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.…