There is no other time in history that your digital rights are facing more challenges — and more defense — than today. Twenty U.S. states have implemented comprehensive privacy regulations; the European Union has prohibited several “high risk” uses of artificial intelligence (AI); and European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) penalties have reached more than €6.2 billion. As well as this, there has been a decline in global internet freedoms for fifteen consecutive years. No matter what motivates you to defend your privacy or to be aware of the trends driving the Internet, having the proper educational tools will ultimately allow you to take action versus simply being exposed to the changes.
What Are Digital Rights, and Why Should I Care About Them Today?
Your digital rights include the freedom and safeguards associated with technology: your right to be free from surveillance, your ability to manage how companies collect, store, use and disclose your private data, your right to express yourself freely online, and your safety from cyber threats. Digital rights are not theoretical. For example, do you know if your employer has permission to monitor every single key stroke you make while working? Does a business have permission to sell your physical location data to another vendor? Is an algorithm allowed to deny you a loan based upon criteria that it never discloses?
There was a dramatic escalation in these risks last year alone. Deep fake incidents rose by 257% in 2025. The United States Supreme Court ruled that the TikTok app must be sold off because of national security concerns. Brazil’s data protection agency suspended Meta from developing AI on behalf of their Brazilian users’ data. It is no longer optional for you to learn about your rights — they are part of self-defense.
The Legal Environment: A Mixed Bag with Some Bites
Europe: GDPR and the AI Act
As mentioned earlier, Europe’s GDPR is still the model for all others globally. Over $6.2 billion dollars in cumulative fines have been imposed against over 2,800 entities who were found guilty of violating some aspect of the GDPR. Among the highest profile cases were Meta’s €1.2 billion fine for sending EU citizen’s data outside of the EU illegally and Tik Tok’s €530 million fine for sending EU citizens’ data to China.
In addition to fines, the European Courts also made a very important decision regarding the right to transparency in 2025. That decision said that individuals have a right to get an explanation of why an automatic system (like an algorithm used to determine credit worthiness or employment eligibility) denied them something. This decision could have profound implications moving forward as many more aspects of our lives begin to be determined by AI systems.
Additionally, the EU recently passed the world’s first comprehensive AI regulation which immediately banned three types of AI systems:
- Manipulative AI systems that are designed to deceive
- Social scoring systems which assign points based upon an individual’s behavior and then deny them things based on those scores
- Real-time facial recognition technologies in public spaces
The rest of the regulation becomes effective in August 2026, and violators may face penalties of up to €35 million or 7% of total global revenues.
United States: A Patchwork of State Laws
In the United States, since there is no federal privacy law, each state is left to develop their own way to provide for their residents. Currently twenty states have enacted comprehensive privacy legislation; California, Texas and Maryland lead in terms of both breadth and enforcement. The American Privacy Rights Act (a bipartisan bill) died in Congress in February 2025 and has yet to be reintroduced. Additionally, forty eight states have enacted legislation addressing deep fakes (i.e., synthetic media designed to look like someone else) and the Federal TAKE IT DOWN Act has now made it a crime to create and distribute nonconsensual images depicting someone engaged in intimate activities without their consent.
Global Developments
Finally, around the globe, India passed the Digital Personal Data Protection Act which includes a phased-in approach through 2027, Australia provided a new statutory basis for suing individuals or organizations for serious invasions of one’s privacy, and the United Nations adopted the Global Digital Compact (a nonbinding agreement however an important development in establishing international norms for digital cooperation and AI governance).
Tools That Give You the Power to Take Your Privacy Back
It’s possible to regain some meaningful privacy without being a techno-whiz. There are a few practical tools that help you fix your most likely weaknesses.
Browsers
- Brave is by far the simplest way to take control of your privacy. It blocks tracking and advertising by default. In terms of simplicity, Brave is probably the easiest tool to get started with if you want to have better privacy.
- Firefox is the only other major browser that supports the full version of uBlock Origin — and that is important since Google has essentially destroyed the ability to block ads using extensions on Chrome due to its transition to Manifest V3.
- Mullvad Browser (built with the Tor Project) allows you to minimize fingerprinting and does this without losing too much speed compared to routing everything over Tor.
VPN
- Mullvad VPN is my go-to choice for true anonymity. No email needed; anonymous account creation available; accepts cash/crypto and has been fully post-quantum encrypted since 2025.
- Proton VPN also offers a true free-tier option and very strong privacy within a larger ecosystem that includes encrypted email/calendar/cloud storage options.
Messaging
- Signal is my top pick for secure messaging — it now comes with quantum-resistant encryption.
- SimpleX Chat doesn’t require any kind of identifier (including a phone number) when sending messages, offering more anonymity than Signal.
Passwords
- 1Password and Bitwarden (free/open source with a $10/year paid-for tier) are leading choices.
- Since 81 percent of all hacking related breaches involve either stolen or weak passwords, a password manager may be the most effective security choice you can possibly make.
Education Resources
Guides and Courses
- EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense guide — significantly revised in 2025 — should be your first stop for learning about personal security.
- Internet Society offers a free Privacy Online course in three different languages.
- Coursera offers several specializations in Privacy/Cybersecurity offered by the University of London, University of Pennsylvania, and Google.
- e-RIGHTS offers free MOOCs on digital rights that provide certified completion.
Must-Read Books
- Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) — Zuboff coined the phrase “Surveillance Capitalism,” and she identified how tech companies monetize behavioral data.
- Carissa Veliz’ Privacy Is Power (2020) — This book makes the argument that privacy is political power.
- Joy Buolamwini’s Unmasking AI (2023) — Documents how facial recognition fails when faced with dark-skinned faces.
- Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI (2021) — Identifies the environmental and human costs behind creating and using AI systems.
- Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification (2025) — Describes how platforms systematically degrade their services — and why this degradation happened quickly enough to make the term “Enshittification” become the American Dialect Society’s word-of-the-year.
Documentaries
- Citizen Four (2014) and The Great Hack (2019) — Essential starting points.
- Coded Bias (2020) — Addresses algorithmic discrimination.
- The Social Dilemma (2020) — Discusses platform manipulation.
- Surveiled (2024) — Looks at how journalists worldwide were targeted using Pegasus spyware.
Organizations
Advocacy groups defend digital rights using litigation, policymaking, and public campaigns:
- Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) — The largest advocacy group fighting for digital rights, currently fighting encryption backdoor mandates from both the UK and France, contesting warrantless border searches of phones, and maintaining tools like Let’s Encrypt and the Atlas of Surveillance.
- Access Now — Fights for at-risk users globally and sponsors the annual RightsCon Conference (set to occur in Lusaka, Zambia in May 2026).
- Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) — Recently added an AI Governance Lab to fight for digital rights.
- Fight for the Future — Conducts aggressive grassroots advocacy work around issues such as face recognition, online age verification mandates, corporate surveillance, and more.
- Privacy International — Tracks governmental and private sector surveillance worldwide.
Take the First Step
You don’t need to master every privacy law or install every tool on this list. Start with one action: switch to a privacy-respecting browser, install a password manager, read a book from the list above, or follow an organization like the EFF. Digital rights aren’t preserved by default — they’re preserved by people who understand what’s at stake and choose to act. The resources have never been better. The urgency has never been greater.