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No need to go to that extreme! We agree that it can feel overwhelming at times to keep up with all the ways to counter corporate and government surveillance. But with some diligence and education, you can take control of your online privacy.

Please take a look at our Surveillance Self-Defense guide: https://ssd.eff.org/.

Also take time to familiarize yourself with platforms’ and devices’ privacy settings.

You can use tools like EFF’s Privacy Badger to minimize web tracking: https://privacybadger.org/.

And if you’re in California, websites are giving opt out options to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/year-review-consumer-data-privacy-california

That may seem like a lot of work, and you’d be right. We’re working with legislators at the state and federal level to enact strong privacy legislation that would make it a little easier for consumers.

Americans around the country are protesting and raising serious questions about police abuse. Now is not the time to give unprecedented power to a government commission that will be dominated by law enforcement. The EARN IT Act’s 19-person commission would effectively be able to write the new rules of the road for Internet websites and platforms.

It’s great that you wrote your Congressional representatives. As Caleb pointed out, you may well get an answer later. For anyone who hasn’t contacted your Senators yet, it only takes a minute to contact them! https://act.eff.org/action/stop-the-earn-it-bill-before-it-breaks-encryption

If you’re just writing encryption software, and not maintaining a platform that hosts others’ content and speech, then you won’t be on the hook for anything. But if you are hosting third-party speech -- like Signal is, for example -- then you would lose Section 230 protections if you provide encryption. The end result is that you could be legally liable for the speech of others that you’re hosting.

For more info, see our blog post: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-bill-governments-not-so-secret-plan-scan-every-message-online

Hi! We really think this is an important issue and are glad you and others are here thinking and talking about it. The best thing you can do to draw attention and to have the most impact is to email your House Reps and your Senators. We have an action you can use here, but you can also raise this issue at local Townhalls or other events with your local elected officials.

At the same time, we don’t feel like this issue has been buried or ignored. It has continued to get press and social media attention. Since this is a time of great crisis around the world, it’s not surprising that Americans and everyone have a lot of things on their minds. We certainly don’t blame journalists or the public for dividing their attention.

This bill itself has been around for a while and so we don’t feel that its drafters are opportunistic in their timing. We do hope that the Congress will conclude, at the very least, that there are other things it should be dealing with first!

The promise of end-to-end encryption is, ultimately, a simple value proposition: it’s the idea that no one but you and your intended recipients can read your messages. End-to-end encryption protects messages in transit all the way from sender to receiver. It ensures that information is turned into a secret message by its original sender (the first “end”) and decoded only by its final recipient (the second “end”). No one, including the app you are using, can “listen in” and eavesdrop on your activity.

When you use end-to-end encrypted messages in an app on your device, it actually means that the app company itself can’t read them. This is a core characteristic of good encryption: even the people who design and deploy it cannot themselves break it.

And encryption with special access for a select group isn’t some kind of superpower—it’s just broken encryption. The same security flaws used by U.S. police will be used by oppressive regimes and criminal syndicates.

Encryption saves lives. Take for example someone who is trying to get out of a domestic violence situation. They’re trying to find their way to a shelter, and along the way making sure to cover their tracks about who helped them, where they went, and where they got help. Keeping these things secret from the abuser can be the difference between life or death.

Consider countries where homosexuality is criminalized, and surveillance and censorship are the norm. For someone in this situation who is trying to get support, to find others like them, or just to have someone to talk to, being able to have those conversations completely privately, even from the government, is a life or death matter.

Encryption changes the dynamics, shifts the balance of power just that little bit towards those who have less of it, gaining access to information and support that they’d otherwise be barred from.

Without end-to-end encryption, any business discussing confidential information could have their business secrets copied by another business. Journalists’ conversations with sources could leak, revealing who the private sources were. And politically, members and staffers in Congress could have foreign governments, or the executive branch, listen in.

If you want more details, check our our Surveillance Self Defense Guide on Encryption: https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/what-should-i-know-about-encryption