The Markup revealed in its reporting last month that New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) has been quietly deploying an algorithmic tool to categorize families as “high risk”. Using a grab-bag of factors like neighborhood and mother’s age, this AI tool can put families under intensified scrutiny without proper justification and oversight. ACS…
There has been a crescendo of states attempting to criminalize the wearing of face coverings while attending protests. Now the President has demanded, in the context of ongoing protests in Los Angeles: “ARREST THE PEOPLE IN FACE MASKS, NOW!” But the truth is: whether you are afraid of catching an airborne illness from your fellow…
NEW YORK–In a victory for personal privacy, a New York federal district court judge today granted a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) disclosure of records to DOGE and its agents. Judge Denise L. Cote of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York found…
Austin organizers turned out to rebuke the city’s misguided contract with Flock Safety— and won. This successful pushback from the community means at the end of the month Austin police will no longer be able to use the surveillance network of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) across the city. Two years ago Austin City Council…
EFF submitted comments to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its subcomponent U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), urging them to abandon a proposal to collect social media identifiers on forms for immigration benefits. This collection would mark yet a further expansion of the government’s efforts to subject immigrants to social media surveillance, invading…
Utah cannot stifle young people’s First Amendment rights to use social media to speak about politics, create art, discuss religion, or to hear from other users discussing those topics, EFF argued in a brief filed this week. EFF filed the brief in NetChoice v. Brown, a constitutional challenge to the Utah Minor Protection in Social…
If you run a site on the open web, chances are you’ve noticed a big increase in traffic over the past few months, whether or not your site has been getting more viewers, and you’re not alone. Operators everywhere have observed a drastic increase in automated traffic—bots—and in most cases attribute much or all of…
As part of multi-pronged effort towards deregulation, the Federal Trade Commission has asked the public to identify any and all “anti-competitive” regulations. Working with our friends at Authors Alliance, EFF answered, calling attention to a set of anti-competitive regulations that many don’t recognize as such: the triennial exemptions to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium…
The Trump administration has been heavily invested in consolidating all of the government’s information into a single searchable, or perhaps AI-queryable, super database. The compiling of all of this information is being done with the dubious justification of efficiency and modernization–however, in many cases, this information was originally siloed for important reasons: to protect your…
“Pernicious.” “Unprecedented… cringe-worthy.” “Egregious.” “Shocking.” These are just some of the words that federal judges used in recent weeks to describe President Trump’s politically motivated and vindictive executive orders targeting law firms that have employed people or represented clients or causes he doesn’t like. But our favorite word by far is “unconstitutional.” EFF was one…