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経済産業省は、工場を建設する目的で平成27年（1月～12月期）に1,000平方メートル以上の用地を取得した製造業、ガス業、熱供給業、電気業の事業者を対象に「工場立地動向調査」を実施し、結果を取りまとめました。

4月5日から9日まで、韓国のソウルにおいて、日中韓自由貿易協定(FTA)交渉の第10回交渉会合(局長/局次長会合)が開催されます。

経済産業省は、昨年10月に「活力あふれる『ビンテージ・ソサエティ』の実現に向けた取組に係る研究会」を立ち上げ、検討を重ね、今般報告書をとりまとめました。

交通事故の削減や渋滞緩和、環境負荷低減等の課題解決が期待される協調ITS（※）の実現普及に必要とされる地図データベースの整備や維持・更新のコスト削減に役立つ日本発の国際規格が制定されました。

平成28年3月4日に、東京電力からありました改正電気事業法に基づく会社分割に係る申請について、このたび申請のとおり認可しました。

Are you a California resident? Then we've got exciting news for you: there's a tool just for you that lets you take a single, relatively easy step to protect your privacy. 

It's called a DROP request. (That's Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, if you're fancy). This one bit of paperwork lets you tell every data broker registered in the state of California that you'd like them to delete your information from their databases and request they stop selling and sharing your information. 

Here are some things to know about DROP. 

(Don’t want all the details and want to just learn how to file a request? Skip to this section.)

What does a request do?

Filing a request on the DROP will send a request to delete and opt-out of sale to all the data brokers in California's registry. Data brokers are companies that collect information about people, repackage that information, and sell it. As of time of writing, a single DROP request reaches 614 brokers.

After August 1, once data brokers receive a request, they will have 45 days to address the request. 

DROP officially launched on Jan. 1 of this year, but companies have until Aug. 1 to begin complying with requests. That means if you file a request now, you'll be in on the ground floor.

Didn't I hear about this before?

If you pay attention to EFF, you sure did. With your help, we advocated for the law creating the DROP tool, the Delete Act. As we said then, we needed the DROP because Californians have a right to request that companies delete information collected about them, and a right to opt-out of having businesses sell information about them. Yet, in reality, making those requests is an incredibly time-consuming and tedious process. Filing each request is hard. Plus, because data brokers buy, sell, and exchange information with so many companies (and each other) people may not even know who to file a request with. By linking a request to California's data broker registry, DROP cuts this process down considerably.

We advocated for DROP and the Delete Act because it makes our privacy law more user-friendly, which gives us better control over our data and reduces the risks that the uncontrolled collection and sale of personal information creates in our everyday lives. 

What's in it for me?

Filing a request benefits you in a few ways. For one, data brokers are often how spammers (or companies that act like spammers) get your email address, phone number, and other ways of contacting you. Removing yourself from data broker lists could lead to a decrease in these kinds of messages. Second, reducing the number of companies that have your personal information also improves your personal cybersecurity, as it decreases the number of firms with your information who could be hacked. Third and finally, it gives you an opportunity to exert more control over how your personal information is collected and used—an important element of privacy. Unless you opt out, data brokers can sell your private information to predatory companies, scammers, stalkers, insurance companies, and law enforcement.

What kinds of information will (and won't) be deleted?

The California Privacy Protection Agency, which administers the DROP, has a great resource explaining what data are and are not included in a request. But in summary, a request will often deal with identifying information such as: social security number, precise geolocation, browsing history, email address, and phone numbers. It will also enter a request to delete guesses that data brokers may have made about you based on identifying information, such as political views, inferences about your health—inferences about pregnancy or chronic illness, for example, that may be based on purchases or browsing history.

Not all information will be deleted. Some information, such as vehicle or real estate ownership, contains information that is a matter of public record. 

If there is a specific data broker you'd like to be able to retain and continue selling your data, the system also gives you a way to remove them from the list of brokers that get any given request. 

How do I file?

Head to the California Privacy Protection Agency's DROP website to start your request. Before you start, there are a few pieces of information you may want to gather for your request, such as your advertising ID or your VIN number, if you want this information to be deleted from data broker databases. 

The agency does ask to collect some personal information—name, address, phone number, email address, etc.—in order to fulfill a request. (Yes, there is an irony to this.) This is to verify that you're the right person asking for your deletion and opt-out request in any given database, and the agency itself is bound to its terms of service that say they won't sell or share it for other purposes.  

If you're interested in filing a request for someone else, such as an elderly relative drowning in junk mail, you can also do that but will need to attest that you're filing for someone else who is a resident of California. 

Once you've filed, you will get a DROP ID, which you can use to check in on your request. If you lose this ID, you can contact the agency to recover it, but keep it in a safe place if you want to check in on the status of your request.  

If I file once, am I done forever?

Unfortunately, no. While the opt-out of sale request should last indefinitely, California's privacy law still allows companies to collect information without asking for permission first in most cases. That means data brokers are likely to continue to collect information for profiles of you—but they will will have less data and be limited in how they use it after an opt-out request. New data brokers may also register with the state after you file your request. And DROP won't stop companies who aren't registered data brokers, like Google, from collecting and sharing your personal information.

Two things can be true. DROP is a fantastic tool to help more people exercise their California privacy rights. We also still need even stronger privacy laws to make things more fair for everyday people. 

That fact shouldn't undercut the power of this tool, but it does mean that you may want to make updating your request a regular part of a broader plan to manage your digital footprint. For example, might we suggest doing it as a part of Opt-Out October—a thing we totally made up but also totally stand behind?

What if I'm not in California?

Also unfortunately for those who don't live in California, this tool only works for California residents. But it's not all bad news. Versions of the Delete Act have been introduced around the country, and many regulators are monitoring how California's system works to see whether a similar system might work in their own states. Residents of all states can use EFF’s Opt-Out October guide to bolster their online privacy and limit the ways that data brokers harvest their personal data. 

令和8年7月21日付　総務省人事

第141回サービス統計・企業統計部会

This document combines a baseline synthesis report and the results of a national validation workshop to create a national roadmap for strengthening community-centered connectivity initiatives in the…

There’s a new boogeyman in the battles over AI: so-called “stealth crawlers.” We’ll admit it—the term “stealth crawlers” sounds quite nefarious. In reality, they’re anything but.

“Stealth crawlers” are simply automated tools to access and collect public web data—without disclosing the user’s identity. Private crawlers like these facilitate all kinds of important work that benefits the public, including investigative reporting, academic research, cybersecurity protection, and more.

Anonymous crawling enables some of the most publicly beneficial uses of the open web.

Many publishers want to unmask crawlers anyways—and are pushing for new legislation that would give them new powers to do so. These legislative proposals threaten the open web, user privacy, and valuable research without directly addressing the problems they’re supposedly intending to solve.

Alarmingly, these harmful proposals are gaining traction. The New York state legislature has already passed such a bill, the NY Stealth Crawler Protection Act, which is now on Governor Hochul’s desk. We expect to see similar bills introduced in other states, and potentially in Congress. That’s a big problem for the open web—and the many benefits it provides.

Anonymous crawling is worth protecting

Anonymous crawling enables some of the most publicly beneficial uses of the open web. Researchers, journalists, and other watchdog groups use unidentified automated tools to gather the information necessary to hold powerful institutions accountable and protect the public.

Anonymous crawling fuels important investigative journalism. For example, The Markup, a non-profit news site, used anonymous crawlers to investigate potentially anti-competitive practices by tech companies, such as Amazon’s tendency to prioritize Amazon brands and Amazon-exclusive products over competitors with higher ratings. The crawlers identified themselves as ordinary Firefox browsers to web servers, which allowed The Markup to understand how Amazon search results pages would appear to ordinary users. Similarly, ProPublica used an automated tool designed to simulate an ordinary Amazon customer to reveal that the site steered shoppers to more expensive products over cheaper alternatives.

Anonymous web scraping is also crucial for cybersecurity professionals, who use automated tools to monitor the web for information that helps them protect against malicious attackers. Privacy tools, including EFF’s own Privacy Badger, also crawl sites anonymously to identify trackers without compromising user privacy.

However, without the ability to scrape anonymously, these tools would likely be blocked. Sites can—and do—block crawlers operated by researchers, journalists, and activists who criticize them. For example, Facebook shut down accounts belonging to researchers who used automated tools to study misinformation on the platform and demanded that they take down published research. Many sites block automated access by anyone who hasn’t paid to crawl public webpages.    

Unmasking crawlers threatens the open web

News publishers—and their allies in government—say that unmasking crawlers is necessary to protect news organizations from technological strain caused by AI-related crawling, and fears that AI could reduce news sites’ traffic and ad revenue. These are legitimate concerns.

But enacting broad, reactionary restrictions on automated access is not the answer. Legislation targeting anonymous crawling threatens the open web, user privacy, and valuable research without actually addressing these technological and potential economic harms of scraping.

The New York state legislature recently passed the NY Stealth Crawler Protection Act, a law that would make it illegal to crawl news websites without revealing who is operating the crawler and all possible future uses of the data collected by the crawler. The law would give websites the power to obtain court orders that unmask anyone using an unidentified crawler—without any evidence that they broke the law.

Laws like the New York bill sweep far beyond AI, and do not meaningfully address the technological or potential harms of AI-related web scraping. These policies would chill beneficial crawling by allowing publishers to veto lawful public access, giving them the power to block not just bad actors, but also security professionals, researchers, dissidents, or anyone who has not paid for a license to view public text. This needlessly undermines the free and open internet.

Digital news publishers—like most websites—face real technological challenges in the AI era. While web crawling has been around for decades, with the proliferation of AI, crawlers now collect far more public web data than they used to. This pushes servers closer to their maximum capacity, and if some bots collect information too aggressively, they may strain web servers to the point that it degrades site performance. The problem is not anonymity—so unmasking crawlers won’t solve it. The real problem is overaggressive crawling, which can be effectively addressed with technical measures that target harmful conduct without impeding anonymous access to information.

A better path forward

There are other, far less harmful ways to protect publishers from the harms these “stealth crawler” laws claim to target. Addressing the harms of AI-related crawling requires policies that narrowly target the causes of these issues–without undermining free expression and the open web. Policies that target crawlers and scrapers are anything but.

　帯には「伝説のフィールドワーカーによる遺稿集」とある。45歳という若さで、白血病により世を去った俊英の足跡を、学者仲間が惜しみながら編んだのが本書だ。著者の打越正行は『ヤンキーと地元』（筑摩書房）において参与観察という手法で、一躍注目を浴びた社会学者だった。　ひたすら観察に徹するという姿勢で、地元のヤンキー集団に受け入れられ、パシリという立場に自分をおいて社会内側から分析していく。並の感覚ではとてもまらない立ち位置。そこでの観察を「新章」というインタビュー（それも沖縄言葉う..

令和8年7月20日付　総務省人事

　近年、生成AIの急速な普及に伴い、膨大なデータを処理する「データセンター」の建設が世界中、そして日本国内でも急ピッチで進んでいます。　これに伴い、メディアや政財界では「データセンターによる電力需要増に対応するため、原発の再稼働や新増設が必要だ」という論調が強まっています。しかし、それは本当でしょうか。　データセンターの急増は、単に電力消費の問題にとどまらず、地域の水資源の枯渇や排熱による環境負荷、騒音、電気代上昇、景観破壊などの、さまざまな地域課題・社会問題を世界中で引き起..

令和8年7月19日付　総務省人事

ノンフィクション･ジャンルからチョイスした本の紹介です(刊行順･販価は税別)◆二神慎之介『日本のクマを追う━激動の自然環境を生きる、ヒグマとツキノワグマ』ヤマケイ新書 7/3刊 1500円クマが人間を襲うという事件が連日のように報道され、クマ関連書籍が書店に溢れる。激動する自然環境のなかを生きるクマたちの真の姿はどんなものなのか？ 10年以上、ヒグマ、ツキノワグマを追い求めている動物カメラマンの著者が、クマ事情をつぶさに伝え、ヒトとクマとの共存方法を探る。オールカラー288ペ..

2026年7月10日、チャールズ英国王の次男ヘンリー王子が4年間の不和を吹き飛ばし、自ら画策した＜家族ぐるみのお茶会＞でマスコミ界に再登場しました。　2025年7月17日、ヘンリー王子はアフリカ・アンゴラの地雷原を歩きました。　母ダイアナ妃の遺志を継いで、地雷除去に取り組んでいます。　が、マスコミはあまり取り上げませんでした。世間は、この母子の三面記事ネタにしか興味がないようです。

Reversing course, Flock Safety—the surveillance technology vendor most known for its extensive network of automated license plate readers—has announced that it will end a pilot for its acoustic gunshot detection devices to identify signs of “human distress.”

...public pressure can sometimes work to influence both companies and lawmakers that control a city’s purse strings to discontinue or divest from harmful products...

In October 2025, EFF warned the public that Flock was rolling out a new feature called “Distress Detection” that would be deployed through their acoustic gunshot detection devices (formerly known as Flock Raven, now called Audio Detection). This feature purported to use high-powered microphones scattered throughout a city to search for sounds of human distress, with original advertisements from the product indicating it would search for “screaming.” (Since the publication of our original blog post, Flock quietly amended the ad on this webpage to say “distress” instead of “screaming.”)

Now, Flock has published a blog post stating that “[a]fter careful consideration and community consultation, we decided to remove the feature.” Good riddance. 

We said it when the product was announced and we’ll say it again: this was a misguided and dangerous feature because of the civil liberties concerns it poses, the possibility it could summon armed police to every loud interaction happening on the street, and because in several places this type of spying would be illegal under state eavesdropping laws. 

We were not quiet about this potential new feature. Flock even mentioned our concern about Distress Detection in an attempt to rebut our opposition to the mass surveillance their products enable.

The suspension of Distress Detection, however, does not mean that these high-powered microphones are now magically safe or beyond our concern. Acoustic gunshot detection is still a dangerous and often highly inaccurate technology that has resulted in real world harm, as in Chicago where it resulted in police shooting at children lighting fireworks. As Flock itself states, “No acoustic system is perfect, and we don't claim otherwise.” But police response to a situation where they believe guns are actively in use seems like a pretty high-stakes situation to be making, selling, and deploying technology known to be imperfect. Flock’s devices also listen for more than just gunshots. Their marketing materials admit to be listening for “community disruption,” which includes “non-violent” threats like car sideshows and fireworks. 

Flock’s failed attempt to roll out Distress Detection teaches us a few important lessons about the current state of police surveillance. First, we should not assume that just because these companies are large and well-funded, that does not ensure that they are complying with local privacy laws before floating new products to customers. Second, companies roll out and police adopt invasive technology under the justification that it will be used to address our society’s very worst crimes. However, both the companies and police will leverage deployed surveillance infrastructure to introduce new uses without necessarily seeking the consent or approval of the public. Gunshot detecting microphones eventually being used to listen for screaming is exactly the type of mission creep that we’ve seen happen with other pieces of surveillance technology, including Flock’s license plate readers. Finally, gun violence is too serious and complex of an issue to purport to solve with one flawed piece of technology. It has become too easy for police and cities to listen to the fancy marketing pitches of tech companies claiming they’re going to solve all crime instead of doing the hard work of addressing the root causes of societal issues. And, in the meantime, that technology creates more problems and hazards for the communities they blanket in police surveillance. 

As we’ve also seen with people across the country pushing back on Flock license plate reader contracts in their communities, public pressure can sometimes work to influence both companies and lawmakers that control a city’s purse strings to discontinue or divest from harmful products. Flock’s decision to end “Distress Detection” for human voices is a win.  

This month, we celebrate 36 years of EFF and a mission that is bigger than any one of us. Thanks to EFF, communities around the world are demanding that technology protects their freedom, advances justice, and opens doors to opportunity. That's not a small thing—it's a life's work worth continuing.

If you are committed to staying on the cutting edge of digital rights issues, I'd like to invite you to consider taking that commitment one step further by joining EFF’s Lighthouse Society, our way to acknowledge and thank the community of supporters who are including EFF in their legacy plans.

Learn About the Lighthouse Society

By including EFF in your will or estate plans, you can ensure that EFF’s work and values don't just live beyond you; they thrive because of you. A legacy gift is one of the most powerful ways to say: This matters, and I want it to matter long after I'm gone.

Your gift will fuel our mission for generations by protecting freedom, advancing justice, and driving innovation for communities who need it most. There is still so much more to do, so much more to fight for. With your foresight, it can go so much further.

Planned giving is also more flexible than you might realize. A bequest in your will, a simple beneficiary designation, or another estate planning option can all make a profound difference, often without affecting your finances today.

Get in touch and learn more about what's possible with the Lighthouse Society. Reach out to Jocelyn Wicker at majorgifts@eff.org or fill out our online form to share your intention to give. Thank you for considering a legacy that will carry this work forward for years to come.

　国際協力NGOセンター（JANIC）では、今年5月に成立した「国家情報会議設置法」の動向や、今後さらなる法制化への議論が進むとみられる「スパイ防止法」「外国代理人制度」をめぐる動きについて、国際協力NGOをはじめとする市民社会の活動への影響を考えるウェビナーを開催いたします。スパイ防止法や外国代理人制度は、安全保障上の観点から議論される一方で、その制度設計によっては、海外財団・NGO・国際機関との協働、助成金の受領、政策提言活動などに影響を及ぼす可能性があります。　　　　と..