Notices by Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff@mastodon.social), page 29

“You see social media users exploiting the instruction-following nature of LLMs to ask about internal details of how the bot was set up,” EFF’s Jacob Hoffman-Andrews told Sherwood News — it doesn’t always work, “but it's funny when it happens.”
https://sherwood.news/tech/elon-musk-didnt-rid-twitter-of-bots-x-is-paying-armies-of-them-for-slop/

Join EFF's livestream today @ 10 AM PST! Catch David Greene, Mike Masnick, and Daphne Keller for "The U.S. Supreme Court Takes on the Internet" https://eff.org/livestream-scotus

Digital spaces enable LGBTQ+ people to engage with their gender and sexual orientation, but it can be daunting to give up any kind of privacy online while doing so.

Here's a guide to protecting your identities online, from using a VPN to obscuring faces.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/beyond-pride-month-protecting-digital-identities-lgbtq-people

LISTEN: EFF’s Molly Buckley joins Idaho Reports to discuss new laws requiring age verification to access so-called “harmful content” online, and the privacy concerns that arise with collecting sensitive personal data. https://soundcloud.com/idaho-reports/episode-age-verification-and-privacy-on-the-internet

The risk is clear: Without strong privacy protections in the #UNCybercrimeTreaty, we face increased government overreach, unchecked surveillance, and transnational repression. Countries must stand firm: defeat the treaty or limit its scope.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/un-cybercrime-draft-convention-dangerously-expands-state-surveillance-powers

Victory! EFF spoke up against proposals that would have empowered patent trolls and endangered software developers. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/victory-eff-supporters-beat-uspto-proposal-wreck-patent-reviews

Last year, @USPTO proposed rules that would have weakened the US patent review system. EFF and our supporters spoke up against them, and the worst parts are out. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/victory-eff-supporters-beat-uspto-proposal-wreck-patent-reviews

“Almost every police department in the nation has a device called the Cellebrite, which is a device built for extracting data from phones, and it also has some capability to unlock phones,” EFF’s @cooperq told The @theverge. https://www.theverge.com/24199357/fbi-trump-rally-shooter-phone-thomas-matthew-crooks-quantico-mdtf

Will recent U.S. Supreme Court opinions change your rights online? Join @davidgreene @mmasnick and @daphnehk for "The U.S. Supreme Court Takes on the Internet" streaming live on Thursday, July 18 at 10:00 AM PT. eff.org/livestream-scotus

As a new burst of misinformation/disinformation floods the internet this week, hear @alicetiara discuss why seemingly ludicrous conspiracy theories get so many views and followers, and when fact-checking does and doesn’t work.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/03/podcast-episode-so-you-think-youre-critical-thinker

As we told the court, users are far better off when publishers make editorial decisions free from government mandates.

Laws that allow the government to grant favored speakers special access to the platforms, and silence disfavored speakers are inconsistent with the constitution.

Victory! Supreme Court correctly rules that social media platforms have First Amendment rights to curate and edit the speech of others they deliver to their users.

The Supreme Court’'s ruling is a big win for users and the First Amendment. It recognizes that the government has a very limited role in dictating what social media platforms must and must not publish. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/platforms-have-first-amendment-right-curate-speech-weve-long-argued-supreme-1

The SFPD wants to get a robot dog. Under A.B. 481, the city’s Board of Supervisors has a regulatory duty to probe into this intended purchase—including potentially blocking it altogether. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/sfpds-intended-purchase-robot-dog-triggers-board-supervisors-oversight-obligations

Hacks and data breaches of sensitive age verification information are not a hypothetical concern; it is simply a matter of when the data will be exposed, as this breach shows.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/hack-age-verification-company-shows-privacy-danger-social-media-laws

必须设置安全性强的唯一密码，这没有想象中那么难。https://ssd.eff.org/zh-hans/module/creating-strong-passwords

If data from Minnesota is indicative of what’s happening in the rest of the country, then police are using drones more and more (and spending a lot more money on them too). https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/police-are-using-drones-more-and-spending-more-them

Las contraseñas fuertes y únicas son una necesidad, y no es tan difícil de lograr como se podría pensar. https://ssd.eff.org/es/module/creando-contrase%C3%B1as-seguras

Close to 75% of all police drone use in Minnesota is to survey accidents and officer training. That’s an expensive training toy–but also one that can very easily cross the line into surveillance. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/police-are-using-drones-more-and-spending-more-them

Governments, law enforcement agencies, and even private citizens use malware to circumvent encryption and to spy on users. Knowing how it works can help you protect yourself. https://ssd.eff.org/module/how-do-i-protect-myself-against-malware

There’s no real upside for consumers to allow gen AI to train on their data and there are risks that are still being studied, EFF’s Jacob Hoffman-Andrews told @cnbc. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/12/biggest-risks-of-gen-ai-in-your-private-life-chatgpt-gemini-copilot.html