Privacy & Governance

The CHATBOT Act Forces One Parenting Model On Every Family

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing education, and the way people search for information. Parents, teenagers, teachers, an…

Anthropic’s Opus 5 Is Better at Resisting Prompt Injection

The chart is interesting. On the IPI benchmark, Opus 5 improved over Opus 4.8, reducing the probability of an attacker succeeding…

EFF Guide to Recording Law Enforcement

This post is available as a printable one page handout in English and Spanish. Recordings of law enforcement, whether by bystander…

Facial Recognition at Madison Square Garden

Last month, the story broke (alternate link) that Madison Square Garden uses facial recognition software on everyone entering the…

Max-severity Exchange server flaw under active exploitation by Kremlin hackers

American Being Prosecuted for Wiping His Phone Before Handing It Over to Border Officials

He’s being prosecuted for giving border officials a code that wiped his phone: The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneO…

Should You Use AI for a Task? Here’s a Simple Way to Decide

This essay originally appeared in The Guardian. I teach public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School at the Uni…

Measuring the Tendency of AI Agents to Go Rogue

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in The Guardian. In July, Hugging Face, a company that hosts…

🏃 Fitness Tracker Privacy Fails | EFFector 38.14

Watches, bands, and rings—if you want to digitally monitor your fitness, more companies than ever are selling devices to do it. An…

Long-Lived Vulnerability in Microsoft Secure Boot

Microsoft’s Secure Boot has had a serious vulnerability for most of its existence. An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to…

Measuring LLMs’ Ability to Perform Cryptanalysis

There’s new benchmark measuring AI’s ability to perform mathematical cryptanalysis. Anthropic’s frontier model actually found new…

San Francisco: Don’t Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

The concept of “surveillance pricing” is just one part of a much larger problem and business model: corporations maximizing their…

Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases of Their Patrons?

Recent reports have raised alarm about the use of PatronScan, an ID-checking and face-scanning system, at multiple LGBTQ+ bars in…

Axon Is Another License Plate Surveillance Company

Governments are switching, but I’m not sure it makes a difference: …some municipalities, including Denver, Colorado, are ditching…

Missed EFF's Livestream with Adam Savage and iFixit? Listen Here!

EFF’s first EFFecting Change livestream was all the way back in July of 2024. Maybe you've caught each stream, or maybe you’ve onl…

Cognyte Sells a Mobile Cell Surveillance Van

Yet another Israeli mass surveillance company: Made by Israeli surveillance company Cognyte, the tech simulates a mobile phone tow…

Friday Squid Blogging: Illex Squid Catch in the Falklands

Lower catch this year. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t co…

Farmers Are Getting Control Of Their Equipment Back

For years, John Deere had actively made repairing their tractors near-impossible for anyone but itself and the few "authorized" re…

Why AI Needs a “Genie Coefficient”

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in The Guardian. Major benchmarks measure what AI can do. Non…

Hundreds of Drone-as-First-Responder Programs Could Soon Be Launched Across the Country

Police departments across the country are lining up to launch drone-as-first-responder (DFR) programs, and hundreds have cleared a…

New warnings that Russian operatives are targeting the emails of US nuclear scientists and defense contractors

Russian Espionage Group Exploited Zimbra Zero-Day to Steal Mail and 2FA Codes

US and allies say Russian hackers stole emails without social engineering

End-to-End Encryption and “Going Dark”

New paper: “Encryption and Globalization 15 Years Later: End-to-End Encryption and the Third Round of the ‘Going Dark’ Debate“: Ab…

The Fourth Circuit Says Border Agents Can Search Your Phone By Hand, No Suspicion Required

Legal intern Suzanne Castillo was the principal author of this post. The Fourth Circuit issued a disappointing opinion in U.S. v.…

If you pay a hacker’s ransom, chances are that they’ll come back for more

First-Person Identity Theft Story

Harrowing story of an identity theft victim. Yes, the person made a mistake—they gave the scammer a two-factor authentication code…

New EU Court of Justice Ruling on Platform Liability Could Cause Collateral Damage to Freedom of Expression

Intermediary liability laws around the world recognize that social media platforms, search engines, and other online service provi…

Proofpoint Research Finds 65% of Organizations Affected by Ransomware Say AI Made Attacks More Effective

MIT to Become Hotbed of AI Video Surveillance

It’s a lot: According to information obtained by The Tech, MIT is spending over $3 million on more than 500 AI surveillance camera…