As the devices in our homes get “smarter,” are they also going to spy on us? That question has led to one sentence in Samsung’s SmartTV privacy policy getting a lot of attention lately: Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition. The comparisons to 1984’s two-way “telescreens” are straightforward. This kind of language suggests that while you’re watching TV, Big Brother may be watching (or listening to) you. Samsung has taken to its…
Author: EFFSource
What do Japan’s Blue Sky Library, Malaysia’s answer to John Wayne, and the first recorded composer from New Zealand, all have in common? They could all disappear from their countries’ public domain for the next 20 years, if the current agreement on copyright term extension in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) holds. You may have read in the news over the past year about how the public domain has recently been enriched with some exciting new additions, such as Sherlock Holmes and—in countries with shorter copyright terms, such as Canada—James Bond, passing out of copyright, freeing them for reissue, adaptation, and…
When you buy a video game, you expect to be able to play it for as long as you want. You expect be able to play it with your kids many years from now if you want (well, maybe not Grand Theft Auto). And you would hope that museums and media historians could preserve the games that were so important to your childhood. But unfortunately, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions (17 U.S.C. § 1201, or Section 1201) creates legal risks for players who want to keep playing after game servers shut down, and curators who want to preserve…
Last week, Google announced that its Youtube service would default to using HTML5 video instead of Flash. Once upon a time, this would have been cause for celebration: after all, Flash is a proprietary technology owned by one company, a frequent source of critical vulnerabilities that expose hundreds of millions of Internet users to attacks on their computers and all that they protect, and Flash objects can only be reliably accessed via closed software, and not from free/open code that anyone can inspect. A year ago, the largest video site on the net ditching Flash would have been a blow…
France’s misguided efforts to grapple with hate speech—which is already prohibited by French law—have been making headlines for years. In 2012, after an horrific attack on a Jewish school, then-president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed criminal penalties for anyone visiting websites that contain hate speech. An anti-terror law passed in December imposes greater penalties on those that “glorify terrorism” online (as opposed to offline), and allows websites engaging in the promotion of terrorism to be blocked with little oversight. And following the attack on Charlie Hebdo last month, Prime Minister Manuel Valls stated that “it will be necessary to take further measures”…
Following EFF’s victory in a four-year Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the government released an opinion (pdf), written by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2010, that concluded that Section 215—the provision of the Patriot Act the NSA relies on to collect millions of Americans’ phone records—does have a limit: census data. The Commerce Department requested an OLC opinion on whether any provisions of the Patriot Act could override the privacy requirements of the Census Act, provisions which, as the opinion acknowledges, “have long provided assurances of confidentiality to” census participants. The opinion contrasts the “broad authority” and “substantial…
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) exists to ensure that national security does not trump privacy and civil liberties, and it has been especially busy since the publication of the first Snowden leak. Congress and the President asked the Board to review the use of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, as well as the operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In 2014, PCLOB published two reports addressing these issues. And last week, the Board published a “Recommendations Assessment Report [pdf].” Section 215 Recommendations The most striking piece of…
Security shouldn’t be a synonym for giving up civil liberties. But bills like HR 399 show that lawmakers think it is. The Secure Our Borders First Act is an ugly piece of legislation that’s clearly intended to strongarm the Department of Homeland Security into dealing with the border in a very particular way—with drones and other surveillance technology. The bill appears to have stalled in the House—it was on the calendar for last week but wasn’t voted on, and it’s not on the schedule for this week. But it’s not dead yet. And even if it does die, this isn’t…
Verizon told the New York Times on Friday that it plans to begin allowing its customers to opt out of its privacy-invasive header injection program. For customers that are aware of the Verizon program and visit the opt-out page, this means they will soon be able to protect themselves against privacy circumvention like Turn’s zombie cookie.Verizon’s move to begin allowing opt-out comes after more than 2,600 of you signed our petition urging the FCC to investigate Verizon’s practices. It also comes just one day after Senators on the the Commerce Committee sent a strongly-worded letter to Verizon Wireless [pdf] expressing…
Federal Law Blocks Extraordinary and Burdensome SubpoenaSan Francisco – A high-profile battle over whether Google must respond to an unusual and dangerous subpoena raises fundamental concerns about federal free speech law and the protections it affords hosts of online content, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argued in an amicus brief filed today. Attorney General Jim Hood of Mississippi issued the 79-page subpoena in October, seeking information about Google’s policies and practices with respect to content it hosts, Internet searches, and more. The invasive request appeared to be based primarily on allegedly unlawful activities of third parties who use Google’s services.…
Late last week, a group of four peers on Britain’s House of Lords attempted to insert the entirety of the “Snoopers’ Charter”—the Internet surveillance bill that was savaged by a Parliamentary overview, and abandoned by the UK’s current coalition government—into a new counter-terrorism bill. Under an incredibly tight deadline, thousands of UK citizens coordinated to warn the House of Lords what these amendments represented, and why they should oppose such an underhanded move. Over twenty-eight thousand messages were sent via EFF’s action center to the 150 peers who are on Twitter: and that’s not counting the emails, letters and phone…
The 911 system has a problem. As people switch from landlines to mobile phones, more and more 911 calls come from wireless devices. But under current FCC E911 (Enhanced 911) regulations, carriers are only required to provide 911 dispatchers with a mobile phone’s location to within 300 meters, and aren’t required to provide any sort of vertical location information (i.e. to pinpoint what floor of a skyscraper someone is on). This lack of accurate location information can make it difficult for first responders to find callers, especially when the person calling becomes disoriented or unable to speak. Unfortunately, in an…
We have a problem when it comes to stopping mass surveillance. The entity that’s conducting the most extreme and far-reaching surveillance against most of the world’s communications—the National Security Agency—is bound by United States law. That’s good news for Americans. U.S. law and the Constitution protect American citizens and legal residents from warrantless surveillance. That means we have a very strong legal case to challenge mass surveillance conducted domestically or that sweeps in Americans’ communications. Similarly, the United States Congress is elected by American voters. That means Congressional representatives are beholden to the American people for their jobs, so public…
The next round of secret Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations begins this Monday, January 26, and runs through the following week at the Sheraton New York Time Square Hotel in downtown Manhattan. As with many previous TPP meetings, the public will be shut out of talks as negotiators convene behind closed doors to decide binding rules that could impact how our lawmakers set digital policy in the decades to come. Big content industry interests have been given privileged access to negotiating texts and have driven the US Trade Representative’s mandate when it comes to copyright—which is why the TPP carries extreme…
U.S. District Judge Sam A. Lindsay sentenced Barrett Brown this morning to 63 months in federal prison, minus the 31 months he has already served to date. He was also ordered to pay $890,000 in restitution. EFF is disappointed to see that Brown wasn’t released today, after having spent nearly three years in prison on charges stemming from his work as an independent journalist. Brown’s work has appeared in major outlets like Vanity Fair, the Huffington Post and the Guardian. He also founded Project PM, a project to crowdsource review of documents for investigative journalism. Brown’s legal trouble began in 2011,…
Last year, we identified European copyright reform as one of the main developments to watch for in 2015, and barely a month into the year this debate is already heating up. Coinciding with the release of a draft European Parliament report written by Julia Reda, Member of the European Parliament for the German Pirate Party, Copyright for Creativity (C4C) have also released their own new Copyright Manifesto this week. We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements…
The Associated Press reports that healthcare.gov–the flagship site of the Affordable Care Act, where millions of Americans have signed up to receive health care–is quietly sending personal health information to a number of third party websites. The information being sent includes one’s zip code, income level, smoking status, pregnancy status and more. An example of personal health data being sent to third parties from healthcare.gov EFF researchers have independently confirmed that healthcare.gov is sending personal health information to at least 14 third party domains, even if the user has enabled Do Not Track. The information is sent via the referrer…
Longtime Digital Rights Champion to Liberate Users from Digital Locks that Restrict Our TechSan Francisco – Leading digital rights champion and author Cory Doctorow has rejoined the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to battle the pervasive use of dangerous digital rights management (DRM) technologies that threaten users’ security and privacy, distort markets, confiscate public rights, and undermine innovation. Doctorow will be a special consultant to the Apollo 1201 Project, a mission to eradicate DRM in our lifetime. Apollo 1201 will challenge the use of DRM as well as the legal structures that support it. “Apollo was a decade-long plan to do…
Advertising network Turn announced today that they will suspend their zombie tracking cookie program. Turn was recently caught using Verizon Wireless’ invasive UIDH header to undelete tracking cookies that web visitors had previously deleted. This unacceptable practice means that users who delete cookies to avoid Turn’s and others’ tracking will continue to be tracked against their will, using information associated with their previous activity through a permanent identity. This is a step toward victory for everyone who spoke out against Turn’s zombie cookies, but it is not enough. Turn’s cookies just underscore the huge privacy problems with Verizon’s header injection.…
We’re usually very happy to see the government release documents shed light on unconstitutional surveillance. We’re less happy when the release is done Christmas week, in an attempt to ensure that they will get as little attention as possible. That’s what happened this Christmas. On December 23, the National Security Agency (NSA) released over a decade’s worth of oversight reports from the NSA to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board—documents that should have been released years ago pursuant to a FOIA lawsuit brought by EFF. And on December 24, the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General released “A Review…