Show Support for Digital Rights During Video Calls with EFF Virtual Backgrounds

Want to show your support for EFF while you spend more and more time in video conferences and chats? Here’s one fun way: virtual backgrounds! 

We’ve collected some of our favorite EFF designs that promote issues like transparency, creativity, innovation, and privacy, for users to protect their own privacy (and add some joy to their conference calls) by replacing their usual backgrounds. These images are available under the Creative Commons CC BY license.

You can find even more virtual background ideas, and other CC BY photos and images, at EFF’s Flickr page. Enjoy!

To call attention to the NSA’s collect-it-all approach to surveillance and to demand an end to mass spying, EFF joined forces with environmental campaigning group Greenpeace and the Tenth Amendment Center (TAC) to fly a blimp over the NSA’s data center in Utah. 

Even if you aren’t on a call with Congress, you can show the importance of telling them where you stand on important issues of digital liberties.

Our robot mecha girl fights to protect users. This banner shows that you do, too.

SLAPPs are lawsuits that are filed to bully or bankrupt activists, protesters, journalists, bloggers, or even online reviewers. The point of a SLAPP isn’t to resolve a legitimate legal dispute—instead, it seeks to leverage the financial and psychological pain of litigation against someone who has spoken out, and silence or diminish that person’s speech. Unfortunately, SLAPPs have been on the rise. Show your support for the ability to speak out with this background.

Show your support for strong passwords—or other dice-related activities—with this banner. 

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) “safe harbor” provisions protect service providers who meet certain conditions from monetary damages for the infringing activities of their users and other third parties on the net. Without these protections, the risk of potential copyright liability would prevent many online intermediaries from providing services such as hosting and transmitting user-generated content. Thus the safe harbors, while imperfect, have been essential to the growth of the Internet as an engine for innovation and free expression.

Even if you’re not rocking the EFF member hoodie that this design is pulled from, you can show off your support for EFF.

Computer security and the lack of computer security is a fundamental issue that underpins much of how the Internet does (and doesn’t) function. Many of the policy issues that EFF works on are linked to security in deep ways including privacy and anonymity, DRM, censorship, and network neutrality.

Whether it’s fighting copyright infringement or fighting criminal behavior online, it may be tempting to believe that more reliance on automation will solve problems. In reality, when we let computers make the final decision about what types of speech are allowed online, we build a wall around our freedom of expression. We can’t put robots in charge of the Internet. 

Imagine being able to walk around any street in any city and never worrying about checking an email, downloading a map, making a video call, or streaming a song. EFF believes that open wireless networks greatly contribute to that goal, and to the public good.

EFF’s Privacy Badger is a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web.  If an advertiser seems to be tracking you across multiple websites without your permission, Privacy Badger automatically blocks that advertiser from loading any more content in your browser.  To the advertiser, it’s like you suddenly disappeared. Show your support for badgers everywhere (and push back against third-party tracking) with this banner. 

Show that you’re part of the fight to protect mobile location data from government surveillance; to prevent Google, Apple and other mobile OS makers from seizing inappropriate and anti-competitive control over mobile software development; to push back against DRM technologies that prevent users from modifying the software on phones and tablets they’ve purchased; and to hold telcos accountable for their invasions of user privacy and violations of network neutrality.

Keys make the encrypted Internet more reliable and secure. 

The Snowden leaks changed how the world sees NSA surveillance and caused a sea change in the policy landscape related to surveillance. After the leaks, EFF worked with dozens of coalition partners across the political spectrum to pass the USA Freedom Act, the first piece of legislation to rein in NSA spying in over thirty years—a bill that would have been unthinkable without the Snowden leaks. Check out 65 things we know thanks to the leaks, and support keeping an eye on surveillance with this banner.

We introduced this flickering EFF wallpaper when we updated our logo, and added special icons representing issues that we fight for, like privacy, security, and free speech. Grab the .mp4 file here to use it as a background.

Whistleblower Mark Klein revealed AT&T’s complicity in NSA mass spying. In AT&T’s Folsom Street facility a device called a “fiberoptic splitter” made a complete copy of the email, web browsing requests, and other electronic communications sent to or from the customers of AT&T’s Internet service from people who use another Internet service provider. The copied traffic was diverted into a room, 641A, pictured below, which is controlled by the NSA. Mark Klein’s picture of room 641A (CC BY 3.0) reminds users to be careful what they say over the Internet. 

Though EFF cannot guarantee that the use of this background screen will prevent a recording, it can be a good way to demand your privacy. This image is also available, slightly modified, as a wallpaper! 

(Use of this mark does not imply an endorsement and should not be used as such.)