EFF Background EFF has had a long tradition of devising mechanisms to protect privacy and were early participants in the current debate about privacy and identity. We've gone through a period of discovery while working with other NGOs to help discover solutions that will best protect consumer privacy, including market-based solutions. It was successful in its first mission in educating companies about the necessity of privacy policies and giving them a proactive mechanism to help solve the problem. It was also useful as were working to raise awareness of the growing problem of transparency of consumer information and to give companies the time they needed to put effective privacy policies into effect. We now must move out of this awareness-raising mode and into an action mode where real protection can be achieved.
Legislation is needed in order to achieve that goal.
Without the real threat of government regulation and enforcement, it is very unlikely that there would have been any impetus for companies to devise any plan to protect consumer privacy on their own. This is one reason why we think it is time to move away from a strict self-regulation approach to protecting privacy online. Architecture is Policy EFF has long believed that architecture and technology is policy. How individual and businesses transact and evolve is tied to the language and infrastructure underlying this communication. Proactively bringing together the voices for informed debate and the creation of solutions allows us the opportunity to embed socially responsible policy in the technology as opposed to responding with reactive policies to counteract less responsible infrastructures.