Security News

Today Google launched a new version of its Chrome browser with what they call an "ad filter"—which means that it sometimes blocks ads but is not an "ad blocker." EFF welcomes the elimination of the worst ad formats. But Google's approach here is a band-aid response to the crisis of trust in advertising that leaves massive user privacy issues unaddressed. 

Last year, a new industry organization, the Coalition for Better Ads, published user research...

Americans in 2017 lived under a threat of constant surveillance, both online and offline. While the battle to curtail unaccountable and unconstitutional NSA surveillance continued this year with only limited opportunities appearing in Congress, the struggle to secure community control over surveillance by local police has made dramatic and expanding strides across the country at the local level.

In July, Seattle passed a law making it the nation’s second jurisdiction to require...

Step onto any city street and you may find yourself subject to numerous forms of police surveillance—many imperceptible to the human eye.

A cruiser equipped with automated license plate readers (also known as ALPRs) may have just logged where you parked your car. A cell-site simulator may be capturing your cell-phone data incidentally while detectives track a suspect nearby. That speck in the sky may be a drone capturing video of your commute. Police might use face recognition...

UPDATE: EFF joined coalition comments on October 18, 2017 in opposition to the A-File notice.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last month issued a notice that it is storing social media information on immigrants, including lawful permanent residents and naturalized U.S. citizens, apparently indefinitely, in a government database that contains “Alien Files” (A-Files). This is an invasive new feature of DHS’s previously known programs on collecting social media...

Twitter recently abandoned their longstanding support for the Do Not Track (DNT) signal, disregarding the privacy preferences of millions of their users. Twitter can see when you visit other sites where its code is present through Tweet/Follow buttons and embedded tweets (like tweets you see quoted in a forum or an article). Embedded Twitter content is so widespread that Twitter can likely reconstruct a significant portion of your browsing history. Twitter's rejection of DNT leaves users’...

Since Wednesday night, Twitter users have been greeted by a pop-up notice about Twitter’s new privacy policy, which will come into effect June 18:

Contrary to the inviting “Sounds good” button to accept the new policy and get to tweeting, the changes Twitter has made around user tracking and data personalization do not sound good for user privacy. For example, the company will now record and store non-EU users’ off-Twitter web browsing history for...