Electronic Frontier Foundation - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• State opposition to domestic drone use grows

  Applications for domestic drone licenses are increasing steadily, even as privacy concerns related to their use over the U.S. continue to mount. Some states are even moving to ban them all together.

• NGOs warn of US lobbying efforts against European privacy legislation

  Top U.S. officials will be warned in a letter Monday of an intense U.S. lobbying effort that seeks to weaken European privacy legislation.

• Phone unlocking services face new legal risk, EFF says

  U.S. phone unlocking services face the biggest legal risk from mobile operators keen to enforce a change in copyright law that now makes it illegal to modify a mobile device to work on another network, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

• Groups raise questions about privacy on Skype

  Skype owner Microsoft should release information about how much user data it gives to third parties, including government agencies, several organisations and individuals said in a letter to company officials.

• Privacy advocates welcome Yahoo Mail HTTPS roll-out

  Digital rights and privacy advocates have welcomed Yahoo's decision to provide its users with an option to enable HTTPS (HTTP Secure) for their entire webmail sessions.

• Facebook to roll out HTTPS by default to all users

  Facebook started encrypting the connections of its North American users by default last week as part of a plan to roll out always-on HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) to its entire global user base.

• Judge blocks enforcement of Calif. human trafficking law

  A federal judge has temporarily blocked enforcement of a provision in a just-enacted California state law that requires all registered sex-offenders to immediately turn over the all of their Internet identifiers and the names of their Internet service providers to local police or sheriff's departments.

• Court blocks temporarily California's disclosure rules for sex offenders

  A federal court in the U.S. on Wednesday temporarily restrained law officials in California from enforcing new provisions that allegedly violate the free speech rights of sexual offenders.

• ACLU, EFF challenge law targeting online activities of sex offenders

  Two civil rights groups have filed a lawsuit challenging parts of a California ballot measure that requires registered sex offenders to turn over their Internet identities and service providers to police.

• DOJ: Hearing on Megaupload stored data should be limited

  A U.S. judge should limit the scope of a proposed court hearing examining whether a former Megaupload user can recover files that were on the website when the U.S. Department of Justice shut it down, the agency said.

• High court nixes appeal of AT&T, NSA wiretap Case

  The U.S. Supreme Court refuses to hear an appeal of a lower-court court decision upholding legal immunity for telecom companies that allegedly participated in an NSA surveillance program during the last decade.
  

• EFF proposes new method to strengthen Public Key Infrastructure

  The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is proposing an extension to the current SSL chain of trust that aims to improve the security of HTTPS and other secure communication protocols.

• Advertisers can't be trusted to self-regulate on data collection, says EFF

  The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) doesn't think that the digital advertising industry can efficiently regulate itself and has issued a statement saying that the self-regulatory principles for multisite data recently published by the Digital Advertising Alliance will suffer from a lack of enforcement.

• House hearing on Stop Online Piracy Act scheduled

  The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee will conduct a hearing on the controversial copyright enforcement bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act, on Wednesday, the committee has announced.

• US Judge upholds investigators' access to Twitter data

  A District Judge in the U.S. upheld Thursday an earlier order that Twitter must provide certain types of information of account holders to government investigators working on the WikiLeaks case, and declined to unseal records that could provide information on whether the prosecutors had tried to get similar information from other Internet companies.