EFF have done good work vis-a-vis government surveillance, but EFF has always been a libertarian project to promote and protect tech power by weakening government oversight of the net.
EFF have been putting some significant distance between themselves and their (admittedly, true) Libertarian origins. Cory Doctorow (long-time public-face, current special advisor) has distinctly non-Libertarian leanings.
<https://www.eff.org/about/special-counsel#main-content>
The more-libertarian John Gilmore and Brad Templeton are both emeriti:
<https://www.eff.org/about/emeritus#main-content>
I've raised the question with Cory previously, response was, effectively, that there's a considerable overlap between viewpoints, regardless of ideology. And I'd personally heard Templeton express concerns over Google over two decades ago (Q&A at a Stanford event).
My read is that viewpoints at EFF are diverse, and that concerns over commercial surviellance are also longstanding. E.g., Privacy Badger, aimed directly at same, was released over a decade ago, 14 July 2014:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.eff....>
Privacy Badger is at best an also-ran privacy tool that’s had little impact in general, and no impact on big tech bottom line. It’s a joke in the grand scheme of things.
Also, “concern over Google” is utterly immaterial to the fact that EFF takes millions from Google. They’re not too “concerned” to cash the checks. Neither was Mozilla.
???
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine
It seems to hurt a lot of people’s feelings in SV, but no, you wearing an EFF tshirt and making yearly corporate-matches donations doesn’t remove your culpability for working for big tech. Likewise, the EFF knows how many of the “small” donation come from SV tech employees.
It’s a sham organization that was premised on a faulty understanding of regulatory frameworks that does very, very little of value in the past 15 years.