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An EFF investigation of public records acquired from dozens of state and local law enforcement agencies has uncovered a widely-used mass surveillance technology. Americans are accustomed to hearing about how the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and even the domestically-focused Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have illegally swept up massive amounts of data on people living in the United States—but what about the state and local police? Fog Data Science LLC, a previously unknown company, provides law enforcement with easy and often warrantless access to the precise and continuous geolocation of hundreds of millions of unsuspecting Americans, collected through their smartphone apps and then aggregated by shadowy data brokers.
Internet users’ private messages, files, and photos of everyday people are increasingly being examined by tech companies, which check the data against government databases. While this is not a new practice, the public is being told this massive scanning should extend to nearly every reach of their online activity so that police can more productively investigate crimes related to child sexual abuse images, sometimes called CSAM. We don’t know much about how the public gets watched in this way. That’s...
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overruled a half century of precedent supporting the constitutional right to abortion access, numerous states have moved towards making abortion illegal and restricting additional reproductive health services. In South Carolina, Republican state Senators Richard Cash, Rex F. Rice and Daniel B. Verdin III introduced Senate Bill 1373 seeking to criminalize abortions. The bill would have also made it a crime to “aid, abet, or conspire with someone to procure an abortion,” which includes “providing information...
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Surveillance Self-Defense
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Surveillance Self-Defense is EFF's online guide to defending yourself and your friends from surveillance by using secure technology and developing careful practices.
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Privacy Badger
Description:
Privacy Badger is an install-and-forget browser add-on that stops advertisers and trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web.
