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At the end of every year, we look back at the last 12 months and evaluate what has changed for the better (and worse) for digital rights. While we can be frustrated—hello ongoing attacks on encryption—overall it’s always an exhilarating reminder of just how far we’ve come since EFF was founded over 33 years ago. Just the scale alone it’s breathtaking. Digital rights started as a niche, future-focused issue that we would struggle to explain to nontechnical people; now it’s deeply embedded into all of our lives.
The legislative, court, and agency fights around the world this year also helped us see and articulate a common thread: the need for a “privacy first” approach to laws and technology innovation. As we wrote in a new white paper aptly entitled “Privacy First: A Better Way to Address Online Harms,” many of the ills of today’s internet have a single thing in common, and it is that they are built on a business model of corporate surveillance and behavioral advertising. Addressing that problem could help us make great strides in a range of issues, and avoid many of the the terrible likely impacts of many of today’s proposed “solutions.”
Instead of considering proposals that would censor speech and put children’s access to internet resources at the whims of state attorneys general, we could be targeting the root cause of the concern: internet companies’ collection, storage, sales, and use of our personal information and activities to feed their algorithms and ad services. Police go straight to tech companies for your data or the data on everyone who was near a certain location. And that’s when they even bother with a court-overseen process, rather than simply issuing a subpoena, showing up and demanding it, or buying data from data brokers. If we res
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