Age Verification Mandates Would Undermine Anonymity Online
By Jason Kelley and Adam Schwartz Age verification systems are surveillance systems. Mandatory age verification, and with it, mandatory identity verification, is the wrong approach…
Adam Schwartz
Fourth Circuit: Individuals Have a First Amendment Right to Livestream Their Own Traffic Stops
By Sophia Cope and Adam Schwartz In a partial victory for police accountability, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that the…
Victory! Another Court Protects the Right to Record Police
By Adam Schwartz and Mukund Rathi When people fear that the police are about to break the law, they pull out their phones and hit…
Victory! More Lawsuits Proceed Against Clearview’s Face Surveillance
By Adam Schwartz Face surveillance is a growing menace to racial justice, privacy, free speech, and information security. So EFF supports bans on government use…
Resisting the Menace of Face Recognition
By Adam Schwartz Face recognition technology is a special menace to privacy, racial justice, free expression, and information security. Our faces are unique identifiers, and…
Face Recognition Isn’t Just Face Identification and Verification: It’s Also Photo Clustering, Race Analysis, Real-time Tracking, and More
By Bennett Cyphers, Adam Schwartz, and Nathan Sheard Governments and corporations are tracking how we go about our lives with a unique marker that most…
Victory! Lawsuit Proceeds Against Clearview’s Face Surveillance
By Adam Schwartz Face surveillance is a growing menace to racial justice, privacy, and free speech. So EFF supports laws that ban government use of…
DHS’s Flawed Plan for Mobile Driver’s Licenses
By Adam Schwartz and Alexis Hancock Digital identification can invade our privacy and aggravate existing social inequities. Designed wrong, it might be a big step…
Clearview’s Face Surveillance Still Has No First Amendment Defense
By Adam Schwartz Clearview AI extracts faceprints from billions of people, without their consent, and uses these faceprints to help police identify suspects. This does…
Decoding California’s New Digital Vaccine Records and Potential Dangers
By Alexis Hancock, Adam Schwartz, and Jon Callas The State of California recently released what it calls a “Digital COVID-19 Vaccine Record.” It is part…
Community Control of Police Spy Tech
By Nathan Sheard and Adam Schwartz All too often, police and other government agencies unleash invasive surveillance technologies on the streets of our communities, based…
First Circuit Upholds First Amendment Right to Secretly Audio Record the Police
By Sophia Cope and Adam Schwartz EFF applauds the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit for holding that the First Amendment protects individuals…
So-called “Consent Searches” Harm Our Digital Rights
By Adam Schwartz Imagine this scenario: You’re driving home. Police pull you over, allegedly for a traffic violation. After you provide your license and registration,…
COVID-19 and Surveillance Tech: Year in Review 2020
By Adam Schwartz Location tracking apps. Spyware to enforce quarantine. Immunity passports. Throughout 2020, governments around the world deployed invasive surveillance technologies to contain the…