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, labor unions, and other groups. The bill has advanced through the California Assembly and has arrived for consideration in the California Senate.

Why EFF Supports the California Bill

Surveillance pricing is just one part of a much larger problem: corporations maximizing their profits by invading our privacy. The all-too-common business model is to systematically harvest, collate, and store as much of our personal data as possible, and then monetize it through use and sale.

EFF’s general approach to this problem is a strong regulatory framework that we call “privacy first.” For example, laws should require businesses to “minimize” their data processing, meaning they must not collect, store, use, or disclose our data unless doing so is strictly necessary to give us what we asked for. Likewise, laws should require businesses to get our voluntary and informed opt-in consent before processing our data, buttressed by legal bans on coercive pay-for-privacy schemes and manipulative “dark patterns.”

A.B. 2564 is just a specific application of the minimization rule. Nobody who uses a web browser or a mobile app expects that, as a result, their clicks and footsteps will be funneled into personal dossiers, and later used by downstream businesses to offer a higher or lower price.

A.B. 2564 is also a specific application of the “no pay-for-privacy” rule. At its best, surveillance pricing is a corporate offer of a lower price in exchange for a consumer’s submission to surveillance of their personal data. This scheme encourages all people to surrender their privacy in exchange for a lower price. This is especially coercive for people with lower incomes, and thus carries the risk of creating a society of privacy “haves” and “have nots.” And swept into this supposed “bargain” is the potential for higher surveillance-based prices based on false information or erroneous inferences.

Surveillance pricing is very similar to online behavioral advertising, a business practice that EFF urges governments to ban. Both practices incentivize all businesses to collect as much of our personal data as possible, in order to later monetize it. Both practices lead some businesses to collate and store our data into dossiers about us for later use. Both practices use these surveillance-based dossiers to manipulate and limit our economic choices, by altering the advertisements and prices we see online. In the words of the FTC report discussed above: “Existing and common techniques used for targeted advertising can also be used for other forms of targeting prices.”

Absent a specific ban on surveillance pricing, as in A.B. 2564, it would be very difficult to protect the public from the many harms it causes. Corporate price-setting is increasingly opaque, making it difficult for consumers and regulators to determine whether a particular company set a particular price for a particular consumer based on their data, and if so, the particular data that it used. As a result, it would be very difficult in this context to enforce general laws requiring minimization or consent. Moreover, many such laws exempt how a business processes the data it directly collected from its own customers; for example, the California Consumer Privacy Act’s limits on “cross-context behavioral advertising” do not apply to how a business uses personal data it collected on its own website. Yet many practitioners of surveillance pricing (like Tindr) rely on such data.

Finally, there is little to no risk that A.B. 2564 will have unintended consequences that hurt internet users’ speech or technological innovation. The bill does not address any particular type of technology. It does not limit any collection, retention, or disclosure of personal data. It limits only one very narrow and easily defined use of data: use to set a customized price. And it has three broad exemptions.

In sum, EFF is proud to join with other groups in support of California’s A.B. 2564. You can read our support letter here.

‘News’ Site Keeps Hallucinating EFF Staffers

Josh Richman — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:20:26 +0000

What do EFF staffers Sarah Chen, Javier Morales, Caitlin Chin, Emma Rodriguez, and Mikko Kopponen have in common?

For one thing, they don’t exist.

For another, all have been quoted as EFF experts in articles published in the past two months on a site called News-USA Today, which describes itself as “an independent news publisher focused on clear, accurate, and useful journalism.”

Uh…

(Please don’t confuse this site with USA Today, in which real EFF experts are accurately quoted on a regular basis.)

News-USA Today is hardly the only slagheap that’s hallucinating or fabricating EFF personnel and quotes; as we wrote last September, media companies large and small are using AI to generate news content because it’s cheaper than paying for journalists’ salaries, but that savings can come at the cost of the outlets’ reputations— assuming they care about reputation at all.

But this many fake EFF sources in two months? That’s making a play for the championship title of bogus news content.

News-USA Today’s site proclaims, “Our goal is simple: give readers the facts and the context they need to make informed decisions.” It then defines its mission:

“Deliver timely, factual reporting grounded in verifiable sources and public documents.”
“Make complex topics understandable without losing nuance or accuracy.”
“Serve the public interest by surfacing stories that affect lives, institutions, and communities.”
“Maintain a clear separation between news, analysis, opinion, and sponsored content.”

Attempts to reach contacts listed on the site went unanswered. In fact, after we reached out to them, they published a story on June 9 with quotes from Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director Jared Cohen — who also doesn’t exist.

As we noted last year, EFF is all about having our words spread far and wide. Per our copyright policy, any and all original material on the EFF website may be freely distributed at will under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY), unless otherwise noted.

However, we don't want disreputable sites making up words (or false identities!) for us, whether or not they’re using AI. False quotations that misstate our positions damage the trust that the public and reputable media outlets have in us.

The best thing a news consumer can do is invest a little time and energy to learn how to discern the real from the fake. It’s unfortunate that it's the public’s burden to put in this much effort, but while we're adjusting to new tools and a new normal, a little effort now can go a long way.

As we’ve noted before in the context of election misinformation, the nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica has published a handy guide about how to tell if what you’re reading is accurate or “fake news,” as has FactCheck.org.

LGBT Q&A: We’re Back With Season 2!

Paige Collings — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:20:27 +0000

Last June during Pride, we launched a new initiative—LGBT Q&A—where we answered your most pressing queer-related digital rights questions on EFF’s Instagram and TikTok accounts. No question was too big or too small! You asked us things like what pictures to use on dating apps; how to remove your name from internet searches; why homophobic content doesn't get removed after you report it; and how to stay safe at Pride marches.

And this year, we’re doing it all again.

Both online and offline, LGBTQ+ individuals and the fight for queer liberation are under threat; and the need for guidance and protection from prying eyes and oppressive structures is increasingly pertinent. This is particularly true for those of us who face consequences when intimate details around gender or sexual identities are revealed without consent.

But we know that it can feel overwhelming to even start thinking about how you can protect yourself online in the face of these issues. That's why this Pride, we’re answering all your digital rights questions.

How to submit your questions?

If you would like to remain anonymous and away from social platforms, you can submit questions via this secure link.
Head to EFF’s Reddit or the r/LGBTQ subreddit and submit your questions underneath the posts.
Your questions can also be submitted under the linked posts on EFF’s Instagram and TikTok, as well as on our stories where you can submit questions directly.
If you prefer Mastodon and Bluesky, comment your questions under the linked posts.

As always, we will not engage with comments that discriminate against marginalized groups, including the LGBTQ+ community.

We’re here to help build an online space where you get to decide what aspects of yourself you share with others, how you present to the world, and what things you keep private. Join us to make the internet private, safe, and full of pride.

Congress Just Rushed Through a Disastrous Copyright Office Overhaul

Joe Mullin — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:54:52 +0000

In a voice vote earlier this week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 6028, the “Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act.” The legislation is presented as a technical reorganization of some government agencies, but it’s much more than that.

H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office, and not in a good way. The bill removes the Library of Congress’ current supervisory role over the Copyright Office, transfers several powers directly to the Register of Copyrights, and makes the Register a presidential appointee, confirmed by the Senate.

These changes would make an office that’s already hugely influential in copyright and tech policy much more political. EFF first explained why that’s a terrible idea when it came up nearly a decade ago. This bill, like the older one, weakens the few public-interest checks and balances that do exist. We hope the Senate promptly rejects this bill.

The Copyright Office Doesn’t Need More Politics—Or More Power

The Copyright Office's main responsibilities are administrative and advisory. It registers copyrights, maintains records, grows the Library of Congress’s collections, and provides expertise to Congress on copyright law. But over the past two decades, the Office has also become increasingly influential in copyright policy debates that affect free expression, libraries, educators, competition—and everyday internet users. Unfortunately, it has not been a neutral advocate. The office’s recent report on the role of AI severely bungled the issue of fair use, prioritizing private licensing market “solutions” over user rights.

Going further back, the Copyright Office supported one of the most infamous anti-internet proposals of all time—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a disastrous internet censorship proposal that sparked one of the largest online protests in history. The Office has repeatedly advanced positions that favored large entertainment-industry interests over the public interest.

The Office also plays a major role in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Section 1201 rulemaking process, which determines when the public may lawfully bypass digital locks for activities such as security research, repair, preservation, or accessibility. EFF has used this process repeatedly to mitigate some of the worst harms of the DMCA. H.R. 6028 would move rulemaking authority over 1201 from the Librarian of Congress to the Register of Copyrights, further consolidating power within the Copyright Office itself.

The bill also makes the Register of Copyrights a presidential appointee confirmed by the Senate. Each administration will be pressured to pick nominees aligned with their own policy preferences, and the powerful copyright owning industries will invest even more heavily in lobbying to get their way, and influence the selection. This position should be focused on administrative ability and actual expertise, not lobbying and politics.

The Copyright Office Should Stay Connected To The Library of Congress

H.R. 6028 would do more than change who appoints the Register of Copyrights. It would sever the Copyright Office from Library of Congress supervision and transfer many Librarian powers directly to the Register.

The supervisory relationship exists for good reason, as the nation’s libraries have pointed out for years. The Library, while far from perfect, at least has the mission of preserving and providing access to knowledge. That should be an important public-interest counterweight in copyright debates. Congress has not explained how weakening the ties between the Library and the Copyright Office would serve the public better, or even seriously inquired about it.

This Bill Was Rushed Through

Back in March, EFF joined Public Knowledge, the Center for Democracy and Technology, library organizations and tech groups, urging Congress not to fast-track this legislation. We told them changes to the Copyright Office will have major consequences for the “speech rights, educational opportunities, and creative freedoms of all Americans.”

Yet Congress moved forward without any hearings on the bill, and without meaningful examination. H.R. 6028 creates a years-long separation of the Copyright Office from the Library of Congress, transfers significant legal authority, and restructures the appointment process for the nation’s top copyright official. Changes like that deserve hearings, debate, and public scrutiny. H.R. 6028 got none of that.

The Senate Should Stop This Bill

Copyright law exists to serve the public and “promote the progress” of science and learning. The institutions that administer copyright law should do the same.

H.R. 6028 would move the Copyright Office further away from that goal. Congress should be strengthening public-interest oversight of copyright policymaking, not looking for ways to concentrate more authority in a single presidentially appointed official.

The Senate should reject H.R. 6028. The Copyright Office should serve the public—not presidential administrations, and not industry lobbyists.

The 702 Ultimatum: Warrant Requirement or Bust

Matthew Guariglia — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:25:28 +0000

For months now, Congress has been kicking the ball down the road—temporarily postponing the expiration of the mass surveillance authority Section 702 of FISA in hopes that some consensus could be reached. Now, with the deadline looming, the stakes have never been higher. Nearly every time the statute has come up for renewal, the people demanding privacy and civil liberties have had to compromise, but with current negotiations seemingly at an impasse, it’s time for surveillance maximalist lawmakers to come to the table.

We say to the Intelligence Community crowd: Section 702 should require a warrant before the Federal Bureau of Investigation can look at digital communications collected from Americans. If not, we should let the whole thing expire.

This is a serious proposition. The intelligence community can keep a useful national security surveillance tool if and only if they make FBI agents get a warrant signed by a judge before they sift through and read out private communications. A warrant requirement is not the only demand EFF has been making for changing Section 702, but it is the most important reform and it should happen before there is any more reauthorization of the policy.

For too long, the FBI has been able to piggyback on a major national security tool as an unconstitutional backdoor way of reading Americans’ communications. 702 collects communications going to, from, or between people in other countries—including when they are contacted by people in the United States. Mass surveillance is just that—mass. It’s lacking any of the individualized suspicion that our legal system is based on.

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TELL congress: 702 Needs Reform

So, what’s been happening?

On one side are surveillance hawks and intelligence community-devotees who think the mass surveillance of Americans is an acceptable, even valuable, product of this authority. This bipartisan coalition of privacy deniers think that 702 should be extended without any change, and they seem to be willing to let the authority expire rather than compromise with the lawmakers and public that are demanding common-sense reforms. They’ve been given a number of chances to pass bills that would implement some key incremental reforms, but those opportunities have not moved the needle.

On the other side of the debate is a bipartisan coalition of people who understand that this authority can no longer operate as is. Section 702 is rife with problems, loopholes, and compliance issues that need fixing. The National Security Agency collects full conversations being conducted by and with overseas targets—including conversations by and with Americans in the U.S.—and stores them in massive databases. The NSA then allows other agencies, specifically the FBI, to access untold amounts of that information. In turn, the FBI takes a “finders keepers” approach to this data: they reason that since it's already collected under one law, it’s OK for them to see it. If the FBI wanted to get that data on their own, it would require them to get a warrant signed by a judge certifying that there is probable cause. Instead, under current practice, the FBI can query and even read the U.S. side of that communication without a warrant. What’s more, victims of this surveillance won’t know and have very few ways of finding out that their communications have been surveilled.

Complicating this matter more is that the Trump administration has announced Bill Pulte as the new Director of National Intelligence, whose job it will be to oversee and direct U.S. intelligence agencies. This is particularly concerning because of Pulte’s history of using private information held by the government as a political weapon. In his FHFA role, he has accused several of the President’s political foes and targets—including New York State Attorney General Letitia James, U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook—of mortgage fraud based on private data held by his agency. Because of his looming appointment, many Democrats have vowed not to reauthorize Section 702 unless he is removed from the position. They shouldn’t stop there—they should use that leverage to demand a warrant requirement. The integrity of the people in charge of a program should not be the only thing that stands between Americans and violations of their civil liberties.

What happens if 702 expires?

As the New York Times reports, “The law, however, has a built-in safety net for a temporary lapse that allows the surveillance program to endure until annual certifications issued by the nation’s intelligence court expire, though such a scenario could invite legal challenges. The court recertified the program in March, meaning the N.S.A. could continue to operate the program through March 2027 even if the statute were to expire.”

If Section 702 does stay expired past March 2027, the United States government will likely revert to using other programs and authorities to justify the surveillance of overseas national security targets, namely 12333, a shadowy executive order from the 1980s that gives the U.S. government nearly unlimited power to spy on people overseas. Even if this does come to pass, standing our ground on warrant requirements and allowing Section 702 to expire is important for several reasons. First, just because the government continues surveillance under a different authority does not mean it is legally justified in doing so—this was the lesson of the post 9/11 Presidential Surveillance Program, which was only retroactively immunized by Congress. Second, seeing how the government responds to the end of Section 702 might give us opportunities to push for transparency in other parts of information collection and better understand how the inner workings of the intelligence apparatus pivot and adapt as new legal authorities take precedence.

Where do we go from here?

Every few years, for almost two decades now, we’ve been fighting to reform Section 702 so that it will no longer enable the warrantless mass surveillance of Americans. A bipartisan coalition in Congress supports this goal, but the White House and Congressional leadership won’t listen. It’s past time we make at least one serious reform to a mass surveillance law that has been abused for decades. Tell your elected official: Put a warrant requirement in Section 702 or let it expire.

Take action

TELL congress: 702 Needs Reform

Enshittification Merch That Actually Fights Enshittification

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:34:12 +0000

Enshittification isn't just a sweary word to describe the accelerating decay of the online platforms, apps, and services that we rely on.

It's a framework for understanding the structural incentives that make tech companies enemies of their own users over time—the surveillance business model, the erosion of privacy, the monopoly power that eliminates alternatives, the regulatory capture that prevents accountability.

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GET LimITED EDITION MERCH + FIGHT ENSHITTIFICATION

These are some of EFF's core fights and have been for over 35 years. EFF sues. EFF advocates. EFF codes. And EFF wins. EFF is the most profound and powerful disenshittifying force on the planet Earth, and I’ve been proud to fight alongside them for nearly 25 of those years.

One of the lessons you learn in battles with very long timelines against very powerful actors is that these battles are deeply serious, and because of that they must also be fun. “Enshittification” took off as a shorthand in part because of the minor license to vulgarity it confers. It's slightly crass for a reason: getting people to engage with the abstract issues of tech policy can be hard at the best of times. No one knows this better than my colleagues at EFF, who consistently surprise me with their ability to make complex, technical concepts concrete, memorable, and sometimes even joyful.

Words matter, but so do visuals. For the cover of the U.S. edition of my book, Enshittification, designer Devin Washburn of No Ideas studio created an iconic variation of the "pile of poo" emoji, with angry eyebrows and a grawlix-scrawled censor bar over its mouth. It instantly became the symbol of enshittification I’d been looking for.

I liked it so much I ordered a couple hundred enamel pins and a couple thousand vinyl stickers and handed them out to people I met on my 33-city book tour. Even when giving them away, I was inundated with requests to buy more of them.

I've since bought out Devin's rights to the image and released it under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license—free for anyone to use, remix, or build on, including commercially, with attribution. The high-resolution files are on Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, and the Internet Archive (including a PSD with an ink-density adjustment layer). It belongs to the commons now.

But I made sure EFF had first crack at the design for their “official merch,” and they've done right by it. There are two items available now in the EFF shop, and all proceeds go directly to EFF's work defending digital rights. I’ve spent years admiring EFF’s merch and consistent, creative visual identity, so it fills me with pride to see this more-than-a-mere-poop-emoji in their shop.

A recognizable visual shorthand is a genuine organizing tool. When someone sees the enshittification emoji, they know what the conversation is about. When you wear the pin or slap the sticker on your laptop, you're signaling that you understand what's happening to the internet, and that you know we can do better.

You can get a $5 sticker:

Or a $10 pin:

Because the design is CC-licensed, you don't have to buy one. You can make your own merch, your own swag, your own illustrations. I made a lawn flag for my front garden.

But if you do want to buy a sticker or pin, you can do so while supporting the most profound and powerful disenshittifying force on the planet Earth—the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

SUPPORT EFF

GET LimITED EDITION MERCH + FIGHT ENSHITTIFICATION

🔊 Mass Surveillance for… Loud Music? | EFFector 38.11

Hudson Hongo — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:29:08 +0000

Across the country, surveillance companies have spun a vast web of tens of thousands of license plate cameras. The people selling this tech want you to believe that it's for your safety, but how are authorities really using automated license plate readers (ALPR)? In this week's EFFector newsletter, we're looking at how these powerful surveillance networks have become universal people-trackers used for noise complaints and other low-level investigations.

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For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This week's issue covers a victory for facial privacy, EFF's testimony to Congress about AI and surveillance, and troubling new examples of ALPR mission creep.

Prefer to listen in? EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms. This week, we're chatting with EFF Associate Director of State Affairs Rindala Alajaji about what she uncovered about police use of ALPR. And don't miss the EFFector news quiz. You can find the episode and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice:

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Want to stay in the fight for privacy and free speech online? Sign up for EFF's EFFector newsletter for updates, ways to take action, and new merch drops. You can also fuel the fight against online surveillance when you support EFF today!

How and Why to Fight Back Against Social Media Bans

Molly Buckley — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:51:45 +0000

Several U.S. states are pushing to ban young people from social media entirely. This marks the latest wave of censorship bills masquerading as “children’s online safety” measures, with states like Massachusetts, Idaho, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois, and EFF’s home state of California leading the charge.

Just a few years ago, lawmakers supporting age-gating laws insisted their efforts were narrowly targeted at limiting young people’s access to adult content. At the time, we warned that they would not stop there: once the government established the authority and built the infrastructure to collect and “verify” massive troves of user data, it would inevitably sweep broader and broader categories of lawful speech into this mass surveillance and censorship system.

Unfortunately, our predictions came true. As legislators across the country advance proposals that would block all young people from accessing the “modern public square,” the Overton window has shifted dramatically towards mass censorship—and the speed of this shift should concern all of us.

This primer breaks down this dangerous wave of social media bans: how they work (and why they don’t), who they harm, and how we can fight back.

How to Spot a Social Media Ban

The details of these bills vary from state to state. Some (like California’s AB 1709) are a flat-out social media ban for all young people under a certain age, while other states (like South Carolina and Minnesota) allow access to young users who hand over even more data to show verifiable parental consent. Many bills regulate certain social media features, too, including by setting default privacy settings, time limits, or notification preferences for all accounts that fail the age-gate.

As for the age-gating mechanism itself, most proposals fall into two broad categories: age verification bills and behavioral age estimation bills.

Age Verification Bills require online services to collect highly sensitive data, including government ID and biometric information, from all users before either restricting or allowing them access.

For example, take California’s social media ban (AB 1709). Starting in January 2027, operating systems will be required to collect enough information from users to sort them into age groups, or “brackets.” Under AB 1709, social media apps would then use that age bracket information to completely block anyone under 16, while supposedly letting everyone else through. By contrast, Florida’s law (HB 3) takes a more aggressive route by forcing platforms to verify users' identities directly, usually by contracting with private third-party companies to perform verification services.

Behavioral Age Estimation Bills, on the other hand, are a more recent innovation of states like Minnesota (HF 1438) and South Carolina (H 4591). These bills require platforms to estimate the ages of users based largely on data that they already collect, including self-attested age, behavioral information, and account history and activity. In practice, these bills enable tech companies to use algorithms and/or AI to analyze our online behavior and estimate age based on that.

Proponents of behavioral age estimation bills claim that their proposals avoid the massive security risks that come with mandatory age verification bills. However, much of the data that social media platforms collect from us “in the ordinary course of operation” is collected in order to serve us targeted behavioral ads. If we force platforms to use this imperfect data to make more important judgments about who can access their services, we risk entrenching those insidious data collection practices. Surely we don’t want to give social media companies more reasons to justify and sustain their reliance on this exploitative business model.

If you want to dig into the nuance here, our terminology guide sheds more light on the technical differences between age verification and age estimation bills.

Overall, it’s a lose-lose scenario: either platforms collect new forms of our most sensitive and immutable data, or they unleash their AI and algorithms on our existing behavioral data to make creepy guesses about who we are and what we deserve to see. No matter which age-gating method your state chooses to execute its social media ban, there will be lots of error at the margins—and lots of users who will be blocked or chilled from access to lawful online speech.

Why Social Media Bans Are So Dangerous

Social media bans are unconstitutional, discriminatory, and deeply misguided. They reinforce existing structures of oppression, and they are broadly unsupported by young people, whose voices are conspicuously absent from this conversation. They undermine parental decision-making and replace tailored family-level solutions with a one-size-fits-all band-aid. And, in the places we have seen social media bans go into effect, early reports show that they don't even work.

For example, in Australia, where a social media ban has been in effect since late 2025, a majority of young people can still access social media, those who can’t have lost their access to the news, and crisis helplines are reporting skyrocketing numbers of calls from youth left stranded without online community or resources.

We could go on and on about all of the inherent harms here, but we’ll try to keep this short as we walk through some of the major issues.

1. Security Risks and Privacy Harms

In order to ban some users, social media platforms first must confirm the ages of all users, regardless of age. Bans thus incentivize companies to force users of all ages to hand over government IDs, face scans, and other sensitive information. When parental consent is required, companies must collect even more verification data and often create explicit links between child and parent accounts—further destroying users’ anonymity.

Both of these databases create massive data "honeypots" that invite identity theft and permanent surveillance. We’ve already seen repeated data breaches involving age- and identity-verification services. Yet these laws would force both adults and the youth they claim to protect to feed their most sensitive data into this growing surveillance ecosystem.

If we don’t trust tech companies with our private information now, we shouldn't pass laws that force us to give them even more of it.

2. Disproportionate Harm to Vulnerable Communities

Age-verification technology is deeply flawed and prone to discrimination. These systems frequently misidentify or lock out people of color, people with disabilities, and trans or gender-nonconforming individuals whose IDs may not match their appearance.

Where these bills require parental consent, they impose disproportionate access barriers on low-income, non-traditional, and immigrant families. These sorts of families are more likely to share a single family device or have strong reasons to not want the government to track family associations and ID documents.

Beyond the technical failures, these bans cut off a vital lifeline. For LGBTQ+ youth, foster kids, and those stuck in unsupportive home environments, social media is often the only place to find community, explore their identity, or access life-saving resources. Forcibly removing young people isolates those who need connection the most, while creating massive new barriers for adults.

You can read a breakdown of the diverse groups vulnerable to these laws here.

3. Based on Shoddy Science

The current legislative push to ban young people from social media relies heavily on the idea that the "great rewiring" of the adolescent brain is a proven fact. This simply isn’t true.

Social science indicates that moderate internet use is a net positive for teens’ development, and negative outcomes are usually due to either lack of access or excessive use. For LGBTQ+ and marginalized youth in particular, social media offers an essential space to access support they might lack offline. By forcing youth into digital isolation, these bans cut off vital access to political news, community, and health resources. They also completely ignore the calls of young people themselves who favor digital literacy and education over restrictive government control.

Instead of cutting off these lifelines, we should support measures that arm all youth (and the adults in their lives) with the knowledge they need to navigate online spaces safely.

4. Reckless Free Speech Violations for Users of All Ages

No matter your age, the First Amendment protects your right to speak and access information.

Blanket social media bans immensely and unconstitutionally chill all users’ exercise of this right. They cut off young people’s access to lawful speech, or ruin their privacy in the home by mandating parental consent and sometimes even parental access to their account activities and settings. They force all users (adults and young people alike) to hand private information over to tech companies before speaking or accessing information on social media platforms, imposing annoying obstacles on lawful online expression and wrongfully blocking some adults outright.

Critically, these bans destroy our right to online anonymity—a cornerstone of our right to free expression that protects whistleblowers, journalists, activists, immigrants, and everyone who has ever used a private browser or account to ask the internet an embarrassing question.

How to Fight Back

Social media bans weaponize parents’ concerns about children’s safety to justify unprecedented levels of surveillance and censorship. In the process, these laws deny young people their rights, threaten online anonymity for everyone, expose our sensitive personal data to breach and abuse, and replace parental decision-making with state authority. This is a battle over the future of the open, private, and free internet, and we must act now to protect it.

Here’s how you can help us fight back: Talk to your community (including young people!) about what’s at stake. If you’re a parent, lean on open conversations and platforms’ existing tools to tailor your child’s experiences instead of handing that power over to the government. And no matter where you live, contact your government representatives and tell them clearly that social media bans are not the answer to kids’ online safety.

Tell Congress: Just Say No to NO FAKES

Katharine Trendacosta — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:00:35 +0000

The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to consider and vote on the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act (NO FAKES). Instead of targeting the real privacy harms posed by AI-generated replicas, this law would create another layer of internet censorship on top of the already existing legal and voluntary takedown systems. Congress should reject NO FAKES.

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Tell Congress to Say No to NO FAKES

As currently written, NO FAKES proposes to tackle the problems of misleading AI-generated replicas by creating a broad property right in someone's look, voice, and general style. However, there are all kinds of First Amendment-protected expression that would be swept under the NO FAKES regime—think about parody, news, criticism.

NO FAKES also does a laughable job of protecting artists from use of their image in misleading ways. It doesn’t create a privacy right, but rather a property right that can easily be signed away—as major studios and record labels are almost certain to require in their contracts with artists. As a result, NO FAKES actually creates a new avenue for the exploitation of artists by companies instead of protection from misleading replicas.

The bill also makes it trivially easy for protected speech to be censored. It is a supercharged version of the already flawed copyright takedown regime. It would essentially require platforms to institute filters that don't just look for exact matches of copyrighted material, as current filters do, but anything that might be a digital replica. Even though the latest version of this bill adds some forms of redress for bad faith takedowns, those provisions lack the teeth required to deter a malicious actor.

NO FAKES targets speech, tools, and innovation instead of focusing on the real concern posed by these replicas: privacy. This bill was a bad idea when it was introduced, and got even worse when it was amended last year. Tell Congress to just say no to NO FAKES.

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Tell Congress to Say No to NO FAKES

VICTORY: Meta Strips Facial Recognition Code From Smart Glasses App After Public Outcry

Cooper Quintin — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:32:38 +0000

Just days after a damning WIRED report exposed that Meta had quietly embedded facial recognition technology (FRT) code into millions of phones, the tech giant has quietly acquiesced in demands to reverse course.

Last week, researchers identified code in Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, that could convert images of faces into unique biometric signatures to identify strangers in public. EFF’s Threat Lab verified these findings through static analysis, and reminded consumers to think twice before buying or using Meta’s surveillance glasses.

Just as quietly as Meta embedded this code, the app’s June 5th app update appears to have quietly removed all those features and systems. Gone is the face-recognition technology, the code meant to trigger “Person recognized” alerts, and the machine learning models and databases designed to detect, digitize, and store the biometric signatures of people users engage with.

When WIRED broke the news last week, Meta’s executives immediately went on the defensive. Yet, their actions speak louder than their tweets: less than 48 hours after the public caught wind of their plans, Meta quietly launched an update to scrub nearly all traces of the FRT system from their app.

But this quiet deletion of code does not equal a permanent change of heart. Meta previously used face recognition, and stopped only after it faced the legal and financial consequences. Now the company has refused to answer WIRED’s inquiries on whether it plans to bring the NameTag system back in the future, or what they did with any data they may have already collected during internal testing.

There are billions of reasons not to turn Meta’s customers into a distributed surveillance machine. This whiplash behavior proves exactly why we cannot rely on the "good will" of Big Tech to protect our digital rights. We need robust, enforceable consumer privacy laws, complete with a private right of action that allows everyday people to sue companies that violate their biometric privacy.

While we won this round, Meta's FRT ambitions probably aren't going away. EFF will keep watching.

Cheers to the Winners of EFF’s 18th Annual Cyberlaw Trivia Night!

Joe Mullin — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:12:02 +0000

On a warm June evening in San Francisco, attorneys and other legally-minded friends of EFF gathered for our 18th Annual Cyberlaw Trivia Night, an annual test of tech-related legal knowledge, and the ability to remember some deeply obscure facts under pressure.

Returning Quizmaster Kurt Opsahl once again guided competitors through six rounds of trivia covering everything from intellectual property and free speech to privacy, security, and artificial intelligence. Teams wrestled with questions about geofence warrants, AI copyright disputes, the SOPA/PIPA internet blackout, Section 230, and even a Senate hearing featuring a contestant who was herself present at cyberlaw trivia.

The judges’ table made it obvious that 2026 was a notable year. Weighing in on the toughest close calls were three folks with a deep history at our org: outgoing EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn and new Executive Director Nicole Ozer both sat at as judges, joined by new cyberlaw judge Mike Masnick, founder of Techdirt and a recipient of an EFF Award in 2020.

The food was hot, the drinks were cold, and the competition was fierce. Teams including Shady Docket, Byte Club, Flock U, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Precedent, Nicky's Angels, and Betamaxxers battled through six rounds of challenging questions.

When a question about Afroman's successful legal battle against Ohio sheriff's deputies came up, members of Byte Club offered to do more than name his most popular album: they offered to perform a rendition of “Lemon Pound Cake” (also the album name—tricky!) for the judges. This won no sway with the 3-judge Cyberlaw Judiciary, and the offer was politely declined.

The teams racked their collective law-noggins about some of the details of recent legal battles over digital rights, and a round entitled “You Can Call Me AI.” After the IP round, which rewarded folks in the audience who could answer details about the server test, the trivia moved onto newsier questions, with questions about ICE apps, anti-ICE apps, recent defamation cases involving our sitting president, and the slogan of a mineral company that you might've heard on terrestrial radio anytime between the early aughts and this week.

You don't have to wear a morning coat to win Supreme Court arguments, but knowing who did for 4 years might have helped you win the IP round.

By the end of regulation play, the cyberlaw trivia competition was closer than we could have imagined. For the first time in Cyberlaw Trivia history, three teams finished tied for first place, sending the contest to two tiebreaker questions.

The final question noted that Google had received more than 287,000 government information requests in the first half of 2025, and asked teams to estimate how many were received by OpenAI during the same period. Every team guessed over, but it was the victors, Shady Docket, who guessed the lowest: 260. (The real answer is 146.)

As Shady Docket team member Erin Simon explained after the win: "As much as we love EFF, what we love even more is crushing other trivia teams."

In second place were Nicky’s Angels. Rounding out the virtual podium in 3rd were the Betamaxxers, who jumped ahead early with a home-run run in the Free Speech round, getting every question correct.

Each summer, EFF's Cyberlaw Trivia Night brings together the legal community that helps defend privacy, free expression, innovation, and digital rights. We want to especially thank this year Morrison Foerster, Fenwick, Wilson Sonsini, and Public Resource for supporting EFF's legal intern program.

Are you an attorney interested in defending civil liberties in the digital world? Consider joining EFF's Cooperating Attorneys list. This network helps EFF connect people to legal assistance when EFF is unable to provide direct assistance.

Fighting for first place at EFF’s Cyberlaw Trivia Night helps us fight for your rights online! Sponsor one of our annual events and join the movement for digital privacy, free speech, and innovation. Please visit eff.org/thanks or contact tierney@eff.org for more information.

Internet Age Gates Are a Growing Global Threat

Paige Collings — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 19:28:01 +0000

The internet is an essential resource for young people and adults to access information, explore community, and find themselves—both inside countries and across continents. Yet governments around the world continue to introduce and implement legislation requiring all online users to verify their ages before accessing the digital space. In some cases, politicians are going further, putting forth proposals to ban social media for younger users.

In late 2025, Australia’s government rolled out the first complete ban on users under 16 from having social media accounts. In this sweeping regime, platforms are required to introduce age assurance tools to block under-16s, demonstrate that they have taken “reasonable steps” to deactivate accounts used by under-16s, and prevent any new accounts being created, or face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($32 million USD). The 10 banned platforms—Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok, Kick, Reddit, Twitch, and X—have each said they’ll comply with the legislation, which led to young people losing access to their accounts overnight. Reddit is currently challenging the law in Australian courts on constitutional grounds. Recent research notes how the ban is preventing teenagers from accessing news in the country.

In the United Kingdom, rules took effect in mid-2025 under the Online Safety Act that require all online services available in the country to assess whether they host content considered harmful to children; 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.

This approach is reckless, short-sighted, and we’ve already seen it introduce more harm to the young people that it is trying to protect. The UK’s scramble to find an effective age verification method shows us that there isn't one, and we’ve spent years urging UK politicians to abandon any measures that require platforms to collect data or remove privacy protections around users’ identities.

Earlier this year, Indonesia’s Communications and Digital Affairs Minister, Meutya Hafid, announced that users under 16 would have their accounts on “high risk” platforms deactivated from 28 March. The platforms subject to this ban are YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live, and Roblox; with Hafid noting how this policy would make Indonesia “the first non-Western country to delay children's access to digital spaces according to age.”

Similarly, the Malaysian government has recently pushed forward with plans to ban users under 16 from having accounts on social media platforms with at least 8 million users in Malaysia, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Users under the age of 16 are being told to download or transfer their data from these platforms in one month before the restrictions are applied. Platforms failing to comply with the ban may face penalties of up to $2.5 million USD.

In Latin America, Brazil approved a new law in 2025 establishing that providers of information technology products and services directed to children and teenagers, or likely to be accessed by them, must conduct age checks when their products and services offer risks to underage users. Regulation requires age assurance for products and services that are not allowed for children and adolescents in accordance with Brazilian legislation. App stores and operating systems are required to provide age signals for other providers.

While the law is already in force, full compliance with its obligations is expected for early 2027, after the approval of further regulations and a transition period, and the authority responsible for enforcing the law is the Brazilian National Data Protection Agency. The list of concerns regarding the implementation of the law include: the wide scope of products and services that may fall within age-check obligations, how these obligations can affect non-proprietary operating systems and free software projects, and how effective the law's crucial data protection safeguards will be in a context of likely widespread age checks for accessing content online.

Similarly, the European Union has taken large steps towards mandatory age verification that could undermine privacy, expression, and participation rights for everyone. Politicians are promoting an EU-wide approach to age verification through its age verification “app,” which will be fully interoperable with the Digital Identity Wallet. While this mini-app has been announced as technically ready to be rolled out “for citizens to use,” it comes with its own realm of potential privacy and security concerns, such as long-term identifiers (which could result in tracking) and over-exposure of personal information.

The European Commission also supports age verification in various legislative initiatives, from proposals that would allow or mandate companies to scan our communication (“Chat Control”) to non-binding guidelines of existing laws, such as the Digital Services Act. The EU Parliament, too, has proposed an EU digital minimum age of 16 for access to social media, a move that aligns with EU Commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen’s recent public support for measures inspired by Australia’s model. To all these initiatives EFF has provided one consistent response: mandatory age verification measures are not the right way to protect young people.

These proposals restrict the fundamental rights of young people to speak to each other and to access information. They also force all internet users, not just those under a certain age, to upload private data—like a face scan or passport—in order to access a website or service. In considering the vast scope of privacy issues pertaining to the collection, storage, and sharing of this personal information, the problems of age verification in restricting free speech are compounded by these reckless and harmful approaches to verification.

The problem of censorship and surveillance goes far beyond the borders of the internet. EFF continues to explore support for legislative and litigation challenges that recognize how these laws harm everyone’s rights to privacy, free expression and due process.

LGBT Q&A Season 1 Recap: Staying Safer Online

Paige Collings — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:01:21 +0000

Last year during LGBTQ+ Pride month, we launched an LGBT Q&A where we answered your most pressing digital rights questions on EFF’s Instagram and TikTok accounts.

Ahead of LGBT Q&A Season 2 launching next week, we’re posting a recap with some of the questions we answered. Check them out below.

You wanted to know: How to stay safe when dating online.
You asked: I'm a 17 year old trans woman and my address is public on the Internet. What steps can I take to mitigate this risk?
You wondered about: Tips for staying safe at Budapest Pride.
You questioned: Why does homophobic content I report on social media not get removed?
You asked: What pictures are safe to use on dating apps?
You wanted to know: Is it safe to have gay, trans, and Palestinian flags in my bio?

California’s AB 412 Still Demands Developers Do The Impossible

Joe Mullin — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:56:13 +0000

California lawmakers are again considering A.B. 412, a bill that would require AI developers to identify and disclose copyrighted works used to train generative AI systems.

The problem this year is the same as last year: it’s practically impossible to comply with this law. The bill demands information that often does not exist, and cannot realistically be obtained.

EFF submitted an opposition letter to the California Senate Privacy Committee explaining why we continue to believe A.B. 412 is simply unworkable. To the extent developers do follow this law, it will have the effect of locking in the power of the largest companies in AI.

A Burden That Can’t Be Met

A.B. 412 sounds simple: just have AI developers create and keep a list of all the registered copyrighted works they use in AI training.

That may seem straightforward. In practice, it’s anything but.

There is no machine-readable “list” of copyrighted works at the U.S. Copyright Office. And many copyright holders can get a copyright without even depositing a publicly viewable sample of the work—for example, software companies may register copyright on proprietary code without revealing it to the public.

And on the open internet, copyright information is often incomplete, unavailable, or impossible to verify. One image may be registered with the copyright office, while the next is licensed under a free Creative Commons license (like the images that EFF creates), and the next is public domain. A message forum user might post an original story, photograph, or poem without any indication of ownership or registration status.

The bill effectively asks developers to continuously cross-reference massive batches of online data against a copyright system that simply wasn’t designed to do so. If California passes A.B. 412, its impact will go far beyond the large AI companies we read about in the headlines.

Not Just Big Tech

Supporters often frame this bill as a way to help creative workers have some leverage against Big Tech, but the bill reaches much further than the big AI companies.

Its definition of “developer” extends to anyone who makes a generative AI model available to Californians. That includes indie developers tinkering with an existing model, open-source initiatives, nonprofits, and other non-commercial efforts. Recent amendments added exemptions for universities and government entities, which is important, but that still leaves out a vast swathe of non-commercial tech work that’s done by people without full-time jobs in government or academia.

Large companies will hire compliance teams and lawyers to navigate these requirements. Smaller organizations and independent developers usually can’t. The result will be fewer opportunities for startups and new entrants. Faced with this massive compliance burden, some won’t even try.

Courts Are Already Deciding These Questions

The bill is premised on the idea that copyright owners currently don’t have good remedies if they’re mistreated by AI companies. That simply isn’t true. And the growing wave of federal court filings in this space prove it. Content companies that want to sue tech companies, large or small, have no problem doing so. Those courts are still working through important questions about fair use and transformative use. Some courts have already concluded that many AI training activities qualify as fair use. Others continue to evaluate the issue.

California lawmakers should not rush to impose new state regulation while those questions remain unresolved. This is why copyright is governed at the federal level: both creators and fair users benefit from a single set of nationwide rules.

At this point, the bill remains a solution in search of a problem. Rights holders already have powerful tools to protect their interests under existing federal law. What this bill adds isn’t clarity or transparency, but a costly and essentially impossible compliance burden that will discourage small developers and researchers.

California has been able to support both artistic creativity and tech innovation for decades now. But A.B. 412 does not strike the right balance.

If you are a California resident and interested in speaking out about this bill, you can find and contact your representatives through this website.

Pulte Appointment Underscores Need to Reform Section 702 Spying

Josh Richman — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:18:18 +0000

President Trump’s highly politicized appointment of an entirely unqualified acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) underscores why the government’s warrantless mass spying power must be reformed.

Congress now faces a deadline of Friday, June 12 to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an unconstitutional program rife with problems, loopholes, and compliance issues. Section 702 allows the National Security Agency to collect communications from targets overseas – including communications with Americans in the U.S. – and stores them in massive databases. The NSA then allows other agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to access untold amounts of that information.

Under current practice, the FBI can query and even read the U.S. side of that communication without a warrant. What’s more, victims won’t even know and have very few ways of finding out that their communications have been surveilled. EFF and other civil liberties advocates have been trying for years to know how data collected through Section 702 is used in domestic investigations and prosecutions. 

Our advocacy to reform Section 702 has been consistent across administrations, including when the federal Intelligence Community was run by people with experience in the relevant agencies. In fact, the 2004 law creating the position of DNI – which coordinates America’s 18 spy agencies – requires those who hold it to have “extensive national security expertise.”

Enter Bill Pulte.

Trump on Tuesday named Pulte – currently director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – to replace current DNI Tulsi Gabbard, who announced her resignation last month. Pulte lacks any intelligence, military, or congressional experience.

“William has deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America, the safety and soundness of the Markets, and over 10 Trillion Dollars at Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, a substantial increase from where it was just 12 months ago,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Because Trump named him acting DNI, Pulte isn’t subject to Senate confirmation. And under the Vacancies Act, Pulte could remain in the role for about seven months.

This is particularly concerning because of Pulte’s history of using private information held by the government as a political weapon. In his FHFA role, he has accused several of the President’s political foes and targets – including New York State Attorney General Letitia James, U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook – of mortgage fraud based on private data held by his agency.

All these targets and others have denied wrongdoing. A federal criminal complaint filed against James in Virginia imploded after a judge found prosecutor Lindsey Halligan had been unlawfully appointed, and prosecutors twice failed to convince a grand jury to indict James. Pulte’s accusations against Schiff, Cook, and others have not led to criminal charges.

Pulte also used his FHFA pulpit to attack then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and dismantle internal oversight.

Pulte isn't a qualified intelligence administrator. He does, however, seem to be unquestioningly loyal to President Trump and willing to use his position to attack and smear the President’s political foes. As acting DNI, Pulte would have access to every scrap of classified information the Intelligence Community holds, and under Section 702, that includes massive amounts of information about Americans.

Even lawmakers who are typically friendly to the intelligence community acknowledge that this is a disaster in the making. U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who is the Senate Intelligence Committee’s ranking Democrat, told NPR that Pulte has "no experience in the military, no experience in Congress, no experience in the intel community or law enforcement" and was chosen because he is "100% loyal to doing anything and everything President Trump demands."

And Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters “we don’t need a weaponized” national intelligence director. Asked about fears that Pulte might pursue Trump’s political opponents, Thune said: “We need professionals there.”

Congress already has had trouble reauthorizing Section 702 as Freedom Caucus Republicans and many Democrats joined forces to demand reforms including the common-sense requirement that federal agencies get a probable cause warrant from a judge before searching any data involving Americans. Pulte’s appointment exemplifies why no administration should have the power granted by Section 702 without the independent judicial review required in seeking a warrant.

EFF Testifies to Congress on Protecting Americans’ Rights from Government AI

Josh Richman — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:52:05 +0000

Governments must not adopt emerging and powerful AI technologies without also adopting strong and clear safeguards to protect Constitutional rights, EFF Senior Policy Analyst Dr. Matthew Guariglia testified today to the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection.

During the hearing on “The AI Security Landscape: How Frontier Models, Agentic AI, and AI Coding Tools Are Reshaping Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Resilience,” he explained that the use of generative AI for the purposes of mass government surveillance would supercharge unconstitutional violations of civil liberties. He also highlighted how government secrecy, in addition to the black box of for-profit proprietary technology, prevents the public and lawmakers from knowing when AI models make mistakes, including errors that seriously impact the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure and the lives of individuals.

“AI also has a track record of getting things wrong—from false citations on legal briefs to a major AI mistake that sent DHS recruits to the field without proper training. There are likely more consequential examples that we do not even know about because of classification that would prevent a more thorough accounting," he said in his opening remarks.

Privacy info. This embed will serve content from youtube.com

“At this level the question is not how do we rein in AI, it’s how do we rein in the agencies that would unleash AI on the American public,” Matthew said in response to a question by Subcommittee Ranking Member Delia Ramirez, D-Ill.

You can read his full testimony as prepared here.

Move Fast, Surveil Things

Cooper Quintin — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:08:25 +0000

Update, June 8, 2026: Following widespread public scrutiny and WIRED’s critical reporting, Meta has stripped the unactivated facial recognition code from its latest Meta AI app update.

Meta has deployed facial recognition code to millions of their always-on surveillance glasses, according to new reporting by Wired. EFF’s Threat Lab was able to confirm that the facial recognition code is present through static analysis of the application.

This dangerous new Meta functionality stores faceprints as a series of 2,048 numbers uniquely representing the positioning of a person’s facial features. When this feature is activated, it will convert every new face in the sightlines of the surveillance glasses into a series of numbers, and compare it to all the existing faceprints in the user’s database.

Wired and EFF confirmed that the code is present and active, though not yet exposed to consumers. Another researcher confirmed that when they manually added a face to the app database by connecting the phone to a computer in debug mode and issuing a few commands, the glasses would subsequently detect that face when it came into view.

Meta has already paid $650 million to settle a BIPA lawsuit challenging mass facial recognition of every photo posted to its platform, a feature which it has since shut down.

Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine. This is just one more reason to think twice before buying or using Meta’s surveillance glasses.

Considering that Meta previously wrote in an internal document that they want to launch facial recognition “during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns," this invasive new feature doesn't come as a surprise. But Meta's surveillance plans won't escape public scrutiny that easily, and we'll be watching if this feature is rolled out to the public.

We're Fighting Mass Surveillance Tech—and Winning

Dave Maass — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:41:54 +0000

EFF is on the front lines of the fight against tech-enabled tyranny, but we aren't alone. Our team depends on your help to fight back against the surveillance state.

JOIN EFF

People around the world are pushing back against the mass surveillance that undermines privacy and free expression for everyone. You can help during EFF's spring membership drive.

One of the people who joined the fight for digital rights is EFF client Will Freeman. Will created the website DeFlock.me to reveal the dangers of automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—cameras that collect location data on every vehicle they see and upload that to a massive nationwide police database. Deflock.me turns the tables by enlisting ordinary people to track the locations of tens of thousands of ALPR cameras.

But when the police spy-tech company Flock Safety went after Will's website with legal threats citing trademark law, he saw it for what it was: an attempt to silence critics and dim the light on mass surveillance.

The company will try everything it can to downplay the criticism, but EFF will be right there demanding accountability.

"I was totally unprepared to receive a cease & desist letter. I can see how most people would be bullied into submission by a threat like that. That's when I remembered Dave Maass from the EFF introduced himself via email several weeks before, so I reached out for help," Freeman says.

And that's when EFF stepped in. Recognizing DeFlock.me as a quintessential expression of grassroots advocacy and a form of criticism protected by the U.S. First Amendment, EFF's lawyers helped Will fight back. And the Big Surveillance Tech flinched.

But these battles against Flock's Spying tools rage on. In cities around the country, privacy advocates are pressuring officials to block or end contracts for ALPRs—and winning. The company will try everything it can to downplay the criticism, but EFF will be right there demanding accountability.

Get the new Claw Back member t-shirt featuring a fierce feline swatting at community surveillance. You might empathize with him, but there’s a better way. Let’s end the law enforcement contracts, harmful practices, and twisted logic that enable mass spying in the first place.

"I'm really grateful the EFF was able to step in and help. Without them, free speech would be only for those wealthy enough to defend themselves against billion dollar companies. We've grown a lot since then and are expanding our efforts to expose and push back against mass surveillance on our streets," Freeman says.

Support the movement

stop mass surveillance tech today when you join EFF

____________________

EFF is a member-supported U.S. 501(c)(3) organization. We've received top ratings from the nonprofit watchdog Charity Navigator since 2013! Your donation is tax-deductible as allowed by law.

Welcome New EFF Executive Director Nicole Ozer

Josh Richman — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:25:05 +0000

EFF welcomes our new Executive Director Nicole Ozer today!

Nicole is a legal expert on privacy and surveillance, artificial intelligence, and digital speech who previously served as the inaugural executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at UC Law San Francisco. From 2004-2025, she was founding director of the Technology and Civil Liberties Program at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

Nicole has long been a partner of EFF’s in the fight to defend civil liberties in the digital world. Many of us already know her, and she’s basically as close to EFF “family” as someone can be without actually having worked here.

Over her more than two decades leading public interest technology work, Nicole has:

spearheaded passage of the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act – working with EFF to enact the nation’s strongest electronic surveillance law, requiring a warrant for government access to electronic information;
modernized California law to protect reading records in the digital age by helping, along with EFF, to craft the Reader Privacy Act, requiring a “super warrant” for government access;
created a groundbreaking model law for local democratic oversight of surveillance systems which inspired 25 laws across the country that help safeguard the rights and safety of more than 17 million people;
litigated civil liberties cases, including work with EFF on the NSA cases, and drafted influential amicus briefs on technology issues at all levels of state and federal court, including the U.S. Supreme Court and California Supreme Court; and
developed multi-year campaigns to strengthen the anti-surveillance policies related to social media surveillance and face recognition of major technology companies and foster stronger privacy and free expression protection for billions of people worldwide.

And that's just the TL;DR! You can read more about her bona fides here.

EFF’s work to ensure technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation is more urgent than ever. And with Nicole’s decades of leadership in public interest technology work, EFF is poised to be stronger than ever to meet this moment and build for the fights ahead.

Nicole succeeds Cindy Cohn, who has been with EFF for more than 25 years and served as executive director since 2015. Cindy is leaving EFF later this month – not to retire, but to find a role that puts her back in the courtroom doing what she does best: suing the government! She’ll still be part of the EFF community.

We are living digital lives, using technology to connect, communicate, and mobilize for change. And we need you in these critical fights to defend and advance rights in the digital world – so join EFF today, and sign up for our EFFector newsletter to make sure you’re updated on the latest EFF news including upcoming events to help you get to know Nicole.

Welcome Nicole!

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: CA's AB 1856 Exempts Open Source But Expands Age-Gating

Molly Buckley — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:15:43 +0000

After public outrage, California lawmakers are moving closer to exempting open-source operating systems from the sweeping age-bracketing regime mandated by last year’s Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043). Nonetheless, the current bill still jeopardizes internet users’ speech, privacy, and security.

While the open source exemption, if passed, would improve the law, the remaining amendments proposed by AB 1856 would require all web browsers and websites to request and collect users’ ages. This is an expansion of last year's AB 1043's age-bracketing system that compounds its constitutional harms to users’ speech, privacy, and security. As AB 1856 moves on to the Senate, EFF will continue fighting for amendments that reduce those harms.

AB 1856 Extends AB 1043’s Age-Gating Regime

Last year, California passed AB 1043, which requires all operating systems and app stores to create age-bracketing systems that segment users based on their ages. As we’ve written, that regime is a recipe for censorship: it creates unnecessary and unconstitutional barriers to accessing lawful online speech, threatens our right to anonymity, and pressures online services to collect troves of valuable and sensitive user data. On top of that, A.B. 1043’s wide-sweeping compliance burdens impose disproportionate harms on the open-source ecosystem that underpins much of the modern web.

Given these flaws, lawmakers introduced AB 1856 this year as a supposed “clean-up” bill for AB 1043. But instead of sticking to fixing AB 1043’s unique and serious harms (like its impact on open-source operating systems), AB 1856 also expanded the regime even further—extending its age-bracketing requirements beyond operating systems and app stores to browsers and websites.

EFF opposed AB 1856 on two grounds, which we explained in our opposition letter to the Assembly:

The harms that age-gating regimes pose to users’ speech, privacy, and anonymity; and
The disproportionate harms that this particular regime imposes on open-source developers.

Open Source Concerns Somewhat Alleviated By Amendment

On May 28th, AB 1856 passed the Assembly in a nearly unanimous vote (68-1).

Before that vote, however, AB 1856 was amended to relieve the compliance burden on open-source operating systems. This is a meaningful improvement and a welcome relief for open-source developers, who have been loud and clear about how much of an existential threat A.B. 1043’s age-gating mandate would pose.

The new exception reads:

“Operating system provider” does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.”

EFF understands this amendment to exempt open-source operating systems from the requirement to collect and transmit users’ age-bracket data. That is a definite win for open-source developers. The bill is narrower now than it was before, and lawmakers clearly responded to concerns raised by EFF and the broader open-source community.

Some important questions still remain—for example, it is unclear how the law would apply when an open-source operating system is incorporated into a commercial product or service. And, given the structure of where the exemption is placed under the “operating system provider” definition, lawmakers could stand to clarify that the exemption applies to open-source operating systems and applications.

Nonetheless, that ambiguity aside, this amendment does substantially reduce the threat that AB 1043 could have on many open-source developers.

AB 1856 Still Expands the Problematic Age-Bracketing Regime

Don’t get us wrong—if this bill passes, we will be very happy that AB 1043 does not pose nearly the amount of harm to our friends behind open-source operating systems. But even after these amendments, EFF remains opposed to AB 1856 because it ultimately expands California’s sweeping age-bracketing framework far beyond the original scope of AB 1043.

In AB 1856 and its amendments, the Assembly failed to address the core problem with AB 1043’s age-bracketing regime: mandated age-gating systems threaten users’ speech, privacy, anonymity, and security.

Even after these amendments, EFF remains opposed to AB 1856 because it ultimately expands California’s sweeping age-bracketing framework far beyond the original scope of AB 1043.

Even though AB 1043 does not explicitly require companies to perform age verification, it nonetheless imposes a liability structure that strongly pressures companies to verify users’ ages anyway. In practice, that could lead to more ID checks, more biometric scanning, more invasive data collection and risk of breach, and more barriers to adults’ and young people’s lawful speech.

In fact, instead of narrowing AB 1043’s wide net, AB 1856 expanded it to add browser providers and website operators to the list of entities that must comply with its age-bracketing requirements. This dramatically broadens the scope of AB 1043 and pulls more services, developers, and users into an anonymity- and privacy-destroying data collection framework that has not yet been implemented or evaluated. The result would make it nearly impossible for regular internet users to avoid AB 1043’s age gates.

The Fight Moves to the Senate

On those grounds, EFF will continue to oppose AB 1856. Though it has passed the Assembly, the fight is not over. As the bill moves through the Senate, we’ll continue to push for amendments that actually “clean up” and narrow the scope of AB 1043, and offer more protection to users from the harms of age-gating systems.