EFF’s full page ad begs tech firms to secure before Trump

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is worried about the state of privacy and net neutrality online, but it's really worried about it once Donald Trump comes to power in January next year. To try and get the jump on that, it's taken out a full page advert in Wired magazine to try and encourage technology firms to take action now, to secure data and protect their customers.

In the piece titled, “Your threat model just changed,” it highlights how campaign promises made by Donald Trump could impact the “rights of millions of people,” and the free internet as we know and love it. Most egregiously it said, it wants to use ‘your' servers to do it.

It calls on technology companies to take several steps which it believes will make it much harder for a surveillance happy president to take advantage of current spying laws. It wants to see them:

• Encrypt data by default, obfuscating all user transactions, communications and activity.
• Delete logs, so that there is no storage of user actions online.
• Publicise when government agencies demand data.
• Fight for user rights in court rooms if necessary.

It goes on to highlight that when users believe a company will protect them, they support it in turn. “The future of our democracy depends on an Internet that is free from censorship and government surveillance,” it said.

It will be interesting to see the response this advert gets. Some companies, like Apple and Lavabit, have stood up to government surveillance over the years. Whether others will do the same remains to be seen.

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KitGuru Says: While I don't disagree with the EFF on this, I do think it's shortsighted to think that Trump is the big bad when it comes to surveillance. Obama has entrenched all of the spying powers that the Bush administration brought in, allowed the NSA to run rampant with its snooping and done little to protect those who stand against it. He's no saint in that regard. 

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