 Welcome to Affector from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This is the audio edition of EFF's email newsletter geared towards keeping you on the bleeding edge of your digital rights. This is Affector Volume 36, Issue 1, titled, Tools to Protect Your Privacy Online. This issue was published in January 2024, and I'm your host, Membership Advocate Christian Romero. Let's start with our top feature. EFF unveils its new street-level surveillance hub. The expanded and updated hub, a sort of field guide to police surveillance, has new or updated pages on automated license plate readers, biometric surveillance, body-worn cameras, camera networks, cell-site simulators, drones and robots, face recognition, electronic monitoring, gunshot detection, forensic extraction tools, police access to the Internet of Things, predictive policing, community surveillance apps, real-time location tracking, social media monitoring, and police databases. Next up, Privacy Badger puts you in control of widgets. If you see a widget, the widget sees you back. Privacy Badger now replaces embedded tweets, video audio players, and comments sections with, click to activate placeholders to protect your privacy. Now, let's go through some EFF updates. First up, EFF's 2024 in and out list. Since EFF was formed in 1990, we've been working hard to protect digital rights for all. As each year passes, we've come to understand the challenges and opportunities a little better, as well as what we're not willing to accept. Accordingly, here's what we'd like to see a lot more of, and a lot less of, in 2024. Next up, EFF urges Pennsylvania Supreme Court to find keyword search warrant unconstitutional. Keyword warrants that let police indiscriminately sift through search engine databases are unconstitutional dragnets that target free speech, lack particularity and probable cause, and violate the privacy of countless innocent people. The Electronic Friends Here Foundation and other organizations argued in a brief file to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. Everyone deserves to search online without police looking over their shoulder. Yet, millions of innocent Americans' privacy rights are at risk in Commonwealth v. Kurtz, the only second case of its kind to reach a state's highest court. Next up, AI watermarking won't curb disinformation. Generative AI lets people produce piles upon piles of images and words very quickly, and it would be nice if there was some way to reliably distinguish AI-generated content from human-generated content. One common proposal is that companies should incorporate watermarks into the output of their AIs. Unfortunately, watermarking schemes are unlikely to work. So far, most have proven easy to remove, and it's likely that future schemes will have similar problems. Next up, EFF asks court to uphold federal law that protects online video viewers' privacy and free expression. As millions of internet users watch videos online for news and entertainment, it is essential to uphold a federal privacy law that protects against the disclosure of everyone's viewing history. EFF argued in court last month. And for our last update, victory! Police drone footage is not categorically exempt from California's public records law. Video footage captured by police drones sent in response to 911 calls cannot be kept entirely secret from the public, a California appellate court has ruled. EFF, along with the First Amendment Coalition and the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press, had filed a friend of the court brief, arguing that categorically excluding all drone footage from public disclosure could have troubling consequences on the public's ability to understand and oversee the police drone program. And now, we've got a few announcements. Craig Newmark Philanthropies, celebrating 30 years of support for digital rights. EFF has been awarded a new $200,000 grant from Craig Newmark Philanthropies to strengthen our cybersecurity work in 2024. We are especially grateful this year as it marks 30 years of donations from Craig Newmark who joined EFF as a member just three years after our founding and four years before he launched the popular website, Craigslist. Next up, we want to shout out an organizational member. Thank you and welcome to GRIST Labs, an open source spreadsheet for collaborating on sensitive data for their support of EFF as a new leader organizational member. And for our last announcement, Speaking Freely continues. EFF's series of interviews with free speech thought leaders continues. Jillian York interviewed Dr. Caroline Eyre, an innovation fellow at Northumbria's University Center for Digital Citizens. Her research primarily focuses on the intersection between online abuse and censorship. Her current research project investigates Instagram and TikTok's approach to malicious flagging against gray area content or content that toes the line of compliance with social media's community guidelines. They discuss the impact of platform censorship on sex workers and activist communities, the need for systemic change around content moderation and how there's hope to be found in younger generations. And now we can go through some mini-links. First up from IEEE Spectrum, how tech automated the January 6th investigations. The increasing reach of cameras and sophistication of algorithms worries EFF's Jennifer Lynch. We suddenly seem to have this web of face recognition, she says. It's been building for years, but now it seems to be much easier for FBI and other police departments to hold onto images for a long time and just run these automated searches whenever they feel like it. Next up from KCBS Radio, modern cars are being used by abusive partners to track locations. EFF's Eva Galtperin spoke with KCBS Radio about how the data that modern cars collect and the access they give to their drivers' lives can be weaponized in abusive relationships. Next up from Slate, AI's Groundhog Day. To EFF's Corinne McSherry, the panic over AI feels like Groundhog Day. It replicates the anxieties we've seen around social media for a long time, she says. And so far it seems like we're taking the same track we did around social media regulation. Someone in Congress halls a bunch of CEOs to DC to testify about how they should be regulated. Next up from 404 Media, is your local police department using FUSIS AI enabled cameras? Find out here. More than a hundred local police departments, sheriff's offices, and cities have set up an AI powered camera system with nearly 200,000 connected cameras belonging to residents and businesses around the country, able to provide direct access to law enforcement according to a 404 Media analysis of a set of scraped data. EFF's Barolipton, who has researched FUSIS, said, this is the most detailed record of FUSIS integrated cameras I've seen. It makes clear that these systems are using hundreds of thousands of public and private cameras to blanket huge swaths of our cities, particularly those in the southeast, with the capacity for constant surveillance. This last mini-link comes from Associated Press. How watermelon imagery, a symbol of solidarity with Palestinians, spread around the planet. With the watermelon emoji, I think this is actually really the first time where I've seen it widely used as a stand-in. And that to me marks a notable uptick in censorship of Palestinian content. EFF's Gillian York said how the symbol is being used to confuse algorithms. And that's it. Thanks for listening. If you like what you're hearing, be sure to sign up for the email version of EFF, which includes links to in-depth coverage of these stories and more. See past issues and subscribe at EFF.org slash EFF. Before we end this issue of the newsletter, I want to let you know that EFF is a member supported nonprofit organization and you can help us protect digital privacy, security, and free expression for everyone. Donate to EFF today and even grab a bit of gear by heading over to EFF.org slash EFF. Thanks for your support and I hope you'll join us for the next issue of EFFECTOR.