While How to Fix the Internet is on hiatus, we wanted to share a great conversation with you from last week. EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn spoke with bestselling novelist, journalist, and EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow about Cindy’s new book, “Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance” (MIT Press).
Part memoir, part battle cry, “Privacy’s Defender” is the story of Cindy’s fights alongside the visionaries who looked at the early internet and understood that the legal and political battles over this new technology - the Crypto Wars, the NSA’s dragnet, the FBI gag orders - were really over the future of free speech, privacy, and power for all.
This conversation was recorded on Tuesday, March 10 in front of a packed house at San Francisco’s iconic City Lights Bookstore. For more about the book and Cindy’s national book tour - with stops in places including Seattle, Silicon Valley, Denver, Boston, Ann Arbor, Iowa City, Washington DC and New York City - check out https://www.eff.org/Privacys-Defender
And finally, stay tuned to this feed; we’re working on a special podcast series featuring key players and moments from the book!
On February 8, during the Super Bowl in the United States, countless owners of one of the most popular smart products today got a bit of a wakeup call: Their Ring doorbells could be used to see a whole lot more than they knew.
In a commercial that was broadcast to one of most reliably enormous audiences in the country, Amazon, which owns the company Ring, promoted a new feature for its smart doorbells called “Search Party.” By scouring the footage of individual Ring cameras across a specific region, “Search Party” can implement AI-powered image recognition technology to find, as the commercial portrayed it, a lost dog. But immediately after the commercial aired, people began wondering what else their Ring cameras could be used to find.
“Ring’s Super Bowl ad exposed a scary truth: the technology in its doorbell cameras could be used to hunt down a lost pet…or a person. Amazon must discontinue its dystopian monitoring features.”
These “dystopian monitoring features” aren’t entirely new, but that’s not to say that most Ring owners knew what they were allowing when they originally bought their devices.
Bought by Amazon in 2018, Ring is the most popular manufacturer of a product that, as of 15 years ago, didn’t really exist. And while other “smart” innovations failed, smart doorbells have become a fixture of American neighborhoods, providing a mixture of convenience and security. For instance, a Ring owner away from home can verify and buzz in their mailman dropping off a package behind a gated entrance. Or, a Ring owner can see on their phone that the person knocking at their door is a salesman and choose to avoid talking to them. Or, a Ring owner can help police who are investigating a crime in their area by handing over relevant footage. Even the presence of a Ring doorbell, and its variety of motion-detecting alerts, could possibly serve as a deterrent to crime.
What has seemingly upset so many of those same owners, then, is learning exactly how their personal devices might be used for a company’s gains.
Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at Electronic Frontier Foundation, about Ring’s long history of partnering with—and sometimes even speaking directly for—police, who can access Ring doorbell footage both inside the company and outside it, and what people really open themselves up to when purchasing a Ring device.
”There’s this impression, a myth practically, that ‘I buy a ring doorbell to put on my house, I control the footage… But there is [an] entire secondary use of this device, which is by police that you don’t really get a lot of say in.”
In January, Google settled a lawsuit that pricked up a few ears: It agreed to pay $68 million to a wide array of people who sued the company together, alleging that Google’s voice-activated smart assistant had secretly recorded their conversations, which were then sent to advertisers to target them with promotions.
Google denied any admission of wrongdoing in the settlement agreement, but the fact stands that one of the largest phone makers in the world decided to forego a trial against some potentially explosive surveillance allegations. It’s a decision that the public has already seen in the past, when Apple agreed to pay $95 million last year to settle similar legal claims against its smart assistant, Siri.
Back-to-back, the stories raise a question that just seems to never go away: Are our phones listening to us?
This week, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we revisit an episode from last year in which we tried to find the answer. In speaking to Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff Technologist Lena Cohen about mobile tracking overall, it becomes clear that, even if our phones aren’t literally listening to our conversations, the devices are stuffed with so many novel forms of surveillance that we need not say something out loud to be predictably targeted with ads for it.
“Companies are collecting so much information about us and in such covert ways that it really feels like they’re listening to us.”
When you hear the words “data privacy,” what do you first imagine?
Maybe you picture going into your social media apps and setting your profile and posts to private. Maybe you think about who you’ve shared your location with and deciding to revoke some of that access. Maybe you want to remove a few apps entirely from your smartphone, maybe you want to try a new web browser, maybe you even want to skirt the type of street-level surveillance provided by Automated License Plate Readers, which can record your car model, license plate number, and location on your morning drive to work.
Importantly, all of these are “data privacy,” but trying to do all of these things at once can feel impossible.
That’s why, this year, for Data Privacy Day, Malwarebytes Senior Privacy Advocate (and Lock and Code host) David Ruiz is sharing the one thing he’s doing different to improve his privacy. And it’s this: He’s given up Google Search entirely.
When Ruiz requested the data that Google had collected about him last year, he saw that the company had recorded an eye-popping 8,000 searches in just the span of 18 months. And those 8,000 searches didn’t just reveal what he was thinking about on any given day—including his shopping interests, his home improvement projects, and his late-night medical concerns—they also revealed when he clicked on an ad based on the words he searched. This type of data, which connects a person’s searches to the likelihood of engaging with an online ad, is vital to Google’s revenue, and it’s the type of thing that Ruiz is seeking to finally cut off.
So, for 2026, he has switched to a new search engine, Brave Search.
Today, on the Lock and Code podcast, Ruiz explains why he made the switch, what he values about Brave Search, and why he also refused to switch to any of the major AI platforms in replacing Google.
2025 was a stellar year for EFF’s award-winning podcast, “How to Fix the Internet,” as our sixth season focused on the tools and technology of freedom.
It seems like everywhere we turn we see dystopian stories about technology’s impact on our lives and our futures—from tracking-based surveillance capitalism, to street level government surveillance, to the dominance of a few large platforms choking innovation, to the growing efforts by authoritarian governments to control what we see and say—the landscape can feel bleak. Exposing and articulating these problems is important, but so is envisioning and then building solutions. That’s where our podcast comes in.
EFF's How to Fix the Internet podcast offers a better way forward. Through curious conversations with some of the leading minds in law and technology, EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn and Activism Director Jason Kelley explore creative solutions to some of today’s biggest tech challenges. Our sixth season, which ran from May through September, featured:
“Digital Autonomy for Bodily Autonomy” – We all leave digital trails as we navigate the internet—records of what we searched for, what we bought, who we talked to, where we went or want to go in the real world—and those trails usually are owned by the big corporations behind the platforms we use. But what if we valued our digital autonomy the way that we do our bodily autonomy? Digital Defense Fund Director Kate Bertash joined Cindy and Jason to discuss how creativity and community can align to center people in the digital world and make us freer both online and offline.
“Love the Internet Before You Hate On It” – There’s a weird belief out there that tech critics hate technology. But do movie critics hate movies? Do food critics hate food? No! The most effective, insightful critics do what they do because they love something so deeply that they want to see it made even better. Molly White—a researcher, software engineer, and writer who focuses on the cryptocurrency industry, blockchains, web3, and other tech joined Cindy and Jason to discuss working toward a human-centered internet that gives everyone a sense of control and interaction; open to all in the way that Wikipedia was (and still is) for her and so many others: not just as a static knowledge resource, but as something in which we can all participate.
“Why Three is Tor's Magic Number” – Many in Silicon Valley, and in U.S. business at large, seem to believe innovation springs only from competition, a race to build the next big thing first, cheaper, better, best. But what if collaboration and community breeds innovation just as well as adversarial competition? Tor Project Executive Director Isabela Fernandes joined Cindy and Jason to discuss the importance of not just accepting technology as it’s given to us, but collaboratively breaking it, tinkering with it, and rebuilding it together until it becomes the technology that we really need to make our world a better place.
“Securing Journalism on the ‘Data-Greedy’ Internet” – Public-interest journalism speaks truth to power, so protecting press freedom is part of protecting democracy. But what does it take to digitally secure journalists’ work in an environment where critics, hackers, oppressive regimes, and others seem to have the free press in their crosshairs? Freedom of the Press Foundation Digital Security Director Harlo Holmes joined Cindy and Jason to discuss the tools and techniques that help journalists protect themselves and their sources while keeping the world informed.
“Cryptography Makes a Post-Quantum Leap” – The cryptography that protects our privacy and security online relies on the fact that even the strongest computers will take essentially forever to do certain tasks, like factoring prime numbers and finding discrete logarithms which are important for RSA encryption, Diffie-Hellman key exchanges, and elliptic curve encryption. But what happens when those problems—and the cryptography they underpin—are no longer infeasible for computers to solve? Will our online defenses collapse? Research and applied cryptographer Deirdre Connolly joined Cindy and Jason to discuss not only how post-quantum cryptography can shore up those existing walls but also help us find entirely new methods of protecting our information.
“Finding the Joy in Digital Security” – Many people approach digital security training with furrowed brows, as an obstacle to overcome. But what if learning to keep your tech safe and secure was consistently playful and fun? People react better to learning and retain more knowledge when they're having a good time. It doesn’t mean the topic isn’t serious—it’s just about intentionally approaching a serious topic with joy. East Africa digital security trainer Helen Andromedon joined Cindy and Jason to discuss making digital security less complicated, more relevant, and more joyful to real users, and encouraging all women and girls to take online safety into their own hands so that they can feel fully present and invested in the digital world.
“Smashing the Tech Oligarchy” – Many of the internet’s thorniest problems can be attributed to the concentration of power in a few corporate hands: the surveillance capitalism that makes it profitable to invade our privacy, the lack of algorithmic transparency that turns artificial intelligence and other tech into impenetrable black boxes, the rent-seeking behavior that seeks to monopolize and mega-monetize an existing market instead of creating new products or markets, and much more. Tech journalist and critic Kara Swisher joined Cindy and Jason to discuss regulation that can keep people safe online without stifling innovation, creating an internet that’s transparent and beneficial for all, not just a collection of fiefdoms run by a handful of homogenous oligarchs.
“Separating AI Hope from AI Hype” – If you believe the hype, artificial intelligence will soon take all our jobs, or solve all our problems, or destroy all boundaries between reality and lies, or help us live forever, or take over the world and exterminate humanity. That’s a pretty wide spectrum, and leaves a lot of people very confused about what exactly AI can and can’t do. Princeton Professor and “AI Snake Oil” publisher Arvind Narayanan joined Cindy and Jason to discuss how we get to a world in which AI can improve aspects of our lives from education to transportation—if we make some system improvements first—and how AI will likely work in ways that we barely notice but that help us grow and thrive.
“Protecting Privacy in Your Brain” – Rapidly advancing "neurotechnology" could offer new ways for people with brain trauma or degenerative diseases to communicate, as the New York Times reported this month, but it also could open the door to abusing the privacy of the most personal data of all: our thoughts. Worse yet, it could allow manipulating how people perceive and process reality, as well as their responses to it—a Pandora’s box of epic proportions. Neuroscientist Rafael Yuste and human rights lawyer Jared Genser, co-founders of The Neurorights Foundation, joined Cindy and Jason to discuss how technology is advancing our understanding of what it means to be human, and the solid legal guardrails they're building to protect the privacy of the mind.
“Building and Preserving the Library of Everything” – Access to knowledge not only creates an informed populace that democracy requires but also gives people the tools they need to thrive. And the internet has radically expanded access to knowledge in ways that earlier generations could only have dreamed of—so long as that knowledge is allowed to flow freely. Internet Archive founder and digital librarian Brewster Kahle joined Cindy and Jason to discuss how the free flow of knowledge makes all of us more free.
This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2025.
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