The Marin County Sheriff illegally shares the sensitive location information of millions of drivers with out-of-state and federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The Sheriff uses automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—high-speed cameras… Read More ›
Tag Archive for ‘Locational Privacy’
Illinois Bought Invasive Phone Location Data From Banned Broker Safegraph
The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) purchased access to precise geolocation data about over 40% of the state’s population from Safegraph, the controversial data broker recently banned from Google’s app store. The details of this transaction are described in publicly-available… Read More ›
Why Data-Sharing Mandates Are the Wrong Way To Regulate Tech
The tech companies behind the so-called “sharing economy” have drawn the ire of brick-and-mortar businesses and local governments across the country. For example, take-out apps such as GrubHub and UberEats have grown into a hundred-billion-dollar industry over the past decade,… Read More ›
It’s Time for Google to Resist Geofence Warrants and to Stand Up for Its Affected Users
EFF would like to thank former intern Haley Amster for drafting this post, and former legal fellow Nathan Sobel for his assistance in editing it. The Fourth Amendment requires authorities to target search warrants at particular places or things—like a… Read More ›
Data Brokers are the Problem
Why should you care about data brokers? Reporting this week about a Substack publication outing a priest with location data from Grindr shows once again how easy it is for anyone to take advantage of data brokers’ stores to cause… Read More ›
Victory! Fourth Circuit Rules Baltimore’s Warrantless Aerial Surveillance Program Unconstitutional
This blog post was cowritten by EFF intern Lauren Yu. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled last week that Baltimore’s use of aerial surveillance that could track the movements of the entire city violated the Fourth… Read More ›
Emails from 2016 Show Amazon Ring's Hold on the LAPD Through Camera Giveaways
In March 2016, “smart” doorbell camera maker Ring was a growing company attempting to market its wireless smart security camera when it received an email from an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Gang and Narcotics Division, who… Read More ›
EFF at 30: Surveillance Is Not Obligatory, with Edward Snowden
To commemorate the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s 30th anniversary, we present EFF30 Fireside Chats. This limited series of livestreamed conversations looks back at some of the biggest issues in internet history and their effects on the modern web. To celebrate 30 years… Read More ›
Data Driven 2: California Dragnet—New Data Set Shows Scale of Vehicle Surveillance in the Golden State
This project is based on data processed by student journalist Olivia Ali, 2020 intern JJ Mazzucotelli, and research assistant Liam Harton, based on California Public Records Act requests filed by EFF and dozens of students at the University of Nevada, Reno Reynolds School of Journalism. … Read More ›
Forced Arbitration Thwarts Legal Challenge to AT&T’s Disclosure of Customer Location Data
Location data generated from our cell phones paint an incredibly detailed picture of our movements and private lives. Despite the sensitive nature of this data and a federal law prohibiting cellphone carriers from disclosing it, repeated unauthorized disclosures over the… Read More ›