Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Big Lie ISPs Are Spreading in State Legislatures is That They Don’t Make Enough Money
In their effort to prevent states from protecting a free and open Internet, a small handful of massive and extraordinarily-profitable Internet service providers (ISPs) are telling state legislatures that network neutrality would hinder their ability to raise revenues to pay for upgrades and thus force them to charge consumers higher bills for Internet access. This is because state-based network neutrality will prohibit data discrimination schemes known as “paid prioritization” where the ISP charges websites and applications new tolls and relegate those that do not pay to the slow lane.
The Hypocrisy of AT&T’s “Internet Bill of Rights”
[Commentary] AT&T has decided it’s good business to advocate for an “Internet Bill of Rights.” Of course, that catchy name doesn’t in any way mean that what AT&T wants is a codified list of rights for Internet users. No, what AT&T wants is to keep a firm hold on the gains it has made in the last year at the expense of its customers’ rights. There is nothing in the history—the very recent history—of AT&T to make anyone believe that it has anyone’s actual best interests at heart.
California’s Senate Misfires on Network Neutrality, Ignores Viable Options
The California Senate approved legislation that would require Internet service providers (ISPs) in California to follow the now-repealed 2015 Open Internet Order. While well-intentioned, the legislators sadly chose an approach that is vulnerable to legal attack.
Community Broadband: Privacy, Access, and Local Control
[Commentary] Communities across the United States are considering strategies to protect residents’ access to information and their right to privacy.
Will Congress Bless Internet Fast Lanes?
[Commentary] As the Federal Communications Commission gets ready to abandon a decade of progress on net neutrality, some in Congress are considering how new legislation could fill the gap and protect users from unfair ISP practices. Unfortunately, too many lawmakers seem to be embracing the idea that they should allow ISPs to create Internet “fast lanes” -- also known as “paid prioritization,” one of the harmful practices that violates net neutrality.
Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy
As students across the United States are handed school-issued laptops and signed up for educational cloud services, the way the educational system treats the privacy of students is undergoing profound changes—often without their parents’ notice or consent, and usually without a real choice to opt out of privacy-invading technology. Students are using technology in the classroom at an unprecedented rate. One-third of all K-12 students in US schools use school-issued devices. Google Chromebooks account for about half of those machines. Across the US, more than 30 million students, teachers, and administrators use Google’s G Suite for Education (formerly known as Google Apps for Education), and that number is rapidly growing. Student laptops and educational services are often available for a steeply reduced price, and are sometimes even free. However, they come with real costs and unresolved ethical questions. In short, technology providers are spying on students—and school districts, which often provide inadequate privacy policies or no privacy policy at all, are unwittingly helping them do it.
San Francisco Passes Ordinance to Protect ISP Competition
San Francisco (CA) EFFers: you did it! Thanks in part to your phone calls and tweets to the Board of Supervisors, the Board unanimously passed an ordinance that will address the problem of landlords unfairly restricting their tenants’ choice of Internet service providers.
Under the ordinance, landlords of multi-unit buildings (four units or more) will be required to honor reasonable requests to allow service by any state-accredited ISP a tenant chooses. The ordinance was first scheduled for a vote at last week’s Board meeting, but it was delayed over a private memo that the City Attorney’s office had sent to the Board. At yesterday’s meeting (PDF), the Board went into a private session to discuss risks of litigation that might result from the measure. We don’t know exactly what came up in the private session, but we’ll be watching closely to see if major landlords and entrenched ISPs attempt to threaten the city over the ordinance.
Is Your Android Device Telling the World Where You've Been?
Do you own an Android device? Is it less than three years old? If so, then when your phone’s screen is off and it’s not connected to a Wi-Fi network, there's a high risk that it is broadcasting your location history to anyone within Wi-Fi range that wants to listen.
This location history comes in the form of the names of wireless networks your phone has previously connected to. This data is arguably more dangerous than that leaked in previous location data scandals because it clearly denotes in human language places that you've spent enough time to use the Wi-Fi.
In Android we traced this behavior to a feature introduced in Honeycomb (Android 3.1) called Preferred Network Offload (PNO). PNO is supposed to allow phones and tablets to establish and maintain Wi-Fi connections even when they’re in low-power mode (i.e. when the screen is turned off).
The goal is to extend battery life and reduce mobile data usage, since Wi-Fi uses less power than cellular data. But for some reason, even though none of the Android phones we tested broadcast the names of networks they knew about when their screens were on, many of the phones running Honeycomb or later (and even one running Gingerbread) broadcast the names of networks they knew about when their screens were turned off.
Help EFF Test Privacy Badger, Our New Tool to Stop Creepy Online Tracking
Electronic Frontier Foundation is launching a new extension for Firefox and Chrome called Privacy Badger. Privacy Badger automatically detects and blocks spying ads around the Web, and the invisible trackers that feed information to them.
Privacy Badger is EFF's answer to intrusive and objectionable practices in the online advertising industry, and many advertisers' outright refusal to meaningfully honor Do Not Track requests.
Privacy Badger is a browser-add on tool that analyzes sites to detect and disallow content that tracks you in an objectionable, non-consensual manner. When you visit websites, your copy of Privacy Badger keeps note of the "third-party" domains that embed images, scripts and advertising in the pages you visit. If a third-party server appears to be tracking you without permission, by using uniquely identifying cookies to collect a record of the pages you visit across multiple sites, Privacy Badger will automatically disallow content from that third-party tracker.
Advertisers and other third-party domains can unblock themselves in Privacy Badger by making a strong commitment to respect Do Not Track requests. By including this mechanism, Privacy Badger not only protects users who install it, but actually provides incentives for better privacy practices across the entire Web.