It is our end-of-year tradition at EFF to look back at the last 12 months of digital rights. This year, the number and diversity of our reflections attest that 2024 was a big year.
If there is something uniting all the disparate threads of work EFF has done this year, it is this: that law and policy should be careful, precise, practical, and technologically neutral. We do not care if a cop is using a glass pressed against your door or the most advanced microphone: they need a warrant.
For example, much of the public discourse this year was taken up by generative AI. It seemed that this issue was a Rorschach test for everyone’s anxieties about technology – be they privacy, replacement of workers, surveillance, or intellectual property. Ultimately, it matters little what the specific technology is: whenever technology is being used against our rights, EFF will oppose that use. It’s a future-proof way of protecting us. If we have privacy protections, labor protections, and protections against government invasions, then it does not matter what technology takes over the public imagination, we will have recourse against its harms.
But AI was only one of the issues we took on this past year. We’ve worked on ensuring that the EU’s new rules regarding large online platforms respect human rights. We’ve filed countless briefs in support of free expression online and represented plaintiffs in cases where bad actors have sought to silence them, including citizen journalists who were targeted for posting clips of city council meetings online.
With your help, we have let the United States Congress know that its citizens are for protecting the free press and against laws that would cut kids off from vital sources of information. We’ve spoken to legislators, reporters, and the public to make sure everyone is informed about the benefits and dangers of new technologies, new proposed laws, and legal precedent.
Even all of that does not capture everything we did this year. And we did not—indeed, we cannot—do it without you. Your support keeps the lights on and ensures we are not speaking just for EFF as an organization but for our thousands of tireless members. Thank you, as always.
We will update this page with new stories about digital rights in 2024 every day between now and the new year.
This post was originally published on here
