Police are using their drones as flying automated license plate readers (ALPRs), airborne police cameras that make it easier than ever for law enforcement to follow you. 

"The Flock Safety drone, specifically, are flying LPR cameras as well,” Rahul Sidhu, Vice President of Aviation at Flock Safety, recently told a group of potential law enforcement customers interested in drone-as-first-responder (DFR) programs. 

The integration of Flock Safety’s flagship ALPR technology with its Aerodome drone equipment is a police surveillance combo poised to elevate the privacy threats to civilians caused by both of these invasive technologies as drone adoption expands. 

This is the fourth installment in a blog series documenting EFF's findings from the Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. You can read additional posts here. 

One of the goals of our Stop Censoring Abortion campaign was to put names, stories, and numbers to the experiences we’d been hearing about: people and organizations having their abortion-related content – or entire accounts – removed or suppressed on social media. In reviewing survey submissions, we found that multiple users reported experiencing shadowbanning. Shadowbanning (or “deranking”) is widely experienced and reported by content creators across various social media platforms, and it’s a phenomenon that those who create content about abortion and sexual and reproductive health know all too well.

One of the reasons we opposed the TikTok "ban" is that the First Amendment is supposed to protect us from government using its power to manipulate speech. But as predicted, the TikTok "ban" has only resulted in turning over the platform to the allies of a president who seems to have no respect for the First Amendment.

TikTok was never proven to be a current national security problem, so it's hard to say the sale will alleviate those unproven concerns. And it remains to be seen if the deal places any limits on the new ownership sharing user data with foreign governments or anyone else—the security concern that purportedly justified the forced sale. As for the algorithm, if the concern had been that TikTok could be a conduit for Chinese government propaganda—a concern the Supreme Court declined to even consider—people can now be concerned that TikTok could be a conduit for U.S. government propaganda. An administration official reportedly has said the new TikTok algorithm will be "retrained" with U.S. data to make sure the system is "behaving properly."

This is Part I of a two-part series on EFF’s comments to the International Criminal Court Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) about its draft policy on cyber-enabled crimes.

As human rights atrocities around the world unfold in the digital age, genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity are as heinous and wrongful as they were before the advent of AI and social media.

But criminal methods and evidence increasingly involve technology. Think mass digital surveillance of an ethnic or religious community used to persecute them as part of a widespread or systematic attack against civilians, or cyberattacks that disable hospitals or other essential services, causing injury or death.

California has one of the nation’s most comprehensive consumer data privacy laws. But it’s not always easy for people to exercise those privacy rights. That’s why we supported Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal’s A.B. 566 throughout the legislative session and are now asking California Governor Gavin Newsom to sign it into law. 

The easier it is to exercise your rights, the more power you have.  

A.B. 566 does a very simple thing. It directs browsers—such as Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari, Microsoft’s Edge or Mozilla’s Firefox—to give all their users the option to tell companies they don't want companies to  to sell or share personal information  that’s collected about them on the internet. In other words: it makes it easy for Californians to tell companies what they want to happen with their own information.

By making it easy to use tools that allow you to send these sorts of signals to companies’ websites, A.B. 566 makes the California Consumer Privacy Act more user-friendly. And the easier it is to exercise your rights, the more power you have.  

This is the fifth installment in a blog series documenting EFF's findings from the Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. You can read additional posts here. 

We need your help to make a common-sense bill into California law. Despite the fact that California has one of the nation’s most comprehensive data privacy laws, it’s not always easy for people to exercise those privacy rights. A.B. 566 intends to make it easy by directing browsers to give all their users the option to tell companies they don’t want personal information that’s collected about them on the internet to be sold or shared. Now, we just need Governor Gavin Newsom to sign it into law by October 13, 2025, and this toolkit will help us put on the pressure. Tweet at Gov. Gavin Newsom and help us get A.B. 566 signed into law!

First, pick your platform of choice. Reach Gov. Newsom at any of his social media handles:

This is the sixth installment in a blog series documenting EFF's findings from the Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. You can read additional posts here. 

When we started our Stop Censoring Abortion campaign, we heard from activists, advocacy organizations, researchers, and even healthcare providers who had all experienced having abortion-related content removed or suppressed on social media. One of the submissions we received was from an organization called the Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline.

Jimmy Kimmel has been in the news a lot recently, which means the ongoing lawsuit against him by perennial late-night punching bag/convicted fraudster/former congressman George Santos flew under the radar. But what happened in that case is an essential illustration of the limits of both copyright law and the “fine print” terms of service on websites and apps. 

What happened was this: Kimmel and his staff saw that Santos was on Cameo, which allows people to purchase short videos from various public figures with requested language. Usually it’s something like “happy birthday” or “happy retirement.” In the case of Kimmel and his writers, they set out to see if there was anything they couldn’t get Santos to say on Cameo. For this to work, they obviously didn’t disclose that it was Jimmy Kimmel Live! asking for the videos.  

Alaa Abd El Fattah is finally free and at home with his family. On September 22, it was announced that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi had issued a pardon for Alaa’s release after six years in prison. One day later, the BBC shared video of Alaa dancing with his family in their Cairo home and hugging his mother Laila and sister Sanaa, as well as other visitors. 

Alaa's sister, Mona Seif, posted on X: "An exceptionally kind day. Alaa is free."