Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

Nonprofits and NGOs around the world were stunned last November when the Internet Society (ISOC) announced that it had agreed to sell the Public Interest Registry – the organization that manages the .ORG top-level domain (TLD) – to private equity firm Ethos Capital. The NGO community sprung to action, writing a letter to ISOC urging it to stop the sale.

“We must make sure that, in our scramble to reopen the economy, we do not overlook inequity of access to the vaccine; … and the potential that today’s vaccine passport will act as a catalyst toward tomorrow’s system of national digital identification that can be used to systematically collect and store our personal information.”

On the 10th anniversary of the Arab Spring, activists, journalists, and rights organizations voice frustration and dismay at how platform policies and content moderation procedures all too often lead to the silencing and erasure of critical voices from marginalized and oppressed communities across the region.

Many of the smartphone apps people use every day are collecting data on their users and, in order to make money, many of these apps sell that information. One of the customers for this data is the U.S. government, which regularly purchases commercially available geolocation data.

As authorities escalate their crackdown on human rights defenders and civil society organisations, rights groups call for the immediate release of detained members of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), and an end to the persecution of Egyptian civil society.

EFF urged the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to reconsider a split three-judge panel’s ruling that the Baltimore Police Department’s aerial surveillance of the city’s more than half a million residents is constitutional.

Visa, the credit card network, is trying to buy financial technology company Plaid for $5.3 billion. The merger is bad for a number of reasons.

Cover Your Tracks is about giving users the tools to fight back against the trackers, and improve the web ecosystem to provide privacy for everyone.