The Senate may have a simple voice vote in the next week to move the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) quickly through the legislature, without debate, but any one senator can stop it with a hold. We need you to call your senator's office today to tell them to stop KOSA. KOSA would censor the internet and would make government officials the arbiters of what young people can see online, and would likely lead to age verification.
The Pro Codes Act is a deceptive power grab that will help giant industry associations ration access to huge swaths of U.S. law. Tell Congress not to fall for it.
The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA), S. 2140, would throw out Supreme Court rules that limit patents on abstract ideas. If PERA passes, it will open the floodgates for far more vague and overbroad software patents. It will even allow for a type of patent on human genes that the Supreme Court rightly disallowed in 2013.
No one should be allowed to take an abstract idea, add generic computer language, and get a patent. And we should never see patents on the genes that naturally occur in human bodies. But if PERA passes, that’s exactly what will happen.
We all deserve privacy in our communications, and part of that is trusting that the government will only access them within the limits of the law. But it's now clear that the government hasn’t respected any limits on the intelligence community or law enforcement. When it comes to Section 702, a law that continues to allow spying on Americans, they've ignored our rights.
This December, Section 702 is set to expire, and the current administration will try everything in their power to renew it. We think it’s time for 702 to end entirely and that any future programs must start from scratch in order to protect the privacy of digital communications. EFF will continue to fight to make sure that any bill that does renew Section 702 closes the government’s warrantless access to U.S. communications, minimizes the amount of data collected, and increases transparency. Anything less than that would signal a continued indifference, or contempt, to our right to privacy.
Tell Congress it’s time they protect our privacy!
EFF is a proud supporter of S.B. 362, authored by California State Senator Josh Becker and sponsored by Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and Californians for Consumer Privacy. It directs the California Privacy Protection Agency to create a deletion mechanism for data brokers that allows someone to make this request of every data broker with a single, verifiable consumer request.
The Protecting Kids on Social Media Act would lead to a second-class online experience for young people, mandated privacy-invasive age verification for all users, and in all likelihood, the creation of digital IDs for all U.S. citizens and residents. The bill will make it illegal for anyone under 13 to join a social media platform, and require parental consent, verified by the government, for anyone between the ages of 13 and 18 to do so. The world envisioned by the authors of this bill is one where everyone has less privacy and less power to speak out and access information online.
