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Posts Tagged electronic frontier foundation
Car Makers Spying On You And Selling Your Data
From Electronic Frontier Foundation:
In a recent New York Times article, Kashmir Hill reported how everyday moments in your car like these create a data footprint of your driving habits and routine that is, in some cases, being sold to insurance companies. Collection often happens through so-called “safe driving” programs pre-installed in your vehicle through an internet-connected service on your car or a connected car app. Real-time location tracking often starts when you download an app on your phone or tap “agree” on the dash screen before you drive your car away from the dealership lot.
The Case For Banning Surveillance Ads
From The Electronic Freedom Foundation:
The behavioral advertising industry claims that it can deliver more value to everyone through this surveillance: advertisers get to target exactly who they want to reach; publishers get paid top dollar for setting up exactly the right user with exactly the right ad, and the user wins because they are only ever shown highly relevant ads that are tailored to their interests.
And as to the claim that users “like ads, so long as they are relevant,” the evidence is very strong that this isn’t true and never was. Ad-blocking is the most successful consumer boycott in human history. When Apple gave iPhone users a one-click opt-out to block all surveillance ads, 96 percent of users clicked the button (presumably, the other four percent were confused, or they work for ad-tech companies).
Colorado Court Rules Against 3 Month Long Surveillance
From Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Last week, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled, in a case called People v. Tafoya, that three months of warrantless continuous video surveillance outside a home by the police violated the Fourth Amendment. We, along with the ACLU and the ACLU of Colorado, filed an amicus brief in the case.
Pushing Back Against Surveillance Tech
From Electronic Frontier Foundation:
At work, employee-monitoring “bosswareâ€Â puts workers’ privacy and security at risk with invasive time-tracking and “productivity†features that go far beyond what is necessary and proportionate to manage a workforce. At school, programs like remote proctoring and social media monitoring follow students home and into other parts of their online lives. And at home, stalkerware, parental monitoring “kidware†apps, home monitoring systems, and other consumer tech monitor and control intimate partners, household members, and even neighbors. In all of these settings, subjects and victims often do not know they are being surveilled, or are coerced into it by bosses, administrators, partners, or others with power over them.
The Fight Against Financial Censorship
From The Electronic Frontier Foundation:
On Thursday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency finalized its Fair Access to Financial Services rule, which will prevent banks from refusing to serve entire classes of customers that they find politically or morally unsavory. The rule is a huge win for civil liberties, and for the many sectors who have found themselves in the bad graces of corporate financial services, like cryptocurrency projects, marijuana businesses, sex worker advocacy groups, and others.
Police Can’t Force Your Password
From EFF:
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a forceful opinion today holding that the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects individuals from being forced to disclose the passcode to their devices to the police. In a 4-3 decision in Commonwealth v. Davis, the court found that disclosing a password is “testimony†protected by the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against self-incrimination.
Choosing A Strong Password Is Easier Than You Think
Posted by Brian in Tech, Threat Watch on 8/Aug/2016 07:00
From EFF:
Randomly-generated passphrases offer a major security upgrade over user-chosen passwords. Estimating the difficulty of guessing or cracking a human-chosen password is very difficult. It was the primary topic of my own PhD thesis and remains an active area of research. (One of many difficulties when people choose passwords themselves is that people aren’t very good at making random, unpredictable choices.)
Measuring the security of a randomly-generated passphrase is easy. The most common approach to randomly-generated passphrases (immortalized by XKCD) is to simply choose several words from a list of words, at random. The more words you choose, or the longer the list, the harder it is to crack. Looking at it mathematically, for k words chosen from a list of length n, there are kn possible passphrases of this type. It will take an adversary about kn/2 guesses on average to crack this passphrase. This leaves a big question, though: where do we get a list of words suitable for passphrases, and how do we choose the length of that list?
In general choosing four five-letter words is better than one long word with number substitutions and some weird characters thrown in. It’s easier to remember and vastly harder for a computer to guess.
How Did The FBI Break Into iPhone?
From the EFF:
In addition, this new method of accessing the phone raises questions about the government’s apparent use of security vulnerabilities in iOS and whether it will inform Apple about these vulnerabilities. As a panel of experts hand-picked by the White House recognized, any decision to withhold a security vulnerability for intelligence or law enforcement purposes leaves ordinary users at risk from malicious third parties who also may use the vulnerability. Thanks to a lawsuit by EFF, the government has released its official policy for determining when to disclose security vulnerabilities, the Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP).
EFF Files Brief In Support Of Defense Distributed’s 3-D Files
Posted by Brian in Law, News, Threat Watch on 1/Jan/2016 07:00
From EFF:
The underlying legal ideas stretch back to one of EFF’s earliest major legal victories. Twenty years ago, in Bernstein v. U.S. Department of Justice, a judge articulated that code is speech inrejecting so-called export restrictions on code that implements cryptographic protocols. Daniel Bernstein, a mathematics Ph.D. student, wanted to publish source code for a program to run an algorithm he developed. He objected to the State Department classification of his code as a “munition†and, with EFF’s help, sued to establish his First Amendment right to publish the code without arbitrary restrictions outlined in the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and other laws—restrictions that included registering as an arms dealer and submitting the code for governmental review.
Read EFF’s full amicus brief here.
Tell Congress Not To Authorize Section 215 of PATRIOT Act
From the EFF:
Tell Congress: Stop S. 1357. No reauthorization of Section 215 of the Patriot Act—no matter how short.
Congress has a chance to vote no on the NSA’s mass phone record surveillance under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. But NSA apologists are trying to broker a deal to extend Section 215 for another two months. That’s two more months of the NSA sweeping up millions of people’s phone records unconstitutionally. With your help, we can stop Congress from simply rubber-stamping this reauthorization. Tell Congress: no reauthorization of Section 215, no matter how short.