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Tech News
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has raised objections to the U.S. government's deployment of artificial intelligence tools to help evaluate senior health insurance claims, according to reports. The group argues such automated systems are being used to assess requests tied to Medicare coverage decisions affecting elderly beneficiaries.
A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction halting enforcement of Utah's SB 73, which required adult websites to detect users' physical locations and block or age-verify anyone using a VPN. The court found the law likely violates the Constitution's restrictions on states burdening people and businesses outside their borders, since it would force sites to verify every visitor worldwide. EFF, which opposed the law, called the ruling a win for digital privacy rights.
Ohio State University expelled a student after a prank sent a profane message into a public forum, and also removed a student from its network. Nebraska banned the Computers and Academic Freedom newsletter, citing policy violations. The FBI also requested a conference attendee to reveal his leg during an event, and Playboy contacted the project for an interview. The original archive of the discussion is available on GitHub.
A federal court issued a preliminary injunction halting enforcement of Utah's SB 73, which required adult websites to detect and block VPN users or verify the physical location of visitors using privacy tools, and banned instructions on using VPNs to bypass age checks. The judge found the law likely violates the Constitution's restriction on states burdening people and businesses outside their borders, since it would effectively force sites to age-verify every visitor nationwide in case they were an obfuscating Utah resident.
A public records analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that police officers across the US frequently entered nonsensical or joking justifications—such as 'LMAO,' 'lol,' 'idk,' and random keystrokes—when required to explain searches of Flock's license plate reader database. The pattern spans roughly 2023 through 2026, showing that lack of accountability in these warrantless lookups is widespread rather than isolated.
California lawmakers passed AB 1709, which would bar platforms from offering recommendation algorithms and basic follow/like features to users under 16 starting in January. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is asking Governor Gavin Newsom to veto the bill, arguing it effectively locks minors out of most modern digital services by banning tools essential to how those platforms function.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is pushing back against a wave of lawsuits in which major rightsholders ask courts to broaden copyright protections in response to generative AI. EFF argues this mirrors past panics over VTRs, player pianos, and cameras, technologies once feared to destroy creative industries but which instead expanded them. It warns that rightsholders' 'market dilution' theory, claiming AI tools threaten creative markets simply by existing, would improperly stretch copyright law based on speculation rather than evidence.