Electronic Frontier Foundation
 Electronic Frontier Foundation       | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Formation | 1990 |
| Founder | • Mitch Kapor • John Perry Barlow • John Gilmore |
| Type | 501(c)(3) Nonprofit organization |
| Interest of | Cory Doctorow |
| Membership | • Brian Behlendorf • Anil Dash • Sarah Deutsch • David Farber • John Gilmore • Brewster Kahle • Pamela Samuelson • Bruce Schneier • Gigi Sohn • Shari Steele • James Vasile • Jonathan Zittrain |
| Digital civil liberties group | |
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California.
The EFF provides funds for legal defense in court, presents amicus curiae briefs, defends individuals and new technologies from what it considers abusive legal threats, works to expose government malfeasance, provides guidance to the government and courts, organizes political action and mass mailings, supports some new technologies which it believes preserve personal freedoms and online civil liberties, maintains a database and web sites of related news and information, monitors and challenges potential legislation that it believes would infringe on personal liberties and fair use and solicits a list of what it considers abusive patents with intentions to defeat those that it considers without merit.
Criticism
Yasha Levine, writing in 2018, described the EFF as astroturf created and funded by Silicon Valley, stating they do not actually defend rights for the users of Internet platforms, instead defending large Internet companies (which are, according to him, EFF's biggest benefactors) by lobbying for said companies' interests and deviating attention from their business practices (especially regarding copyright and privacy) to government practices regarding privacy and censorship, as well as actually acting in ways that actively harm Internet users.[1]
