The other day, Nick highlighted the valuable resources the Electronic Frontier Foundation provides to bloggers. Today, I came across another very useful service they offer: TOSBack. This is software which scans the Terms of Service of a number websites and notes any changes. It tells us, for example, that the domain and web-hosting company Go Daddy, inserted the following passage into its TOS on November 17:
In order to provide certain services to you, we may on occasion supplement the personal information you submit to us with information from third party sources (e.g., information from our strategic partners, service providers, or the United States Postal Service). We do this to enhance our ability to serve you, to tailor our products and services to you, and to offer you opportunities to purchase products or services that we believe may be of interest to you.
Good to know, for sure, but there doesn’t seem anything libertarian about this at first glance. While the goal of making companies more transparent is by no means an inherently libertarian goal, the fact that the EFF are voluntarily solving a problem which many see as a rationale for government intervention provides a big boost to libertarian ideas. If unscrupulous companies can be controlled without force, the justification for regulation disappears.
The EFF has an explicitly libertarian side when it comes to advocacy in areas such as free speech, privacy, and intellectual property abuse. I would hazard to say, though, that they are making a bigger contribution to liberty when they fight against the bad behavior of private companies.
Markets always work better than government when compared fairly, but increasing the information available to consumers makes the market work even better and, hopefully, convinces some people that we don’t need the government to solve every social problem. The EFF are smashing the state without really trying.
Brad Taylor is a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He blogs at 
Suggest that you don’t put too much trust in EFF. They do some good things, but their operators have also crumbled on other privacy concerns. And, they had the “good judgment” to support Obama as “the answer.”
Push comes to shove and they are statists.
I agree that their advocacy work is a bit of a mixed bad (though mostly on the right side). My point was that they’re advancing liberty with their practical projects, with their ideology being irrelevant.
I liked this one a lot, Brad. Without the state, “separation of powers” (decentralization) remains a valid strategy. Decentralization may be my favorite freedom enabler.
It is far too simplistic to say that EFF supported Obama. Different members of EFF and different supporters of EFF supported various candidates in 2008. It would be mistaken to think that EFF is primarily a pro-Obama political organisation.
It is certain that John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales were enemies of freedom while in office, and still are. It isn’t clear to me that Holder and Obama have improved much of anything.
Your domain is, I think, registered with GoDaddy. They have not been a very good domain registrar. I’ve seen controversial web sites lose their domains when GoDaddy decided to be authoritarian. This situation is easy to change, simply find a different registrar. I like Domain Dominion myself, and I’ve used WontonGold with good results. YMMV.
It also seems unlikely that their ideology is irrelevant. Politics is increasingly irrelevant, but ideology is significant. And I think guys like John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Esther Dyson (I’m using “guys” in the generic, engineering sense), and Declan McCullagh have good ideology. Ideology matters, politics doesn’t.
Finally, I would quibble with “EFF: Smashing the State.” Rather, EFF has been making the state irrelevant by obviating many of its features, especially where private sector oversight is available.
You might want to check again on Gilmore, FWIW.
I don’t think ideology is irrelevant in general. When it comes to what they’re doing to increase the transparency of businesses, their reasons don’t really matter.