Every fall, EFF releases its annual report, and 2023 was the year of Privacy First. Our annual report dives into our groundbreaking whitepaper along with victories in freeing the law, right to repair, and more. It’s a great, easy-to-read summary of the year’s work, and it contains interesting tidbits about the impact we’ve made—for instance, did you know 394,000 people downloaded an episode of EFF’s Podcast, “How to Fix the Internet as of 2023?” Or that EFF had donors in 88 countries?
As you can see in the report, EFF’s role as the oldest, largest, and most trusted digital rights organization became even more important when tech law and policy commanded the public’s attention in 2023. Major headlines pondered the future of internet freedom. Arguments around free speech, digital privacy, AI, and social media dominated Congress, state legislatures, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the European Union.
EFF intervened with logic and leadership to keep bad ideas from getting traction, and we articulated solutions to legitimate concerns with care and nuance in our whitepaper, Privacy First: A Better Way to Protect Against Online Harms. It demonstrated how seemingly disparate concerns are in fact linked to the dominance of tech giants and the surveillance business models used by most of them. We noted how these business models also feed law enforcement’s increasing hunger for our data. We pushed for a comprehensive approach to privacy instead and showed how this would protect us all more effectively than harmful censorship strategies.
The longest running fight we won in 2023 was to free the law: In our legal representation of PublicResource.org, we successfully ensured that copyright law does not block you from finding, reading and sharing laws, regulations and building codes online. We also won a major victory in helping to pass a law in California to increase tech users’ ability to control their information. In states across the nation, we helped boost the right to repair. Due to the efforts of the many technologists and advocates involved with Let’s Encrypt, HTTPS Everywhere, and Certbot over the last 10 year, as much as 95% of the web is now encrypted. And that’s just barely scratching the surface.
Obviously, we couldn’t do any of this without the support of our members, large and small. Thank you. Take a look at the report for more information about the work we’ve been able to do this year thanks to your help.
This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2024.
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