PayPal has instituted a new policy aimed at censoring what digital denizens can and can’t read, and they’re doing it in a way that leaves us with little recourse to challenge their policies in court. Indie publisher Smashwords has notified contributing authors, publishers, and literary agents that they would...
Earlier this month, EFF called for the protection of Saudi blogger and journalist Hamza Kashgari, who had fled Saudi Arabia after tweets he wrote about the Prophet Mohammed provoked clerics to demand that he be tried for apostasy, and members of the public to call for his murder. Kashgari...
Deeplinks Blog by Cindy Cohn, Trevor Timm | February 26, 2012
The world’s attention has recently turned to the question of how to hold companies accountable for knowingly marketing, selling and adapting the tools of surveillance to repressive regimes. U.S. and E.U. companies’ equipment has been linked to torture and other human rights violations in many Middle East and North...
As the European Parliament considers passing a directive that would target hacking, EFF has submitted comments urging the legislators not to create legal woes for researchers who expose security flaws.
The Pakistani government is looking for new ways to censor the Internet.This week, the Pakistani Telecommunication Authority (PTA) released a Request for Proposals (RFP) for the development, deployment and operation of a “National Level URL Filtering and Blocking System,” calling on institutions to submit by March 2nd a feasible proposal...
Ahead of the Academy Awards this weekend, Chris Dodd, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, would like to assure you that "Hollywood is pro-technology and pro-Internet." But what does that mean? The comments filed at the Copyright Office this month by MPAA and RIAA, together...
On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Earlier this week, we showed you how to delete your Google Web History...
Deeplinks Blog by Parker Higgins, rainey Reitman | February 23, 2012
California State Attorney General Kamala Harris announced an agreement yesterday with six mobile app platform providers aimed at encouraging app developers to provide more accessible privacy policies. The announcement comes at an auspicious moment -- consumer outrage at the recently-discovered address book practices that Path and other app...
Online commentators are pointing to the Internet backlash against H.R. 1981 as the new anti-SOPA movement. While this bill is strikingly different from the Stop Online Piracy Act, it does have one thing in common: it’s a poorly-considered legislative attempt to regulate the Internet in a way experts in...
When Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer uncovered a Google workaround to circumvent the default privacy settings on Safari, EFF called on Google to change their tune on privacy by respecting the Do Not Track flag and building it into the Chrome browser. We specifically praised the World Wide Web Consortium...
EFF is deeply disturbed to hear of the stabbing of Jordanian blogger Enass Musallam on Monday in a suburb of the capital, Amman. Musallam is currently recovering in hospital and is in stable condition.
The 19-year-old university student and blogger's attack may have been in response to a ...
Today the White House proposed a framework for protecting privacy in the digital age. The plan, laid out in detail in a white paper (pdf), includes a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights based on well-established fair information practice principles. EFF, which has previously proposed a Bill of...
Yesterday morning, journalist Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times of London was killed, along with French photographer Rémi Ochlik, in the beseiged city of Homs, Syria, where more than 400 people have been reported dead in recent weeks.
Disturbingly, the Telegraph, the TorontoGlobe and...
We're happy to announce the arrival of the new EFF Issues T-shirt! The back displays the full constellation of EFF's work areas: Privacy, Free Speech, Transparency, Fair Use, International, and Innovation. In our ongoing search for a women's T-shirt with the perfect fit, we printed the women's style on...
Deeplinks Blog by Cindy Cohn, Marcia Hofmann | February 22, 2012
In a potentially troublesome decision, a federal district court has found that a start-up violated anti-spam and computer crime laws by creating and marketing a browser to let users view their social networking accounts in one place. The case demonstrates the difficulties facing those who seek to empower users...
