The past year brought some of the most sustained threats to free expression online that EFF has seen in decades — from a Supreme Court ruling that opened the door to age verification mandates, to a new federal censorship law passed in the name of protecting victims, to the government surveilling and punishing non-citizens for their protected speech.

Section 230 marked its 30th anniversary with proposals from both parties threatening to gut or sunset it. EFF mounted an aggressive defense, publishing a major piece on why Section 230’s elimination would harm small platforms and users, as well as a series of interviews, “The Internet Still Works,” with platforms that rely on Section 230. EFF filed an amicus brief in the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals defending Section 230 immunity for app stores, warning that stripping that protection would force aggressive content policing across the entire app ecosystem.

In June 2025, the Supreme Court ruled in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton that Texas could require age verification to access sexually explicit content online. Critically, the Court’s reasoning applies only to age verification for obscene content — it does not greenlight age gates on social media, news, or any other category of online speech. That distinction matters, because the momentum to expand age mandates far beyond pornography is strong.

Our battle against the censorship and privacy nightmares that come with requirements that internet users submit to age verification is one example of our free-speech advocacy. We’ve long known that age verification technologies, which aim to block young people from viewing or sharing information that the government deems “harmful” or “offensive,” end up becoming tools of censorship for everyone. They often rely on facial recognition and other techniques that have unacceptable levels of inaccuracy and that create security risks. Ultimately, they are surveillance systems that chill access to vital online communities and resources and burden the expressive rights of adults and young people alike.

We launched the Age Verification Hub to help empower the public to understand the risks, challenge these laws, protect our digital rights, and build a safer digital world for everyone, no matter their ages.

EFF also filed briefs challenging age-gating laws in California (twice), Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Ohio, Utah, Texas, and Tennessee explaining how age verification laws both violate young people’s First Amendment rights to speak and get information online and burden adults’ rights and jeopardize everyone’s privacy and data security.

Thanks in part to EFF’s member support, the right to repair is now law in Washington, joining California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Maine, New York, and Oregon. Gov. Bob Ferguson signed two bills in 2025 guaranteeing Washingtonians’ right to access tools, parts, and information so they can fix personal electronics, appliances, and wheelchairs.

The Washington bill affirms our right to repair by banning restrictions that keep people and local businesses from accessing the parts, manuals, and tools they need for cheaper, easier repairs. It joined another strong right-to-repair bill for wheelchairs, ensuring folks can access the parts and manuals they need to fix their mobility devices.

This is the epitome of common-sense legislation:.When you own something, you should have the final say about who fixes, adapts, or modifies it and how. The right to repair movement is gaining serious momentum. All 50 states have now considered some form of right to repair legislation and EFF will continue to fight for this right.

Too often, decisions about powerful technologies such as automated license plate readers (ALPRs), facial recognition, and data-sharing platforms are treated as technical or administrative matters. This limits public input and allows systems that affect civil liberties to become normalized without meaningful democratic consent. Our work reframes these decisions, creating structured opportunities for residents, advocates, and local officials to engage directly in local governance.

Launched in 2025, our Local Impact Labs work provides technical assistance to local officials and grassroots advocates to operationalize “procurement power:” the ability to refuse, scale back, or dismantle harmful surveillance systems through contract negotiations, renewals, and pilot decisions. By aligning institutional authority with community mobilization, this approach lets cities make decisions that reflect public values. In 2025, 853 ALPR cameras were taken down or blocked in 24 municipalities nationwide.

The European Commission (EC) considered a “Digital Omnibus” package in 2025 that would substantially rewrite EU privacy law, particularly the landmark General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It’s not a done deal and we advocate that it shouldn’t be.

The GDPR is the most comprehensive model for privacy legislation around the world. While it is far from perfect and suffers from uneven enforcement, complexities and certain administrative burdens, the omnibus package is full of bad and confusing ideas that, on balance, will significantly weaken privacy protections for users in the name of cutting red tape.

It contains at least one good idea: improving consent rules so users can automatically set consent preferences that will apply across all sites. But much as we love limiting cookie fatigue, it’s not worth the price users will pay if the rest of the proposal is adopted. We urge that the EC needs to go back to the drawing board if it wants to achieve the goal of simplifying EU regulations without gutting user privacy.

Our Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) guides, which provide practical advice and explainers on how to deal with government and corporate surveillance, had a big year. We published several large updates to existing guides and released three all-new guides. And with frequent massive protests across the U.S. and around the world, our guide to attending a protest remained one of the most popular guides of the year, so we made sure our translations were up to date.
The new SSD guides launched in 2025 included iPhone and Android privacy guides, which walk users through all the various privacy options of their phone. Both guides received a handful of updates throughout their first year as new features were released, or in the case of the iPhone, as a new design language was introduced. These also got a fun little boost from a segment on “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” telling people how to disable their phone’s advertising identifier.

We also launched our How to Manage Your Digital Footprint guide. This guide is designed to help users claw back some of the data they may find about themselves online, walking them through different privacy options across different platforms, removing themselves from people-search sites, and much more.

Artificial intelligence is quickly being embedded in systems that surveil communities, evaluate healthcare claims, decide immigration cases, and write the official record of arrests. EFF spent the past year fighting on every front where AI threatens civil liberties, from courtrooms and legislatures to public records requests and congressional testimony.

In July, EFF published the results of a major investigation into Axon’s Draft One, an AI tool that writes narrative police reports. Based on public records requests from dozens of law enforcement agencies, EFF found that Draft One is deliberately designed to prevent audits: It does not retain prior drafts, making it impossible to determine what the AI wrote versus what an officer added or changed after the fact. EFF called on California Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign SB 524, which would require transparency for AI-written police reports and mandate retention of original AI-generated drafts. In a major victory, the bill became law.

In November 2025, EFF opposed a Trump administration directive to preempt state AI regulations, arguing that state laws governing algorithmic discrimination in housing, healthcare, and employment are often the strongest protections users have, and that federal preemption would hand AI companies a liability shield.

A tidal wave of copyright lawsuits against AI developers threatens beneficial uses of AI, like creative expression, legal research, and scientific advancement. How courts decide these cases will profoundly shape the future of this technology, including its capabilities, its costs, and whether its evolution will be shaped by the democratizing forces of the open market or the whims of an oligopoly. As these cases progressed through the courts in 2025, EFF intervened to defend fair use, promote competition, and protect everyone’s rights to build and benefit from this technology.

At the same time, rightsholders stepped up their efforts to control fair uses through everything from state AI laws to technical standards that influence how the web functions. In 2025, EFF fought policies that threaten the open web in the California State Legislature, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and beyond.

The Atlas of Surveillance is a project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, comprising research compiled by more than 1,000 students and volunteers, and incorporating datasets from a variety of public and non-profit sources. The Atlas remains the most comprehensive database of its kind, capturing more than 15,000 deployments of surveillance tech as of 2025 – an invaluable tool for journalists, researchers, and community activists. As the police surveillance industry shifted, expanded, and doubled down on its efforts to win law enforcement customers, EFF added new spyware and equipment to this database. This included a growing category of police technology: the third-party investigative platform, a designation we created for the growing group of software platforms that pull data from other sources and share it with law enforcement, facilitating analysis of police and other data via artificial intelligence and other tools.

EFFecting Change is EFF’s livestream series that takes a deep dive into privacy and free speech issues shaping the future of technology. In EFFecting Change’s 2025 season, we invited panelists from all over the globe to answer questions about protecting digital freedom, digital rights in the new administration in the U.S., and how to address complex questions and risks in AI among other topics.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation podcast How to Fix the Internet delves into solutions to build an equitable, engaged, and open digital world. We inspire a broad audience of technologists, policy wonks, social media creators, gamers, fan communities, and everyone else who relies on digital tools to see that better world as achievable. Season 6 featured conversations on protecting public-interest journalism, post-quantum cryptography, separating AI hope from AI hype, and more.

Certbot - EFF’s free, open-source tool to help websites encrypt their traffic and keep their sites secure - aims to build a web that is more structurally private, safe, and protected against censorship. At the end of 2025, there were 4.5 million Certbot installations maintaining 24 million certificates for 33 million domains.

Privacy Badger is a browser extension that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web. Originally launched in 2014, EFF has continued to maintain and improve the tool, including updates in 2025 that increased accessibility, especially for those using screen readers. Translation support has been improved and is now available in 30 languages. Available to the public for free, Privacy Badger was the first browser extension to specifically focus on blocking tracking in advertisements, instead of just the ads themselves.

Cell-Site Simulators (CSS), also known as International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) catchers, are among law enforcement’s most closely-guarded secret surveillance tools. They act like cell phone towers, “tricking” mobile devices into connecting to them to intercept the information that phones send and receive, like the location of the user and metadata for phone calls, text messages, and other app traffic.

Rayhunter is a new open-source tool we created in 2025 that runs off an affordable mobile hotspot to empower everyone, regardless of technical skill, to help search out CSSs around the world. We hope that activists, journalists, and others will run these devices and help us collect data about the usage and capabilities of CSSs. One goal is to determine conclusively if CSSs are used to surveil free expression such as protests or religious gatherings, and if so, how often. With this data, EFF can engage in threat modeling about the risks of CSSs. Additionally, any data we find will be useful to those who are fighting through legal process or legislative policy to rein in CSS use where they live.