Behind the One-Way Mirror: A Deep Dive Into the Technology of Corporate Surveillance

https://www.eff.org/wp/behind-the-one-way-mirror


#corp #surveillance #why #eff

How to Identify Visible (and Invisible) Surveillance at Protests

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/how-identify-visible-and-invisible-surveillance-protests


#surveillance #protests #why #how #eff

Staying Private While Using Google Docs for Legal & Mutual Aid Work

Regardless of your opinion about Google, their suite of collaborative document editing tools provides a powerful resource in this tumultuous time. Across the country, grassroots groups organizing mutual aid relief work in response to COVID-19 and legal aid as part of the recent wave of protests have relied on Google Docs to coordinate efforts and get help to those that need it. Alternatives to the collaborative tools either do not scale well, are not as usable or intuitive, or just plain aren’t available. Using Google Sheets to coordinate who needs help and how can provide much-needed relief to those hit hardest. But it’s easy to use these tools in a way Google didn’t envision, and trigger account security lockouts in the process.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/staying-private-while-using-google-docs-legal-mutual-aid-work

#eff #google #docs

The Senate’s New Anti-Encryption Bill Is Even Worse Than EARN IT, and That’s Saying Something

Right now, we rely on secure technologies like never before—to cope with the pandemic, to organize and march in the streets, and much more. Yet, now is the moment some members of the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees have chosen to try to effectively outlaw encryption in those very technologies.

The new Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act—introduced this week by Senators Graham, Blackburn, and Cotton—ignores expert consensus and public opinion, which is unfortunately par for the course. 

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/senates-new-anti-encryption-bill-even-worse-earn-it-and-thats-saying-something

#eff #law #encryption

Brazil's Fake News Bill Would Dismantle Crucial Rights Online and is on a Fast Track to Become Law

Despite widespread complaints about its effects on free expression and privacy, Brazilian Congress is moving forward in its attempts to hastily approve a "Fake News" bill. We've already reported about some of the most concerning issues in previous proposals, but the draft text released this week is even worse. It will hinder users' access to social networks and applications, require the construction of massive databases of users' real identities, and oblige companies to keep track of our private communications online. 

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/current-brazils-fake-news-bill-would-dismantle-crucial-rights-online-and-fast

#eff #brazil #privacy #law

California Agency Blocks Release of Police Use of Force and Surveillance Training, Claiming Copyright

Under a California law that went into effect on January 1, 2020, all law enforcement training materials must be “conspicuously” published on the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) website.

However, if you visit POST’s Open Data hub and try to download the officer training materials relating to face recognition technology or automated license plate readers (ALPRs), or the California Peace Officers Association’s course on use of force, you will receive only a Word document with a single sentence

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/california-agency-blocks-release-police-use-force-and-surveillance-training

#eff #surveillance

EFF to Court: Social Media Users Have Privacy and Free Speech Interests in Their Public Information

Visa applicants to the United States are required to disclose personal information including their work, travel, and family histories. And as of May 2019, they are required to register their social media accounts with the U.S. government. According to the State Department, approximately 14.7 million people will be affected by this new policy each year.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/eff-court-social-media-users-have-privacy-and-free-speech-interests-their-public

#eff #us #privacy

Inside the Invasive, Secretive “Bossware” Tracking Workers

COVID-19 has pushed millions of people to work from home, and a flock of companies offering software for tracking workers has swooped in to pitch their products to employers across the country.

The services often sound relatively innocuous. Some vendors bill their tools as “automatic time tracking” or “workplace analytics” software. Others market to companies concerned about data breaches or intellectual property theft. We’ll call these tools, collectively, “bossware.” While aimed at helping employers, bossware puts workers’ privacy and security at risk by logging every click and keystroke, covertly gathering information for lawsuits, and using other spying features that go far beyond what is necessary and proportionate to manage a workforce.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/inside-invasive-secretive-bossware-tracking-workers

#eff #privacy #security

Google's AMP, the Canonical Web, and the Importance of Web Standards

Have you ever clicked on a link after googling something, only to find that Google didn’t take you to the actual webpage but to some weird Google-fied version of it? Instead of the web address being the source of the article, it still says “google” in the address bar on your phone? That’s what’s known as Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), and now Google has announced that AMP has graduated from the OpenJS Foundation Incubation Program. The OpenJS Foundation is a merged effort between major projects in the JavaScript ecosystem, such as NodeJS and jQuery, whose stated mission is “to support the healthy growth of the JavaScript and web ecosystem”. But instead of a standard starting with the web community, a giant company is coming to the community after they’ve already built a large part of the mobile web and are asking for a rubber stamp. Web community discussion should be the first step of making web standards, and not just a last-minute hurdle for Google to clear.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/googles-amp-canonical-web-and-importance-web-standards-0

#amp #eff #google

Hundreds of Police Departments with Deadly Histories Partner with Amazon’s Ring Surveillance Cameras

Partnerships Include Agencies Responsible for Over 30% of Fatal Encounters Over the Last Five Years

San Francisco – Research by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) shows that hundreds of U.S. police departments with deadly histories have official partnerships with Amazon’s Ring—a home-surveillance company that makes it easy to send video footage to law enforcement.

Ring sells networked cameras, often bundled with doorbells or lighting, that record video when they register movement and then send notifications to owners’ cell phones. Ring’s partnerships allow police to seek access to private video footage directly from residents through a special web portal.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/hundreds-police-departments-deadly-histories-partner-amazons-ring-surveillance

#eff #amazon #surveillance

EFF Launches Searchable Database of Police Agencies and the Tech Tools They Use to Spy on Communities

Atlas of Surveillance Shines Light on Deployment of Cameras, Drones, and More

San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), in partnership with the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, today launched the largest-ever collection of searchable data on police use of surveillance technologies, created as a tool for the public to learn about facial recognition, drones, license plate readers, and other devices law enforcement agencies are acquiring to spy on our communities.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-launches-searchable-database-police-agencies-and-tech-tools-they-use-spy

#eff #surveillance #privacy

Proctoring Apps Subject Students to Unnecessary Surveillance

With COVID-19 forcing millions of teachers and students to rethink in-person schooling, this moment is ripe for an innovation in learning. Unfortunately, many schools have simply substituted surveillance technology for real transformation. The use of proctoring apps—privacy-invasive software products that “watch” students as they take tests or complete schoolwork, has skyrocketed. These apps make a seductive promise: that schools can still rely on high-stakes tests, where they have complete control of a student's environment, even during remote learning. But that promise comes with a huge catch—these apps violate student privacy, negatively impact some populations, and will likely never fully stop creative students from outsmarting the system.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/08/proctoring-apps-subject-students-unnecessary-surveillance

#EFF #students #privacy #surveillance

Exposing Your Face Isn't a More Hygienic Way to Pay

A company called PopID has created an identity-management system that uses face recognition. Their first use case is as a system for in-store, point of sale payments using face recognition as authorization for payment.

They are promoting it as a tool for restaurants, claiming that it is pandemic-friendly because it is contactless.

Nonetheless, the PopID payment system is less secure than alternatives, unfriendly to privacy, and is likely riskier than other payment alternatives for anyone concerned about catching COVID-19. On top of these issues, PopID is pitching it as a screening tool for COVID-19 infection, another task that it's completely unsuited for.

👉🏼 Equities issues

It's important that payment systems not disadvantage cash payments, which have the best social equity. Many people are under-banked and in hard times such as these, many people use cash as a way to help them manage their budgets and spending. Cash is also the most privacy-friendly way to pay. As convenient as other systems are, and despite cash not being contactless, we need to protect people's ability to use cash1.

PopID is a charge-up-and-spend system. To lower their costs, PopID has its users charge up an account wn ith them using a credit card or debit card, and payments are deducted from that. Charge-and-spend systems are good for the store, and less good for the person using them; they amount to an interest-free loan that the consumer gives the merchant. This is no small thing: Starbucks, PayPal, and Walmart all have billions in interest-free loans from their customers. This further disadvantages people with budgets, as it requires them to give PopID money before it is spent and keep a balance in their system in anticipation of spending it.

👀 👉🏼 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/09/exposing-your-face-isnt-more-hygienic-way-pay

#eff #face #recognition #PopID #contactless #pay
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Stop the EARN IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

The House and Senate are both pushing forward with the so-called “EARN IT” Act, a bill that will undermine encryption and free speech online. Attorney General William Barr and the DOJ have demanded for years that messaging services give the government special access to users’ private messages. If EARN IT passes, Barr will likely get his wish—law enforcement agencies will be able to scan every message sent online.

💡 The EARN IT Act (S. 3398) is anti-speech, anti-security, and unnecessary. It could come to the Senate floor this month—we need to tell Congress to reject this dangerous proposal.

👀 👉🏼 https://act.eff.org/action/stop-the-earn-it-bill-before-it-breaks-encryption-a7904e20-2083-4d5e-88ae-44ee5fef7a5d

#eff #earnit #bill #encryption #freespeech #usa #thinkabout
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Orders from the Top: The EU’s Timetable for Dismantling End-to-End Encryption

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/orders-top-eus-timetable-dismantling-end-end-encryption


#eu #e2e #encryption #eff

California votes to “expand” privacy laws to allow companies to make you pay for privacy

On election day, California voters chose to pass Proposition 24, which alters the newly inaugurated California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) with some pretty significant changes that can be viewed as a net negative for privacy. There are modest improvements to the CCPA; however, some such as those in the No on Prop 24 campaign, think that those modest gains are far outweighed by the negatives. One of those negatives is formally allowing tech companies to pay for privacy.

Proposition 24 allows pay for privacy, and more

Detractors also point out that there was no public process as in legislative proceedings and the iterations of the Prop 24 highlight that there may have been many backroom deals that were done here to create the ballot measure to rewrite the CCPA even though the CCPA has only been in effect for less than a year. Many of these negatives will affect consumers directly: Allowing Pay for privacy has a positive impact on the bottom lines of corporations, but is a net negative to netizens. They are essentially allowing companies to charge when someone exercises their privacy rights.

If global opt outs of tracking by your browser won’t be respected, it’s a net negative. The mentioned points are just scratching the surface. For more information on why Prop 24 wasn’t a net benefit to privacy, read why the EFF didn’t support Proposition 24.

Privacy News Online has previously written extensively on pay for privacy schemes that have been tried by big tech companies such as AT&T and Verizon in the last several years. The price of privacy changes from $3.50 to “five or ten dollars” depending on who you ask and what type of privacy is being considered, but one thing is clear: setting any price on it devalues its innate nature as an inalienable human right.

👀 👉🏼 https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/california-votes-to-expand-privacy-laws-to-allow-companies-to-make-you-pay-for-privacy/

#california #CCPA #EFF #privacy #netpolitics #thinkabout
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Introducing Cover Your Tracks!

Today, we’re pleased to announce Cover Your Tracks, the newest edition and rebranding of our historic browser fingerprinting and tracker awareness tool Panopticlick. Cover Your Tracks picks up where Panopticlick left off. Panopticlick was about letting users know that browser fingerprinting was possible; Cover Your Tracks is about giving users the tools to fight back against the trackers, and improve the web ecosystem to provide privacy for everyone.

Over a decade ago, we launched Panopticlick as an experiment to see whether the different characteristics that a browser communicates to a website, when viewed in combination, could be used as a unique identifier that tracks a user as they browse the web. We asked users to participate in an experiment to test their browsers, and found that overwhelmingly the answer was yes—browsers were leaking information that allowed web trackers to follow their movements.

n this new iteration, Cover Your Tracks aims to make browser fingerprinting and tracking more understandable to the average user. With helpful explainers accompanying each browser characteristic and how it contributes to their fingerprint, users get an in-depth look into just how trackers can use their browser against them.

👀 👉🏼 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/introducing-cover-your-tracks

#eff #tool #coveryourtracks #panopticlick #tracking #fingerprinting
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

EFF Podcast: Control Over Users, Competitors, and Critics

Cory Doctorow joins EFF hosts Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they discuss how large, established tech companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook can block interoperability in order to squelch competition and control their users, and how we can fix this by taking away big companies' legal right to block new tools that connect to their platforms – tools that would let users control their digital lives.

🎙 https://archive.org/details/eff-podcast-episode-4-interroperability

#eff #doctorow #podcast #apple #google #facebook
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Uncle Sow: Dark Caracal in Latin America - EFF - 2023

In 2018, EFF along with researchers from Lookout Security published a report describing the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) we dubbed "Dark Caracal."

Now we have uncovered a new Dark Caracal campaign operating since March of 2022, with hundreds of infections across more than a dozen countries. In this report we will present evidence that the cyber mercenary group Dark Caracal is still active and continues to be focused on Latin America, as was reported last year. We have discovered that Dark Caracal, using the Bandook spyware, is currently infecting over 700 computers in Central and South America, primarily in The Dominican Republic and Venezuela. 

#DarkCaracal #Bandook #Lebanon #LatinAmerica #EFF #Lookout

About Face (Recognition) | EFF

Is your face truly your own, or is it a commodity to be sold, a weapon to be used against you? A company called #Clearview AI has scraped the internet to gather (without consent) 30 billion images to support a tool that lets users identify people by picture alone. Though it’s primarily used by law enforcement, should we have to worry that the eavesdropper at the next restaurant table, or the creep who’s bothering you in the bar, or the protestor outside the abortion clinic can surreptitiously snap a pic of you, upload it, and use it to identify you, where you live and work, your social media accounts, and more? 


Kashmir Hill has been writing about the intersection of #privacy and #technology for well over a decade; her book about Clearview AI’s rise and practices was published last fall. She speaks with the #EFF about how face recognition technology’s rapid evolution may have outpaced ethics and regulations, and where we might go from here. 

#FacialRecognition