Every day, corporations track our movements through license plate scanners, building detailed profiles of where we go, when we go there, and who we visit. When they do this to us in violation of data privacy laws, we’ve suffered a real harm—period. We shouldn’t need to prove we’ve suffered additional damage, such as physical injury or monetary loss, to have our day in court.

That's why EFF is proud to join an amicus brief in Mata v. Digital Recognition Network, a lawsuit by drivers against a corporation that allegedly violated a California statute that regulates Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs). The state trial court erroneously dismissed the case, by misinterpreting this data privacy law to require proof of extra harm beyond privacy harm. The brief was written by the ACLU of Northern California, Stanford’s Juelsgaard Clinic, and UC Law SF’s Center for Constitutional Democracy.

The amicus brief explains:

This case implicates critical questions about whether a California privacy law, enacted to protect people from harmful surveillance, is not just words on paper, but can be an effective tool for people to protect their rights and safety.

California’s Constitution and laws empower people to challenge harmful surveillance at its inception without waiting for its repercussions to manifest through additional harms. A foundation for these protections is article I, section 1, which grants Californians an inalienable right to privacy.

People in the state have long used this constitutional right to challenge the privacy-invading collection of information by private and governmental parties, not only harms that are financial, mental, or physical. Indeed, widely understood notions of privacy harm, as well as references to harm in the California Code, also demonstrate that term’s expansive meaning.

What’s At Stake

The defendant, Digital Recognition Network, also known as DRN Data, is a subsidiary of Motorola Solutions that provides access to a massive searchable database of ALPR data collected by private contractors. Its customers include law enforcement agencies and private companies, such as insurers, lenders, and repossession firms. DRN is the sister company to the infamous surveillance vendor Vigilant Solutions (now Motorola Solutions), and together they have provided data to ICE through a contract with Thomson Reuters.

The consequences of weak privacy protections are already playing out across the country. This year alone, authorities in multiple states have used license plate readers to hunt for people seeking reproductive healthcare. Police officers have used these systems to stalk romantic partners and monitor political activists. ICE has tapped into these networks to track down immigrants and their families for deportation.

Strong Privacy Laws

This case could determine whether privacy laws have real teeth or are just words on paper. If corporations can collect your personal information with impunity—knowing that unless you can prove bodily injury or economic loss, you can’t fight back—then privacy laws lose value.

We need strong data privacy laws. We need a private right of action so when a company violates our data privacy rights, we can sue them. We need a broad definition of “harm,” so we can sue over our lost privacy rights, without having to prove collateral injury. EFF wages this battle when writing privacy laws, when interpreting those laws, and when asserting “standing” in federal and state courts.

The fight for privacy isn’t just about legal technicalities. It’s about preserving your right to move through the world without being constantly tracked, catalogued, and profiled by corporations looking to profit from your personal information.

You can read the amicus brief here.

Mostafa Fawzy became interested in physics in high school. It was the “elegance and paradox” of quantum theory that got his attention and led to his studies at the undergraduate and graduate level. But even with a solid foundation of coursework and supportive mentors, Fawzy wanted more. MIT Open Learning’s OpenCourseWare was just the thing he was looking for.  

Now a doctoral candidate in atomic physics at Alexandria University and an assistant lecturer of physics at Alamein International University in Egypt, Fawzy reflects on how MIT OpenCourseWare bolstered his learning early in his graduate studies in 2019.  

Part of MIT Open Learning, OpenCourseWare offers free, online, open educational resources from more than 2,500 courses that span the MIT undergraduate and graduate curriculum. Fawzy was looking for advanced resources to supplement his research in quantum mechanics and theoretical physics, and he was immediately struck by the quality, accessibility, and breadth of MIT’s resources. 

“OpenCourseWare was transformative in deepening my understanding of advanced physics,” Fawzy says. “I found the structured lectures and assignments in quantum physics particularly valuable. They enhanced both my theoretical insight and practical problem-solving skills — skills I later applied in research on atomic systems influenced by magnetic fields and plasma environments.”  

He completed educational resources including Quantum Physics I and Quantum Physics II, calling them “dense and mathematically sophisticated.” He met the challenge by engaging with the content in different ways: first, by simply listening to lectures, then by taking detailed notes, and finally by working though problem sets. Although initially he struggled to keep up, this methodical approach paid off, he says. 

Fawzy is now in the final stages of his doctoral research on high-precision atomic calculations under extreme conditions. While in graduate school, he has published eight peer-reviewed international research papers, making him one of the most prolific doctoral researchers in physics working in Egypt currently. He served as an ambassador for the United Nations International Youth Conference (IYC), and he was nominated for both the African Presidential Leadership Program and the Davisson–Germer Prize in Atomic or Surface Physics, a prestigious annual prize offered by the American Physical Society.  

He is grateful to his undergraduate mentors, professors M. Sakr and T. Bahy of Alexandria University, as well as to MIT OpenCourseWare, calling it a “steadfast companion through countless solitary nights of study, a beacon in times when formal resources were scarce, and a living testament to the nobility of open, unbounded learning.”  

Recognizing the power of mentorship and teaching, Fawzy serves as an academic mentor with the African Academy of Sciences, supporting early-career researchers across the continent in theoretical and atomic physics.  

“Many of these mentees lack access to advanced academic resources,” he explains. “I regularly incorporate OpenCourseWare into our mentorship sessions, using it as a foundational teaching and reference tool. It’s an equalizer, providing the same high-caliber content to students regardless of geographical or institutional limitations.” 

As he looks toward the future, Fawzy has big plans, influenced by MIT. 

“I aspire to establish a regional center for excellence in atomic and plasma physics, blending cutting-edge research with open-access education in the Global South,” he says. 

As he continues his research and teaching, he also hopes to influence science policy and contribute to international partnerships that shine the spotlight on research and science in emerging nations.  

Along the way, he says, “OpenCourseWare remains a cornerstone resource that I will return to again and again.”  

Fawzy says he’s also interested in MIT Open Learning resources in computational physics and energy and sustainability. He’s following MIT’s Energy Initiative, calling it increasingly relevant to his current work and future plans.  

Fawzy is a proponent of open learning and a testament to its power. 

“The intellectual seeds sown by Open Learning resources such as MIT OpenCourseWare have flourished within me, shaping my identity as a physicist and affirming my deep belief in the transformative power of knowledge shared freely, without barriers,” he says. 

Concrete already builds our world, and now it’s one step closer to powering it, too. Made by combining cement, water, ultra-fine carbon black (with nanoscale particles), and electrolytes, electron-conducting carbon concrete (ec3, pronounced “e-c-cubed”) creates a conductive “nanonetwork” inside concrete that could enable everyday structures like walls, sidewalks, and bridges to store and release electrical energy. In other words, the concrete around us could one day double as giant “batteries.”

As MIT researchers report in a new PNAS paper, optimized electrolytes and manufacturing processes have increased the energy storage capacity of the latest ec3 supercapacitors by an order of magnitude. In 2023, storing enough energy to meet the daily needs of the average home would have required about 45 cubic meters of ec3, roughly the amount of concrete used in a typical basement. Now, with the improved electrolyte, that same task can be achieved with about 5 cubic meters, the volume of a typical basement wall.

“A key to the sustainability of concrete is the development of ‘multifunctional concrete,’ which integrates functionalities like this energy storage, self-healing, and carbon sequestration. Concrete is already the world’s most-used construction material, so why not take advantage of that scale to create other benefits?” asks Admir Masic, lead author of the new study, MIT Electron-Conducting Carbon-Cement-Based Materials Hub (EC³ Hub) co-director, and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering (CEE) at MIT.

The improved energy density was made possible by a deeper understanding of how the nanocarbon black network inside ec3 functions and interacts with electrolytes. Using focused ion beams for the sequential removal of thin layers of the ec3 material, followed by high-resolution imaging of each slice with a scanning electron microscope (a technique called FIB-SEM tomography), the team across the EC³ Hub and MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub was able to reconstruct the conductive nanonetwork at the highest resolution yet. This approach allowed the team to discover that the network is essentially a fractal-like “web” that surrounds ec3 pores, which is what allows the electrolyte to infiltrate and for current to flow through the system. 

“Understanding how these materials ‘assemble’ themselves at the nanoscale is key to achieving these new functionalities,” adds Masic.

Equipped with their new understanding of the nanonetwork, the team experimented with different electrolytes and their concentrations to see how they impacted energy storage density. As Damian Stefaniuk, first author and EC³ Hub research scientist, highlights, “we found that there is a wide range of electrolytes that could be viable candidates for ec3. This even includes seawater, which could make this a good material for use in coastal and marine applications, perhaps as support structures for offshore wind farms.”

At the same time, the team streamlined the way they added electrolytes to the mix. Rather than curing ec3 electrodes and then soaking them in electrolyte, they added the electrolyte directly into the mixing water. Since electrolyte penetration was no longer a limitation, the team could cast thicker electrodes that stored more energy.

The team achieved the greatest performance when they switched to organic electrolytes, especially those that combined quaternary ammonium salts — found in everyday products like disinfectants — with acetonitrile, a clear, conductive liquid often used in industry. A cubic meter of this version of ec3 — about the size of a refrigerator — can store over 2 kilowatt-hours of energy. That’s about enough to power an actual refrigerator for a day.

While batteries maintain a higher energy density, ec3 can in principle be incorporated directly into a wide range of architectural elements — from slabs and walls to domes and vaults — and last as long as the structure itself.

“The Ancient Romans made great advances in concrete construction. Massive structures like the Pantheon stand to this day without reinforcement. If we keep up their spirit of combining material science with architectural vision, we could be at the brink of a new architectural revolution with multifunctional concretes like ec3,” proposes Masic.

Taking inspiration from Roman architecture, the team built a miniature ec3 arch to show how structural form and energy storage can work together. Operating at 9 volts, the arch supported its own weight and additional load while powering an LED light.

However, something unique happened when the load on the arch increased: the light flickered. This is likely due to the way stress impacts electrical contacts or the distribution of charges. “There may be a kind of self-monitoring capacity here. If we think of an ec3 arch at architectural scale, its output may fluctuate when it’s impacted by a stressor like high winds. We may be able to use this as a signal of when and to what extent a structure is stressed, or monitor its overall health in real time,” envisions Masic.

The latest developments in ec³ technology bring it a step closer to real-world scalability. It’s already been used to heat sidewalk slabs in Sapporo, Japan, due to its thermally conductive properties, representing a potential alternative to salting. “With these higher energy densities and demonstrated value across a broader application space, we now have a powerful and flexible tool that can help us address a wide range of persistent energy challenges,” explains Stefaniuk. “One of our biggest motivations was to help enable the renewable energy transition. Solar power, for example, has come a long way in terms of efficiency. However, it can only generate power when there’s enough sunlight. So, the question becomes: How do you meet your energy needs at night, or on cloudy days?”

Franz-Josef Ulm, EC³ Hub co-director and CEE professor, continues the thread: “The answer is that you need a way to store and release energy. This has usually meant a battery, which often relies on scarce or harmful materials. We believe that ec3 is a viable substitute, letting our buildings and infrastructure meet our energy storage needs.” The team is working toward applications like parking spaces and roads that could charge electric vehicles, as well as homes that can operate fully off the grid.

“What excites us most is that we’ve taken a material as ancient as concrete and shown that it can do something entirely new,” says James Weaver, a co-author on the paper who is an associate professor of design technology and materials science and engineering at Cornell University, as well as a former EC³ Hub researcher. “By combining modern nanoscience with an ancient building block of civilization, we’re opening a door to infrastructure that doesn’t just support our lives, it powers them.”

The Financial Times reports that the U.K. is once again demanding that Apple create a backdoor into its encrypted backup services. The only change since the last time they demanded this is that the order is allegedly limited to only apply to British users. That doesn’t make it any better.

The demand uses a power called a “Technical Capability Notice” (TCN) in the U.K.’s Investigatory Powers Act. At the time of its signing we noted this law would likely be used to demand Apple spy on its users.

After the U.K. government first issued the TCN in January, Apple was forced to either create a backdoor or block its Advanced Data Protection feature—which turns on end-to-end encryption for iCloud—for all U.K. users. The company decided to remove the feature in the U.K. instead of creating the backdoor.

The initial order from January targeted the data of all Apple users. In August, the US claimed the U.K. withdrew the demand, but Apple did not re-enable Advanced Data Protection. The new order provides insight into why: the U.K. was just rewriting it to only apply to British users.

This is still an unsettling overreach that makes U.K. users less safe and less free. As we’ve said time and time again, any backdoor built for the government puts everyone at greater risk of hacking, identity theft, and fraud. It sets a dangerous precedent to demand similar data from other companies, and provides a runway for other authoritarian governments to issue comparable orders. The news of continued server-side access to users' data comes just days after the UK government announced an intrusive mandatory digital ID scheme, framed as a measure against illegal migration.

A tribunal hearing was initially set to take place in January 2026, though it’s currently unclear if that will proceed or if the new order changes the legal process. Apple must continue to refuse these types of backdoors. Breaking end-to-end encryption for one country breaks it for everyone. These repeated attempts to weaken encryption violates fundamental human rights and destroys our right to private spaces.

It's spooky season—but while jump scares may get your heart racing, catching up on digital rights news shouldn't! Our EFFector newsletter has got you covered with easy, bite-sized updates to keep you up-to-date.

In this issue, we spotlight new ALPR-enhanced police drones and how local communities can push back; unpack the ongoing TikTok “ban,” which we’ve consistently said violates the First Amendment; and celebrate a privacy win—abandoning a phone doesn't mean you've also abandoned your privacy rights.

Prefer to listen in? Check out our audio companion, where we interview EFF Staff Attorney Lisa Femia who explains the findings from our investigation into abortion censorship on social media. Catch the conversation on YouTube or the Internet Archive.

LISTEN TO EFFECTOR

EFFECTOR 37.13 - ❌ HOW META IS CENSORING ABORTION

Since 1990 EFF has published EFFector to help keep readers on the bleeding edge of their digital rights. We know that the intersection of technology, civil liberties, human rights, and the law can be complicated, so EFFector is a great way to stay on top of things. The newsletter is chock full of links to updates, announcements, blog posts, and other stories to help keep readers—and listeners—up to date on the movement to protect online privacy and free expression. 

Thank you to the supporters around the world who make our work possible! If you're not a member yet, join EFF today to help us fight for a brighter digital future.

Palladium is one of the keys to jump-starting a hydrogen-based energy economy. The silvery metal is a natural gatekeeper against every gas except hydrogen, which it readily lets through. For its exceptional selectivity, palladium is considered one of the most effective materials at filtering gas mixtures to produce pure hydrogen.

Today, palladium-based membranes are used at commercial scale to provide pure hydrogen for semiconductor manufacturing, food processing, and fertilizer production, among other applications in which the membranes operate at modest temperatures. If palladium membranes get much hotter than around 800 kelvins, they can break down.

Now, MIT engineers have developed a new palladium membrane that remains resilient at much higher temperatures. Rather than being made as a continuous film, as most membranes are, the new design is made from palladium that is deposited as “plugs” into the pores of an underlying supporting material. At high temperatures, the snug-fitting plugs remain stable and continue separating out hydrogen, rather than degrading as a surface film would.

The thermally stable design opens opportunities for membranes to be used in hydrogen-fuel-generating technologies such as compact steam methane reforming and ammonia cracking — technologies that are designed to operate at much higher temperatures to produce hydrogen for zero-carbon-emitting fuel and electricity.

“With further work on scaling and validating performance under realistic industrial feeds, the design could represent a promising route toward practical membranes for high-temperature hydrogen production,” says Lohyun Kim PhD ’24, a former graduate student in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Kim and his colleagues report details of the new membrane in a study appearing today in the journal Advanced Functional Materials. The study’s co-authors are Randall Field, director of research at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI); former MIT chemical engineering graduate student Chun Man Chow PhD ’23; Rohit Karnik, the Jameel Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and the director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS); and Aaron Persad, a former MIT research scientist in mechanical engineering who is now an assistant professor at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.

Compact future

The team’s new design came out of a MITEI project related to fusion energy. Future fusion power plants, such as the one MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems is designing, will involve circulating hydrogen isotopes of deuterium and tritium at extremely high temperatures to produce energy from the isotopes’ fusing. The reactions inevitably produce other gases that will have to be separated, and the hydrogen isotopes will be recirculated into the main reactor for further fusion.

Similar issues arise in a number of other processes for producing hydrogen, where gases must be separated and recirculated back into a reactor. Concepts for such recirculating systems would require first cooling down the gas before it can pass through hydrogen-separating membranes — an expensive and energy-intensive step that would involve additional machinery and hardware.

“One of the questions we were thinking about is: Can we develop membranes which could be as close to the reactor as possible, and operate at higher temperatures, so we don’t have to pull out the gas and cool it down first?” Karnik says. “It would enable more energy-efficient, and therefore cheaper and compact, fusion systems.”

The researchers looked for ways to improve the temperature resistance of palladium membranes. Palladium is the most effective metal used today to separate hydrogen from a variety of gas mixtures. It naturally attracts hydrogen molecules (H2) to its surface, where the metal’s electrons interact with and weaken the molecule’s bonds, causing H2 to temporarily break apart into its respective atoms. The individual atoms then diffuse through the metal and join back up on the other side as pure hydrogen.

Palladium is highly effective at permeating hydrogen, and only hydrogen, from streams of various gases. But conventional membranes typically can operate at temperatures of up to 800 kelvins before the film starts to form holes or clumps up into droplets, allowing other gases to flow through.

Plugging in

Karnik, Kim and their colleagues took a different design approach. They observed that at high temperatures, palladium will start to shrink up. In engineering terms, the material is acting to reduce surface energy. To do this, palladium, and most other materials and even water, will pull apart and form droplets with the smallest surface energy. The lower the surface energy, the more stable the material can be against further heating.

This gave the team an idea: If a supporting material’s pores could be “plugged” with deposits of palladium — essentially already forming a droplet with the lowest surface energy — the tight quarters might substantially increase palladium’s heat tolerance while preserving the membrane’s selectivity for hydrogen.

To test this idea, they fabricated small chip-sized samples of membrane using a porous silica supporting layer (each pore measuring about half a micron wide), onto which they deposited a very thin layer of palladium. They applied techniques to essentially grow the palladium into the pores, and polished down the surface to remove the palladium layer and leave palladium only inside the pores.

They then placed samples in a custom-built apparatus in which they flowed hydrogen-containing gas of various mixtures and temperatures to test its separation performance. The membranes remained stable and continued to separate hydrogen from other gases even after experiencing temperatures of up to 1,000 kelvins for over 100 hours — a significant improvement over conventional film-based membranes.

“The use of palladium film membranes are generally limited to below around 800 kelvins, at which point they degrade,” Kim says. “Our plug design therefore extends palladium’s effective heat resilience by roughly at least 200 kelvins and maintains integrity far longer under extreme conditions.”

These conditions are within the range of hydrogen-generating technologies such as steam methane reforming and ammonia cracking.

Steam methane reforming is an established process that has required complex, energy-intensive systems to preprocess methane to a form where pure hydrogen can be extracted. Such preprocessing steps could be replaced with a compact “membrane reactor,” through which a methane gas would directly flow, and the membrane inside would filter out pure hydrogen. Such reactors would significantly cut down the size, complexity, and cost of producing hydrogen from steam methane reforming, and Kim estimates a membrane would have to work reliably in temperatures of up to nearly 1,000 kelvins. The team’s new membrane could work well within such conditions.

Ammonia cracking is another way to produce hydrogen, by “cracking” or breaking apart ammonia. As ammonia is very stable in liquid form, scientists envision that it could be used as a carrier for hydrogen and be safely transported to a hydrogen fuel station, where ammonia could be fed into a membrane reactor that again pulls out hydrogen and pumps it directly into a fuel cell vehicle. Ammonia cracking is still largely in pilot and demonstration stages, and Kim says any membrane in an ammonia cracking reactor would likely operate at temperatures of around 800 kelvins — within the range of the group’s new plug-based design.

Karnik emphasizes that their results are just a start. Adopting the membrane into working reactors will require further development and testing to ensure it remains reliable over much longer periods of time.

“We showed that instead of making a film, if you make discretized nanostructures you can get much more thermally stable membranes,” Karnik says. “It provides a pathway for designing membranes for extreme temperatures, with the added possibility of using smaller amounts of expensive palladium, toward making hydrogen production more efficient and affordable. There is potential there.”

This work was supported by Eni S.p.A. via the MIT Energy Initiative.

Federal employees play a key role in safeguarding the civil liberties of millions of Americans. Our rights to privacy and free expression can only survive when we stand together to push back against overreach and ensure that technology serves all people—not just the powerful. 

That’s why EFF jumped to action earlier this year, when the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) handed over sensitive employee data—Social Security numbers, benefits data, work histories, and more—to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This was a blatant violation of the Privacy Act of 1974, and it put federal workers directly at risk. 

We didn’t let it stand. Alongside federal employee unions, EFF sued OPM and DOGE in February. In June, we secured a victory when a judge ruled we were entitled to a preliminary injunction and ordered OPM to provide accounting of DOGE access to employee records. Your support makes this possible. 

Now the fight continues—and your support matters more than ever. The Office of Personnel Management is planting the seeds to undermine and potentially remove the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC), the main program federal employees and retirees have long used to support charities—including EFF. For now, you can still give to EFF through the CFC this year (use our ID: 10437) and we’d appreciate your support! But with the program’s uncertain future, direct support is the best way to keep our work going strong for years to come. 

DONATE TODAY

SUPPORT EFF'S WORK DIRECTLY, BECOME A MEMBER!

When you donate directly, you join a movement of lawyers, activists, and technologists who defend privacy, call out censorship, and push back against abuses of power—everywhere from the courts to Congress and to the streets. As a member, you’ll also receive insider updates, invitations to exclusive events, and receive conversation-starting EFF gear. 

Plus, you can sustain our mission long-term with a monthly or annual donation! 

Stand with EFF. Protect privacy. Defend free expression. Support our work today. 

Related Cases: American Federation of Government Employees v. U.S. Office of Personnel Management

Trying to take control of your online privacy can feel like a full-time job. But if you break it up into small tasks and take on one project at a time it makes the process of protecting your privacy much easier. This month we’re going to do just that. For the month of October, we’ll update this post with new tips every weekday that show various ways you can opt yourself out of the ways tech giants surveil you.

Online privacy isn’t dead. But the tech giants make it a pain in the butt to achieve. With these incremental tweaks to the services we use, we can throw sand in the gears of the surveillance machine and opt out of the ways tech companies attempt to optimize us into advertisement and content viewing machines. We’re also pushing companies to make more privacy-protective defaults the norm, but until that happens, the onus is on all of us to dig into the settings.

All month long we’ll share tips, including some with the help from our friends at Consumer Reports’ Security Planner tool. Use the Table of Contents here to jump straight to any tip.

Table of Contents

• Tip 1: Establish Good Digital Hygiene
• Tip 2: Coming October 2
• Tip 3: Coming October 3
• Tip 4: Coming October 6
• Tip 5: Coming October 7
• Tip 6: Coming October 8
• Tip 7: Coming October 9
• Tip 8: Coming October 10
• Tip 9: Coming October 14
• Tip 10: Coming October 15
• Tip 11: Coming October 16
• Tip 12: Coming October 17
• Tip 13: Coming October 20
• Tip 14: Coming October 21
• Tip 15: Coming October 22
• Tip 16: Coming October 23
• Tip 17: Coming October 24
• Tip 18: Coming October 27
• Tip 19: Coming October 28
• Tip 20: Coming October 29
• Tip 21: Coming October 30
• Tip 22: Coming October 31

Tip 1: Establish Good Digital Hygiene

Before we can get into the privacy weeds, we need to first establish strong basics. Namely, two security fundamentals: using strong passwords (a password manager helps simplify this) and two-factor authentication for your online accounts. Together, they can significantly improve your online privacy by making it much harder for your data to fall into the hands of a stranger.

Using unique passwords for every web login means that if your account information ends up in a data breach, it won’t give bad actors an easy way to unlock your other accounts. Since it’s impossible for all of us to remember a unique password for every login we have, most people will want to use a password manager, which generates and stores those passwords for you.

Two-factor authentication is the second lock on those same accounts. In order to login to, say, Facebook for the first time on a particular computer, you’ll need to provide a password and a “second factor,” usually an always-changing numeric code generated in an app or sent to you on another device. This makes it much harder for someone else to get into your account because it’s less likely they’ll have both a password and the temporary code.

This can be a little overwhelming to get started if you’re new to online privacy! Aside from our guides on Surveillance Self-Defense, we recommend taking a look at Consumer Reports’ Security Planner for ways to help you get started setting up your first password manager and turning on two-factor authentication.

Come back tomorrow for another tip!

This is the eighth installment in a blog series documenting EFF's findings from the Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. You can read additional posts here. 

In our Stop Censoring Abortion series, we’ve documented the many ways that reproductive rights advocates have faced arbitrary censorship on Meta platforms. Since social media is the primary—and sometimes the only—way that providers, advocates, and communities can safely and effectively share timely and accurate information about abortion, it’s vitally important that platforms take steps to proactively protect this speech.

Yet, even though Meta says its moderation policies allow abortion-related speech, its enforcement of those policies tells a different story. Posts are being wrongfully flagged, accounts are disappearing without warning, and important information is being removed without clear justification.

So what explains the gap between Meta’s public commitments and its actions? And how can we push platforms to be better—to, dare we say, #StopCensoringAbortion?

After reviewing nearly one-hundred submissions and speaking with Meta to clarify their moderation practices, here’s what we’ve learned.

Platforms’ Editorial Freedom to Moderate User Content

First, given the current landscape—with some states trying to criminalize speech about abortion—you may be wondering how much leeway platforms like Facebook and Instagram have to choose their own content moderation policies. In other words, can social media companies proactively commit to stop censoring abortion?

The answer is yes. Social media companies, including Meta, TikTok, and X, have the constitutionally protected First Amendment right to moderate user content however they see fit. They can take down posts, suspend accounts, or suppress content for virtually any reason.

The Supreme Court explicitly affirmed this right in 2023 in Moody v. Netchoice, holding that social media platforms, like newspapers, bookstores, and art galleries before them, have the First Amendment right to edit the user speech that they host and deliver to other users on their platforms. The Court also established that the government has a very limited role in dictating what social media platforms must (or must not) publish. This editorial discretion, whether granted to individuals, traditional press, or online platforms, is meant to protect these institutions from government interference and to safeguard the diversity of the public sphere—so that important conversations and movements like this one have the space to flourish.

Meta’s Broken Promises

Unfortunately, Meta is failing to meet even these basic standards. Again and again, its policies say one thing while its actual enforcement says another.

Meta has stated its intent to allow conversations about abortion to take place on its platforms. In fact, as we’ve written previously in this series, Meta has publicly insisted that posts with educational content about abortion access should not be censored, even admitting in several public statements to moderation mistakes and over-enforcement. One spokesperson told the New York Times: “We want our platforms to be a place where people can access reliable information about health services, advertisers can promote health services and everyone can discuss and debate public policies in this space. . . . That’s why we allow posts and ads about, discussing and debating abortion.”

Meta’s platform policies largely reflect this intent. But as our campaign reveals, Meta’s enforcement of those policies is wildly inconsistent. Time and again, users—including advocacy organizations, healthcare providers, and individuals sharing personal stories—have had their content taken down even though it did not actually violate any of Meta’s stated guidelines. Worse, they are often left in the dark about what happened and how to fix it.

Arbitrary enforcement like this harms abortion activists and providers by cutting them off from their audiences, wasting the effort they spend creating resources and building community on these platforms, and silencing their vital reproductive rights advocacy. And it goes without saying that it hurts users, who need access to timely, accurate, and sometimes life-saving information. At a time when abortion rights are under attack, platforms with enormous resources—like Meta—have no excuse for silencing this important speech.  

Our Call to Platforms

Our case studies have highlighted that when users can’t rely on platforms to apply their own rules fairly, the result is a widespread chilling effect on online speech. That’s why we are calling on Meta to adopt the following urgent changes.

1. Publish clear and understandable policies.

Too often, platforms’ vague rules force users to guess what content might be flagged in order to avoid shadowbanning or worse, leading to needless self-censorship. To prevent this chilling effect, platforms should strive to offer users the greatest possible transparency and clarity on their policies. The policies should be clear enough that users know exactly what is allowed and what isn’t so that, for example, no one is left wondering how exactly a clip of women sharing their abortion experiences could be mislabeled as violent extremism.

2. Enforce rules consistently and fairly.

If content doesn’t violate a platform’s stated policies, it should not be removed. And, per Meta’s own policies, an account should not be suspended for abortion-related content violations if it has not received any prior warnings or “strikes.” Yet as we’ve seen throughout this campaign, abortion advocates repeatedly face takedowns or even account suspensions of posts that fall entirely within Meta’s Community Standards. On such a massive scale, this selective enforcement erodes trust and chills entire communities from participating in critical conversations. 

3. Provide meaningful transparency in enforcement actions.

When content is removed, Meta tends to give vague, boilerplate explanations—or none at all. Instead, users facing takedowns or suspensions deserve detailed and accurate explanations that state the policy violated, reflect the reasoning behind the actual enforcement decision, and ways to appeal the decision. Clear explanations are key to preventing wrongful censorship and ensuring that platforms remain accountable to their commitments and to their users.

4. Guarantee functional appeals.

Every user deserves a real chance to challenge improper enforcement decisions and have them reversed. But based on our survey responses, it seems Meta’s appeals process is broken. Many users reported that they do not receive responses to appeals, even when the content did not violate Meta’s policies, and thus have no meaningful way to challenge takedowns. Alarmingly, we found that a user’s best (and sometimes only) chance at success is to rely on a personal connection at Meta to right wrongs and restore content. This is unacceptable. Users should have a reliable and efficient appeal process that does not depend on insider access.   

5. Expand human review.

Finally, automated systems cannot always handle the nuance of sensitive issues like reproductive health and advocacy. They misinterpret words, miss important cultural or political context, and wrongly flag legitimate advocacy as “dangerous.” Therefore, we call upon platforms to expand the role that human moderators play in reviewing auto-flagged content violations—especially when posts involve sensitive healthcare information or political expression.

Users Deserve Better

Meta has already made the choice to allow speech about abortion on its platforms, and it has not hesitated to highlight that commitment whenever it has faced scrutiny. Now it’s time for Meta to put its money where its mouth is.

Users deserve better than a system where rules are applied at random, appeals go nowhere, and vital reproductive health information is needlessly (or negligently) silenced. If Meta truly values free speech, it must commit to moderating with fairness, transparency, and accountability.

This is the eighth post in our blog series documenting the findings from our Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. Read more at https://www.eff.org/pages/stop-censoring-abortion   

Affected by unjust censorship? Share your story using the hashtag #StopCensoringAbortion. Amplify censored posts and accounts, share screenshots of removals and platform messages—together, we can demonstrate how these policies harm real people. 

A diet rich in the amino acid cysteine may have rejuvenating effects in the small intestine, according to a new study from MIT. This amino acid, the researchers discovered, can turn on an immune signaling pathway that helps stem cells to regrow new intestinal tissue.

This enhanced regeneration may help to heal injuries from radiation, which often occur in patients undergoing radiation therapy for cancer. The research was conducted in mice, but if future research shows similar results in humans, then delivering elevated quantities of cysteine, through diet or supplements, could offer a new strategy to help damaged tissue heal faster, the researchers say.

“The study suggests that if we give these patients a cysteine-rich diet or cysteine supplementation, perhaps we can dampen some of the chemotherapy or radiation-induced injury,” says Omer Yilmaz, director of the MIT Stem Cell Initiative, an associate professor of biology at MIT, and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “The beauty here is we’re not using a synthetic molecule; we’re exploiting a natural dietary compound.”

While previous research has shown that certain types of diets, including low-calorie diets, can enhance intestinal stem cell activity, the new study is the first to identify a single nutrient that can help intestinal cells to regenerate.

Yilmaz is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Nature. Koch Institute postdoc Fangtao Chi is the paper’s lead author.

Boosting regeneration

It is well-established that diet can affect overall health: High-fat diets can lead to obesity, diabetes, and other health problems, while low-calorie diets have been shown to extend lifespans in many species. In recent years, Yilmaz’s lab has investigated how different types of diets influence stem cell regeneration, and found that high-fat diets, as well as short periods of fasting, can enhance stem cell activity in different ways.

“We know that macro diets such as high-sugar diets, high-fat diets, and low-calorie diets have a clear impact on health. But at the granular level, we know much less about how individual nutrients impact stem cell fate decisions, as well as tissue function and overall tissue health,” Yilmaz says.

In their new study, the researchers began by feeding mice a diet high in one of 20 different amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. For each group, they measured how the diet affected intestinal stem cell regeneration. Among these amino acids, cysteine had the most dramatic effects on stem cells and progenitor cells (immature cells that differentiate into adult intestinal cells).

Further studies revealed that cysteine initiates a chain of events leading to the activation of a population of immune cells called CD8 T cells. When cells in the lining of the intestine absorb cysteine from digested food, they convert it into CoA, a cofactor that is released into the mucosal lining of the intestine. There, CD8 T cells absorb CoA, which stimulates them to begin proliferating and producing a cytokine called IL-22.

IL-22 is an important player in the regulation of intestinal stem cell regeneration, but until now, it wasn’t known that CD8 T cells can produce it to boost intestinal stem cells. Once activated, those IL-22-releasing T cells are primed to help combat any kind of injury that could occur within the intestinal lining.

“What’s really exciting here is that feeding mice a cysteine-rich diet leads to the expansion of an immune cell population that we typically don’t associate with IL-22 production and the regulation of intestinal stemness,” Yilmaz says. “What happens in a cysteine-rich diet is that the pool of cells that make IL-22 increases, particularly the CD8 T-cell fraction.”

These T cells tend to congregate within the lining of the intestine, so they are already in position when needed. The researchers found that the stimulation of CD8 T cells occurred primarily in the small intestine, not in any other part of the digestive tract, which they believe is because most of the protein that we consume is absorbed by the small intestine.

Healing the intestine

In this study, the researchers showed that regeneration stimulated by a cysteine-rich diet could help to repair radiation damage to the intestinal lining. Also, in work that has not been published yet, they showed that a high-cysteine diet had a regenerative effect following treatment with a chemotherapy drug called 5-fluorouracil. This drug, which is used to treat colon and pancreatic cancers, can also damage the intestinal lining.

Cysteine is found in many high-protein foods, including meat, dairy products, legumes, and nuts. The body can also synthesize its own cysteine, by converting the amino acid methionine to cysteine — a process that takes place in the liver. However, cysteine produced in the liver is distributed through the entire body and doesn’t lead to a buildup in the small intestine the way that consuming cysteine in the diet does.

“With our high-cysteine diet, the gut is the first place that sees a high amount of cysteine,” Chi says.

Cysteine has been previously shown to have antioxidant effects, which are also beneficial, but this study is the first to demonstrate its effect on intestinal stem cell regeneration. The researchers now hope to study whether it may also help other types of stem cells regenerate new tissues. In one ongoing study, they are investigating whether cysteine might stimulate hair follicle regeneration.

They also plan to further investigate some of the other amino acids that appear to influence stem cell regeneration.

“I think we’re going to uncover multiple new mechanisms for how these amino acids regulate cell fate decisions and gut health in the small intestine and colon,” Yilmaz says.

The research was funded, in part, by the National Institutes of Health, the V Foundation, the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program via the Kathy and Curt Marble Cancer Research Fund, the Bridge Project — a partnership between the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, the American Federation for Aging Research, the MIT Stem Cell Initiative, and the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Cancer Institute.

Say a local concert venue wants to engage its community by giving social media followers an easy way to share and comment on new music from emerging artists. Rather than working within the constraints of existing social platforms, the venue might want to create its own social app with the functionality that would be best for its community. But building a new social app from scratch involves many complicated programming steps, and even if the venue can create a customized app, the organization’s followers may be unwilling to join the new platform because it could mean leaving their connections and data behind.

Now, researchers from MIT have launched a framework called Graffiti that makes building personalized social applications easier, while allowing users to migrate between multiple applications without losing their friends or data.

“We want to empower people to have control over their own designs rather than having them dictated from the top down,” says electrical engineering and computer science graduate student Theia Henderson.

Henderson and her colleagues designed Graffiti with a flexible structure so individuals have the freedom to create a variety of customized applications, from messenger apps like WhatsApp to microblogging platforms like X to location-based social networking sites like Nextdoor, all using only front-end development tools like HTML.

The protocol ensures all applications can interoperate, so content posted on one application can appear on any other application, even those with disparate designs or functionality. Importantly, Graffiti users retain control of their data, which is stored on a decentralized infrastructure rather than being held by a specific application.

While the pros and cons of implementing Graffiti at scale remain to be fully explored, the researchers hope this new approach can someday lead to healthier online interactions.

“We’ve shown that you can have a rich social ecosystem where everyone owns their own data and can use whatever applications they want to interact with whoever they want in whatever way they want. And they can have their own experiences without losing connection with the people they want to stay connected with,” says David Karger, professor of EECS and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Henderson, the lead author, and Karger are joined by MIT Research Scientist David D. Clark on a paper about Graffiti, which will be presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.

Personalized, integrated applications

With Graffiti, the researchers had two main goals: to lower the barrier to creating personalized social applications and to enable those personalized applications to interoperate without requiring permission from developers.

To make the design process easier, they built a collective back-end infrastructure that all applications access to store and share content. This means developers don’t need to write any complex server code. Instead, designing a Graffiti application is more like making a website using popular tools like Vue.

Developers can also easily introduce new features and new types of content, giving them more freedom and fostering creativity.

“Graffiti is so straightforward that we used it as the infrastructure for the intro to web design class I teach, and students were able to write the front-end very easily to come up with all sorts of applications,” Karger says.

The open, interoperable nature of Graffiti means no one entity has the power to set a moderation policy for the entire platform. Instead, multiple competing and contradictory moderation services can operate, and people can choose the ones they like. 

Graffiti uses the idea of “total reification,” where every action taken in Graffiti, such as liking, sharing, or blocking a post, is represented and stored as its own piece of data. A user can configure their social application to interpret or ignore those data using its own rules.

For instance, if an application is designed so a certain user is a moderator, posts blocked by that user won’t appear in the application. But for an application with different rules where that person isn’t considered a moderator, other users might just see a warning or no flag at all.

“Theia’s system lets each person pick their own moderators, avoiding the one-sized-fits-all approach to moderation taken by the major social platforms,” Karger says.

But at the same time, having no central moderator means there is no one to remove content from the platform that might be offensive or illegal.

“We need to do more research to understand if that is going to provide real, damaging consequences or if the kind of personal moderation we created can provide the protections people need,” he adds.

Empowering social media users

The researchers also had to overcome a problem known as context collapse, which conflicts with their goal of interoperation.

For instance, context collapse would occur if a person’s Tinder profile appeared on LinkedIn, or if a post intended for one group, like close friends, would create conflict with another group, such as family members. Context collapse can lead to anxiety and have social repercussions for the user and their different communities.

“We realize that interoperability can sometimes be a bad thing. People have boundaries between different social contexts, and we didn’t want to violate those,” Henderson says.

To avoid context collapse, the researchers designed Graffiti so all content is organized into distinct channels. Channels are flexible and can represent a variety of contexts, such as people, applications, locations, etc.

If a user’s post appears in an application channel but not their personal channel, others using that application will see the post, but those who only follow this user will not.

“Individuals should have the power to choose the audience for whatever they want to say,” Karger adds.

The researchers created multiple Graffiti applications to showcase personalization and interoperability, including a community-specific application for a local concert venue, a text-centric microblogging platform patterned off X, a Wikipedia-like application that enables collective editing, and a real-time messaging app with multiple moderation schemes patterned off WhatsApp and Slack.

“It also leaves room to create so many social applications people haven’t thought of yet. I’m really excited to see what people come up with when they are given full creative freedom,” Henderson says.

In the future, she and her colleagues want to explore additional social applications they could build with Graffiti. They also intend to incorporate tools like graphical editors to simplify the design process. In addition, they want to strengthen Graffiti’s security and privacy.

And while there is still a long way to go before Graffiti could be implemented at scale, the researchers are currently running a user study as they explore the potential positive and negative impacts the system could have on the social media landscape. 

New report: “Scam GPT: GenAI and the Automation of Fraud.”

This primer maps what we currently know about generative AI’s role in scams, the communities most at risk, and the broader economic and cultural shifts that are making people more willing to take risks, more vulnerable to deception, and more likely to either perpetuate scams or fall victim to them.

AI-enhanced scams are not merely financial or technological crimes; they also exploit social vulnerabilities ­ whether short-term, like travel, or structural, like precarious employment. This means they require social solutions in addition to technical ones. By examining how scammers are changing and accelerating their methods, we hope to show that defending against them will require a constellation of cultural shifts, corporate interventions, and eff­ective legislation...

Car buyers can no longer use federal dollars to help pay for electric vehicles. Analysts expect a sharp drop in domestic sales.

The agency's efforts to undo a series of environmental rules have come to a halt.

Some scientists argue the risks of climate damage outweigh possible benefits. Others say more research is needed as the Arctic warms.

They are supporting the state insurance commissioner's effort to make it harder for advocates to try to block insurance rate hikes.

Lawyers for rule challengers had said the court should take the rare step of granting rehearing because of the "significance of the issues."

The administration’s abrupt effort to repurpose the funds mere days before the end of the fiscal year appears to be illegal, the judge said.

The prime minister is reportedly not planning to attend the COP30 leaders’ summit in Brazil in November.

The move responds to concerns from industry and trading partners who argue the levy is easy to dodge and penalizes domestic exporters.