Digital Rights Are Everyone’s Business, and Yours Can Join the Fight!

EFF update
6 days 19 hours ago

Companies large and small are doubling down on digital rights, and we’re excited to see more and more of them join EFF. We’re first and always an organization who fights for users, so you might be asking: Why does EFF work with corporate donors, and why do they want to work with us?

SHOW YOUR COMPANY SUPPORTS A BETTER DIGITAL FUTURE

JOIN EFF TODAY

Businesses want to work with EFF for two reasons:

  1. They, their employees, and their customers believe in EFF’s values.
  2. They know that when EFF wins, we all win.

Both customers and employees alike care about working with organizations they know share their values. And issues like data privacy, sketchy uses of surveillance, and free expression are pretty top of mind for people these days. Research shows that today’s working adults take philanthropy seriously, whether they’re giving organizations their money or their time. For younger generations (like the Millennial EFFer writing this blog post!) especially, feeling like a meaningful part of the fight for good adds to a sense of purpose and fulfillment. Given the choice to spend hard-earned cash with techno-authoritarians versus someone willing to take a stand for digital freedom: We’ll take option two, thanks.

When EFF wins, users win. Standing up for the ability to access, use, and build on technology means that a handful of powerful interests won’t have unfair advantages over everyone else. Whether it’s the fight for net neutrality, beating back patent trolls in court, protecting the right to repair and tinker, or pushing for decentralization and interoperability, EFF’s work can build a society that supports creativity and innovation; where established players aren’t allowed to silence the next generation of creators. Simply put: Digital rights are good for business!

The trust of EFF’s membership is based on 35 years of speaking truth to power, whether it’s on Capitol Hill or in Silicon Valley (and let’s be honest, if EFF was Big Tech astroturf, we’d drive nicer cars). EFF will always lead the work and invite supporters to join us, not the other way around. EFF will gratefully thank the companies who join us and offer employees and customers ways to get involved, too. EFF won’t take money from Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, or Tesla, and we won’t endorse or sponsor a company, service, or product. Most importantly: EFF won’t alter the mission or the message to meet a donor’s wishes, no matter how much they’ve donated.

A few of the ways your team can support EFF:

  1.  Cash donations
  2. Sponsoring an EFF event
  3. Providing an in-kind product or service
  4. Matching your employees’ gifts
  5. Boosting our messaging

Ready to join us in the fight for a better future? Visit eff.org/thanks.

Tierney Hamilton

Data Brokers Are Ignoring Privacy Law. We Deserve Better.

EFF update
1 week ago

Of the many principles EFF fights for in consumer data privacy legislation, one of the most basic is a right to access the data companies have about you. It’s only fair. So many companies collect information about us without our knowledge or consent. We at least should have a way to find out what they purport to know about our lives.

Yet a recent paper from researchers at the University of Californian-Irvine found that, of 543 data brokers in California’s data broker registry at time of publishing, 43 percent failed to even respond to requests to access data.

43 percent of registered data brokers in California failed to even respond to requests to access data, one study shows.

Let’s stop there for a second. That’s more than four in ten companies from an industry that makes its money from collecting and selling our personal information, ignoring one of our most basic rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act: the right to know what information companies have about us.

Such failures violate the law. If this happens to you, you should file a complaint with the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) and the California Attorney General's Office. 

This is particularly galling because it’s not easy to file a request in the first place. As these researchers pointed out, there is no streamlined process for these time-consuming requests. People often won’t have the time or energy to see them through. Yet when someone does make the effort to file a request, some companies still feel just fine ignoring the law and their customers completely.

Four in ten data brokers are leaving requesters on read, in violation of the law and our privacy rights. That’s not a passing grade in anyone’s book.

Without consequences to back up our rights, as this research illustrates, many companies will bank on not getting caught, or factor weak slaps on the wrist into the cost of doing business.

This is why EFF fights for bills that have teeth. For example, we demand that people have the right to sue for privacy violations themselves—what’s known as a private right of action. Companies hate this form of enforcement, because it can cost them real money when they flout the law.

When the CCPA started out as a ballot initiative, it had a private right of action, including to enforce access requests. But when the legislature enacted the CCPA (in exchange for the initiative’s proponents removing it from the ballot), corporate interests killed the private right of action in negotiations.

We encourage the California Privacy Protection Agency and the California Attorney General’s Office, which both have the authority to bring these companies to task under the CCPA, to look into these findings. Moving forward, we all have to continue to fight for better laws, to strengthen existing laws, and call on states to enforce the laws on their books to respect everyone’s privacy. Data brokers must face real consequences for brazenly flouting our privacy rights.

Hayley Tsukayama

【反戦アピール】戦争を止めよう！　沖縄・西日本ネットワーク「東京行動」＝丹原美穂

日本ジャーナリストクラブ（JCJ）
1 week ago
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