The European Union Council is once again debating its controversial message scanning proposal, aka “Chat Control,” that would lead to the scanning of private conversations of billions of people.

Chat Control, which EFF has strongly opposed since it was first introduced in 2022, keeps being mildly tweaked and pushed by one Council presidency after another.

This post was co-authored by EFF legal intern Olivia Miller.

For most Americans—driving is a part of everyday life. Practically speaking, many of us drive to work, school, play, and anywhere in between. Not only do we visit places that give insights into our personal lives, but we sometimes use vehicles as a mode of displaying information about our political beliefs, socioeconomic status, and other intimate details.

All of this personal activity can be tracked and identified through Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data—a popular surveillance tool used by law enforcement agencies across the country. That’s why, in an amicus brief filed with the Virginia Court of Appeals, EFF, the ACLU of Virginia, and NACDL urged the court to require police to seek a warrant before searching ALPR data.

This post is an adapted version of the article originally published at Silla Vacía 

Heads of state and governments of the Americas will gather this December at the Tenth Summit of the Americas in the Dominican Republic to discuss challenges and opportunities facing the region’s nations. As part of the Summit of the Americas’ Process, which had its first meeting in 1994, the theme of this year’s summit is "Building a Secure and Sustainable Hemisphere with Shared Prosperity.”  

As the first copyright cases concerning AI reach appeals courts, EFF wants to protect important, beneficial uses of this technology—including AI for legal research. That’s why we weighed in on the long-running case of Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence. This case raises at least two important issues: the use of (possibly) copyrighted material to train a machine learning AI system, and public access to legal texts.  

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

Whether due to generative AI hallucinations or human sloppiness, the internet is increasingly rife with bogus news content—and you can count EFF among the victims. 

WinBuzzer published a story June 26 with the headline, “Microsoft Is Getting Sued over Using Nearly 200,000 Pirated Books for AI Training,” containing this passage: 

There is a lot of bad on the internet and it seems to only be getting worse. But one of the things the internet did well, and is worth preserving, is nontraditional paths for creativity, journalism, and criticism. As governments and major corporations throw up more barriers to expression—and more and more gatekeepers try to control the internet—it’s important to learn how to crash through those gates. 

In EFF's interview series, Gate Crashing, we talk to people who have used the internet to take nontraditional paths to the very traditional worlds of journalism, creativity, and criticism. We hope it's both inspiring to see these people and enlightening for anyone trying to find voices they like online.  

Our mini-series will be dropping an episode each month closing out 2025 in style.

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

In our Stop Censoring Abortion series, we’ve documented the many ways that reproductive rights advocates have faced arbitrary censorship on Meta platforms. Since social media is the primary—and sometimes the only—way that providers, advocates, and communities can safely and effectively share timely and accurate information about abortion, it’s vitally important that platforms take steps to proactively protect this speech.

Federal employees play a key role in safeguarding the civil liberties of millions of Americans. Our rights to privacy and free expression can only survive when we stand together to push back against overreach and ensure that technology serves all people—not just the powerful. 

That’s why EFF jumped to action earlier this year, when the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) handed over sensitive employee data—Social Security numbers, benefits data, work histories, and more—to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This was a blatant violation of the Privacy Act of 1974, and it put federal workers directly at risk. 

It's spooky season—but while jump scares may get your heart racing, catching up on digital rights news shouldn't! Our EFFector newsletter has got you covered with easy, bite-sized updates to keep you up-to-date.

In this issue, we spotlight new ALPR-enhanced police drones and how local communities can push back; unpack the ongoing TikTok “ban,” which we’ve consistently said violates the First Amendment; and celebrate a privacy win—abandoning a phone doesn't mean you've also abandoned your privacy rights.

Prefer to listen in? Check out our audio companion, where we interview EFF Staff Attorney Lisa Femia who explains the findings from our investigation into abortion censorship on social media. Catch the conversation on YouTube or the Internet Archive.