By EFA Chair, John Pane.
It’s been some time since we’ve done this. And it’s about time!
As you know, as part of our advocacy work EFA has been chipping away at awareness-building activities (think media interviews and newsletters) and on the ground policy work to push for digital rights policies that matter most to you and help to make our society a better place for all of us.
Right now the fight for digital rights is intensifying, gathering pace and becoming more complex. Big Tech, Silicon Valley, techno-venture capitalists, their lobbyists and even the Trump White House are organizing, influencing and hectoring our government on minimizing protective regulation against untested and unproven mass AI adoption which can negatively impact our society in so many ways if not properly regulated.
While regulatory capture by Big Tech is a high risk to our national sovereignty and our way of life, domestically we have a whole gift basket full of threats to digital rights including the potential weakening of privacy reform, increasing levels of workplace surveillance, flawed social media bans, the tacit greenlighting of the use of biometrics and facial recognition technologies, the spread of age verification, digital ID, rampant misinformation and disinformation, attempts to restrict the use of privacy preserving encryption and VPNs, and internet censorship more broadly.
Sometimes, when the problems we face feel so huge, and the opponents are both well heeled and many in number, the best thing we can do is focus on both the simplification and prioritization of where our energy and efforts will be deployed for the best impact and return.
That’s where you, our members, came in and gave us a helping hand when we needed it most.
The EFA Board is pleased to share with you the full 2025 Membership Engagement Survey, complete with our insights and high level intentions.
We hope you find the survey results interesting reading. Your board is very grateful for taking the time and effort to complete the survey and telling us about the issues which matter to you and why you support EFA in its work. If you have any questions, please reach out to us here.
From the 2026 EFA board, thank you.
Image credit: Marcus Winkler/Unsplash