EFFector Volume 37, Issue 14

🎃 A Full Month of Privacy Tips From EFF

Welcome to an all-new EFFector, your regular digest on everything digital rights from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In our 831st issue: An attack on encryption in the UK, shocking new details about abortion surveillance case in Texas, and small steps to take control of your privacy online.

When you lose your rights online, you lose them in real life. Become an EFF member today!

Featured Story: It's Opt Out October at EFF

Taking control of your online privacy can feel like a full-time job. But it can be a lot easier—maybe even fun!—if you break it up into smaller tasks and tackle one project at a time. With Opt Out October, EFF wants to help you do just that. Each weekday this month, we're sharing a different step you can take to opt out of big tech's surveillance machine.

Our first tip focuses on establishing some privacy basics. Namely, two security fundamentals: using strong passwords (a password manager helps simplify this) and two-factor authentication for your online accounts. Together, they can significantly improve your online privacy by making it much harder for your data to fall into the hands of a stranger.

Other pointers are designed to cut off access to your data to those who would like to collect it, including disabling ad tracking on your phone (Tip 3), decluttering your apps (Tip 4), and installing Privacy Badger to block online trackers (Tip 6). We also explain how you can request your personal information from data brokers—and learn what they think they know about you (Tip 2).

Online privacy isn’t dead. But tech giants have done their best to make protecting it as annoying as possible. With these incremental tweaks to the services we use, we can throw sand in the gears of the surveillance machine and opt out of the ways tech companies attempt to optimize us into ad-viewing machines. EFF is also pushing companies to make more privacy-protective defaults the norm, but until that happens, it'll be on all of us to dig into the settings.

READ MORE…

‌EFF Updates

👮 ABORTION SURVEILLANCE: For months, police have tried to portray a search that used 83,000 cameras to track a woman who had an abortion as a "missing person" case. Flock Safety, which sells the vehicle-tracking ALPR cameras, has even called coverage of the case "clickbait." New documents obtained by EFF show the shocking truth: Deputies did investigate this woman's abortion as a “death investigation,” they did use Flock’s ALPR network to track her down, and they did consult prosecutors about charging her.

📍 BLUETOOTH TRACKERS: Security researchers recently uncovered a series of vulnerabilities with Life360’s Tile Bluetooth trackers that make it easy for stalkers and the company itself to track the location of these devices. We’ve been raising concerns about these types of trackers since they were first introduced. On our blog, we explain why every company involved in the location tracker industry has the responsibility to create safeguards for people, not just their lost keys.

🇬🇧 PRIVACY IN THE UK: The UK government is reportedly once again demanding that Apple create a backdoor into its encrypted backup services. The only difference is that this time they're allegedly only asking to break into the encrypted cloud backups of British users. That doesn’t make it any better. Breaking end-to-end encryption for one country breaks it for everyone. As we write on our blog, these repeated attempts to weaken encryption violates fundamental human rights and destroys our right to private spaces.

🎙 GATE CRASHING: Check out Gate Crashing, EFF's new video series where we talk to people who have used the internet to take nontraditional paths to the very traditional worlds of journalism, creativity, and criticism. In our first episode, "Fanfiction Becomes Mainstream," we're talking to the co-creators of The Rec Center newsletter about how they honed their media criticism skills in fandom spaces.

"This is a way to kind of break it down into small tasks that you can do every day and accomplish a lot. Like by the end of it, you will have taken back a considerable amount of your privacy."

EFF's Thorin Klosowski in this week's EFFector audio companion on how small steps to protect your privacy can build up into big differences. Hear our discussion with Thorin here.

Fresh EFF Gear Is Here

Show off your support for EFF with hot digital rights merch from our online store. Just in: A "Let's Sue the Government" ringer tee to send the signal that our rights are not optional.

In addition to EFF shirts and hoodies, we have a wide variety of freedom-supporting swag in stock, including (extremely popular) liquid core gaming dice, HTTP playing cards, and a tactile Lady Justice braille sticker.

MiniLinks

🗣️ Free Speech

• "Apple Took Down These ICE-Tracking Apps. The Developers Aren't Giving Up" (Wired)

• "The Trump Administration Is Reshaping What 'Doxing' Means" (NOTUS)

🔒 Privacy

• "70,000 government ID photos exposed in Discord user hack" (NBC News)

• "Amazon’s Ring plans to scan everyone’s face at the door" (Washington Post)

• "California AG sues El Cajon for unlawful license plate data sharing" (CBS 8)

💡 Creativity and Innovation

• "A Powerhouse Writer Found One Word to Change the Debate About Tech" (New York Times)

• "PERA Remains a Serious Threat to Efforts Against Bad Patents" (EFF)

🗝️ Security

• "Spyware maker NSO Group confirms acquisition by US investors" (TechCrunch)

Announcements

EFF Events

• EFF Members' Speakeasy 🗽 in New York City, NY | Oct. 18
• Cory Doctorow on Enshittification (the Book) 💩 at Public Works in San Francisco, CA | Oct. 20
• EFF Members' Speakeasy 🌲 in Portland, OR | Oct. 25
• EFF at TechCrunch Disrupt 💻 in San Francisco, CA | Oct. 27-29

EFF Opportunities

• Spring 2026 Legal Internship

Corporate Giving and Sponsorships

• EFF thanks the organizations that support our work. To learn more about how your team can make an impact, visit https://eff.org/thanks.

Get in the Fight

What the future will look like is being decided today. Join the movement to protect our digital rights.

Whether it’s governments trying to censor the internet, private companies exploiting our data for profit, or police using advanced technologies to track our every move, EFF is resisting the forces threatening our digital freedom.

Technology should serve all people, not just the powerful. With your support, we can take back control.