Category: Business

State legislatures—from Olympia, WA, to Honolulu, HI, to Tallahassee, FL, and everywhere in between—kept EFF’s state legislative team busy throughout 2025. We saw some great wins and steps forward this year. Washington became the eighth state to enshrine the right to repair. Several states stepped up to protect the privacy of location data, with bills […]

Across ideologically diverse communities, 2025 campaigns against automated license plate reader (ALPR) surveillance kept winning. From Austin, Texas to Cambridge, Massachusetts to Eugene, Oregon, successful campaigns combined three practical elements: a motivated political champion on city council, organized grassroots pressure from affected communities, and technical assistance at critical decision moments. The 2025 Formula for Refusal […]

It’s been a great year to be on EFF’s membership team. There’s no better feeling than hanging out with your fellow digital freedom supporters and being able to say, “Oh yeah, and we’re suing the government!” We’ve done that a lot this year—and that’s all thanks to people like you.  As a token of appreciation for supporting EFF’s mission to protect privacy and free expression online for all people, […]

State and federal lawmakers have introduced multiple proposals in 2025 to curtail or outright block children and teenagers from accessing legal content on the internet. These lawmakers argue that internet and social media platforms have an obligation to censor or suppress speech that they consider “harmful” to young people. Unfortunately, in many of these legislative […]

Defending encryption has long been a bedrock of our work. Without encryption, it’s impossible to have private conversations or private data storage. This year, we’ve seen attacks on these rights from all around the world.  Europe Goes All in On Breaking Encryption, Mostly Fails (For Now) The European Union Council has repeatedly tried to pass a […]

In 2025, elected officials across the country began treating surveillance technology purchases differently: not as inevitable administrative procurements handled by police departments, but as political decisions subject to council oversight and constituent pressure. This shift proved to be the most effective anti-surveillance strategy of the year. Since February, at least 23 jurisdictions fully ended, cancelled, […]

This year, you may have heard EFF sounding off about our civil liberties on NPR, BBC Radio, or any number of podcasts. But we also started sharing our voices directly with listeners in 2025. In June, we revamped EFFector, our long-running electronic newsletter, and launched a new audio edition to accompany it. Providing a recap of […]

Drone as first responder (DFR) adoption really took off in 2025. Though the concept has been around since 2018, this year saw more normalization of the technology, its integration into more real-time crime center structures, and the implementation of automated deployment of drones. A DFR program features a fleet of camera-equipped drones, which can range […]

EFF’s attorneys, activists, and technologists don’t just do the hard, endless work of defending our digital civil liberties — they also spend a lot of time and effort explaining that work to the public via media interviews.  EFF had thousands of media mentions in 2025, from the smallest hyperlocal outlets to international news behemoths. Our work […]

It’s no secret that digital surveillance and other tech-enabled oppressions are acute dangers for liberation movement workers. The rising tides of tech-fueled authoritarianism and hyper-surveillance are universal themes across the various threat models we consider. EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense project is a vital antidote to these threats, but it’s not all we do to help others […]