Ask HN: What does the E.F.F. do, exactly?
https://www.eff.org/victories
9 items long, most of them in the 1990s, and none of them directly involve the E.F.F. anyway. What do these guys do?
9 items long, most of them in the 1990s, and none of them directly involve the E.F.F. anyway. What do these guys do?
1 comment
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 9.3 ms ] threadEFF does 4 things, as I see it:
(a) They contribute to legal defenses in important online civil rights cases:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_litigation_involving_th...
(b) They lobby.
(c) They run awareness efforts for (a), (b), and some related issues (like, recently, whether companies like Google should use open standards for chat clients). A lot of this involves stuff like blog writing.
(d) Like all nonprofits, they do a lot of fundraising. Charity Navigator tracks a lot of this stuff. EFF spends ~15% of its budget on fundraising (putting them squarely in the middle of the pack for nonprofits).
If you're sketchy on donating to EFF (like I am), ACLU is another organization with a similar mission to EFF that is by-the-numbers more effective; ACLU is also (from what I can find) more transparent about what it spends its money on (its largest single line item is "legal"; EFF doesn't break things out any further than "Salary").
It's definitely not fair to say that EFF only has 9 "victories" because of what that web page says.