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If you’re a Californian, there are a few new state laws that you should know will be going into effect in the new year. EFF has worked hard in Sacramento this session to advance bills that protect privacy, fight surveillance, and promote transparency.

California’s legislature runs in a two-year cycle, meaning that it’s currently halftime for legislators. As we prepare for the next year of the California legislative session in January, it’s a good time to showcase what’s happened so far—and what’s left to do.

Wins Worth Celebrating

In a win for every Californian’s privacy rights, we were happy to support A.B. 566 (Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal). This is a common-sense law that makes California’s main consumer data privacy law, the California Consumer Privacy Act, more user-friendly. It requires that browsers support people’s rights to send opt-out signals, such as the global opt-out in Privacy Badger, to businesses. Managing your privacy as an individual can be a hard job, and EFF wants stronger laws that make it easier for you to do so.

Additionally, we were proud to advance government transparency by supporting A.B. 1524 (Judiciary Committee), which allows members of the public to make copies of public court records using their own devices, such as cell-phone cameras and overhead document scanners, without paying fees.

We also supported two bills that will improve law enforcement accountability at a time when we desperately need it. S.B. 627 (Senator Scott Wiener) prohibits law enforcement officers from wearing masks to avoid accountability (The Trump administration has sued California over this law). We also supported S.B. 524 (Asm. Jesse Arreguín), which requires law enforcement to disclose when a police report was written using artificial intelligence.

On the To-Do List for Next Year

On the flip side, we also stopped some problematic bills from becoming law. This includes S.B. 690 (Sen. Anna Caballero), which we dubbed the Corporate Coverup Act. This bill would have gutted California’s wiretapping statute by allowing businesses to ignore those privacy rights for “any business purpose.” Working with several coalition partners, we were able to keep that bill from moving forward in 2025. We do expect to see it come back in 2026, and are ready to fight back against those corporate business interests.

And, of course, not every fight ended in victory. There are still many areas where we have work left to do. California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill we supported, S.B. 7, which would have given workers in California greater transparency into how their employers use artificial intelligence and was sponsored by the California Federation of Labor Unions. S.B. 7  was vetoed in response to concerns from companies including Uber and Lyft, but we expect to continue working with the labor community on the ways AI affects the workplace in 2026.

Trends of Note

California continued a troubling years-long trend of lawmakers pushing problematic proposals that would require every internet user to verify their age to access information—often by relying on privacy-invasive methods to do so. Earlier this year EFF sent a letter to the California legislature expressing grave concerns with lawmakers’ approach to regulating young people’s ability to speak online. We continue to raise these concerns, and would welcome working with any lawmaker in California on a better solution.

We also continue to keep a close eye on government data sharing. On this front, there is some good news. Several of the bills we supported this year sought to place needed safeguards on the ways various government agencies in California share data. These include: A.B. 82 (Asm. Chris Ward) and S.B. 497 (Wiener), which would add privacy protections to data collected by the state about those who may be receiving gender-affirming or reproductive health care; A.B. 1303 (Asm. Avelino Valencia), which prohibits warrantless data sharing from California’s low-income broadband program to immigration and other government officials; and S.B. 635 (Sen. Maria Elena Durazo), which places similar limits on data collected from sidewalk vendors.

We are also heartened to see California correct course on broad government data sharing. Last session, we opposed A.B. 518 (Asm. Buffy Wicks), which let state agencies ignore existing state privacy law to allow broader information sharing about people eligible for CalFresh—the state’s federally funded food assistance program. As we’ve seen, the federal government has since sought data from food assistance programs to use for other purposes. We were happy to have instead supported A.B. 593 this year, also authored by Asm. Wicks—which reversed course on that data sharing.

We hope to see this attention to the harms of careless government data sharing continue. EFF’s sponsored bill this year, A.B. 1337, would update and extend vital privacy safeguards present at the state agency level to counties and cities. These local entities today collect enormous amounts of data and administer programs that weren’t contemplated when the original law was written in 1977. That information should be held to strong privacy standards.

We’ve been fortunate to work with Asm. Chris Ward, who is also the chair of the LGBTQ Caucus in the legislature, on that bill. The bill stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee during the 2025 legislative session, but we plan to bring it back in the next session with a renewed sense of urgency.

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Age verification mandates won't magically keep young people safer online, but that has not stopped governments around the world spending this year implementing or attempting to introduce legislation requiring all online users to verify their ages before accessing the digital space. 

The UK’s misguided approach to protecting young people online took many headlines due to the reckless and chaotic rollout of the country’s Online Safety Act, but they were not alone: courts in France ruled that porn websites can check users’ ages; the European Commission pushed forward with plans to test its age-verification app; and Australia’s ban on under-16s accessing social media was recently implemented. 

Through this wave of age verification bills, politicians are burdening internet users and forcing them to sacrifice their anonymity, privacy, and security simply to access lawful speech. For adults, this is true even if that speech constitutes sexual or explicit content. These laws are censorship laws, and rules banning sexual content usually hurt marginalized communities and groups that serve them the most.

In response, we’ve spent this year urging governments to pause these legislative initiatives and instead protect everyone’s right to speak and access information online. Here are three ways we pushed back [against these bills] in 2025:

Social Media Bans for Young People

Banning a certain user group changes nothing about a platform’s problematic privacy practices, insufficient content moderation, or business models based on the exploitation of people’s attention and data. And assuming that young people will always find ways to circumvent age restrictions, the ones that do will be left without any protections or age-appropriate experiences.

Yet Australia’s government recently decided to ignore these dangers by rolling out a sweeping regime built around age verification that bans users under 16 from having social media accounts. In this world-first ban, platforms are required to introduce age assurance tools to block under-16s, demonstrate that they have taken “reasonable steps” to deactivate accounts used by under-16s, and prevent any new accounts being created or face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($32 million USD). The 10 banned platforms—Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok, Kick, Reddit, Twitch and X—have each said they’ll comply with the legislation, leading to young people losing access to their accounts overnight. 

Similarly, the European Commission this year took a first step towards mandatory age verification that could undermine privacy, expression, and participation rights for young people—rights that have been fully enshrined in international human rights law through its guidelines under Article 28 of the Digital Services Act. EFF submitted feedback to the Commission’s consultation on the guidelines, emphasizing a critical point: Mandatory age verification measures are not the right way to protect minors, and any online safety measure for young people must also safeguard their privacy and security. Unfortunately, the EU Parliament already went a step further, proposing an EU digital minimum age of 16 for access to social media, a move that aligns with EU Commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen’s recent public support for measures inspired by Australia’s model.

Push for Age Assurance on All Users 

This year, the UK had a moment—and not a good one. In late July, new rules took effect under the Online Safety Act that now require all online services available in the UK to assess whether they host content considered harmful to children, and if so, these services must introduce age checks to prevent children from accessing such content. Online services are also required to change their algorithms and moderation systems to ensure that content defined as harmful, like violent imagery, is not shown to young people.

The UK’s scramble to find an effective age verification method shows us that there isn't one, and it’s high time for politicians to take that seriously. As we argued throughout this year, and during the passage of the Online Safety Act, any attempt to protect young people online should not include measures that require platforms to collect data or remove privacy protections around users’ identities. The approach that UK politicians have taken with the Online Safety Act is reckless, short-sighted, and will introduce more harm to the very young people that it is trying to protect.

We’re seeing these narratives and regulatory initiatives replicated from the UK to U.S. states and other global jurisdictions, and we’ll continue urging politicians not to follow the UK’s lead in passing similar legislation—and to instead explore more holistic approaches to protecting all users online.

Rushed Age Assurance through the EU Digital Wallet

There is not yet a legal obligation to verify users’ ages at the EU level, but policymakers and regulators are already embracing harmful age verification and age assessment measures in the name of reducing online harms.

These demands steer the debate toward identity-based solutions, such as the EU Digital Identity Wallet, which will become available in 2026. This has come with its own realm of privacy and security concerns, such as long-term identifiers (which could result in tracking) and over-exposure of personal information. Even more concerning is, instead of waiting for the full launch of the EU DID Wallet, the Commission rushed a “mini AV” app out this year ahead of schedule, citing an urgent need to address concerns about children and the harms that may come to them online. 

However, this proposed solution directly tied national ID to an age verification method. This also comes with potential mission creep of what other types of verification could be done in EU member states once this is fully deployed—while the focus of the “mini AV” app is for now on verifying age, its release to the public means that the infrastructure to expand ID checks to other purposes is in place, should the government mandate that expansion in the future.  

Without the proper safeguards, this infrastructure could be leveraged inappropriately—all the more reason why lawmakers should explore more holistic approaches to children's safety. 

Ways Forward

The internet is an essential resource for young people and adults to access information, explore community, and find themselves. The issue of online safety is not solved through technology alone, and young people deserve a more intentional approach to protecting their safety and privacy online—not this lazy strategy that causes more harm that it solves. 

Rather than weakening rights for already vulnerable communities online, politicians must acknowledge these shortcomings and explore less invasive approaches to protect all people from online harms. We encourage politicians to look into what is best, and not what is easy; and in the meantime, we’ll continue fighting for the rights of all users on the internet in 2026.

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2025.

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Since the Online Safety Act took effect in late July, UK internet users have made it very clear to their politicians that they do not want anything to do with this censorship regime. Just days after age checks came into effect, VPN apps became the most downloaded on Apple's App Store in the UK, and a petition calling for the repeal of the Online Safety Act (OSA) hit over 400,000 signatures. 

In the months since, more than 550,000 people have petitioned Parliament to repeal or reform the Online Safety Act, making it one of the largest public expressions of concern about a UK digital law in recent history. The OSA has galvanized swathes of the UK population, and it’s high time for politicians to take that seriously. 

Last week, EFF joined Open Rights Group, Big Brother Watch, and Index on Censorship in sending a briefing to UK politicians urging them to listen to their constituents and reform or repeal the Online Safety Act ahead of this week’s Parliamentary petition debate on 15 December.

The legislation is a threat to user privacy, restricts free expression by arbitrating speech online, exposes users to algorithmic discrimination through face checks, and effectively blocks millions of people without a personal device or form of ID from accessing the internet. The briefing highlights how, in the months since the OSA came into effect, we have seen the legislation:

1. Make it harder for not-for-profits and community groups to run their own websites. 
2. Result in the wrong types of content being taken down.
3. Lead to age-assurance being applied widely to all sorts of content.

Our briefing continues:

“Those raising concerns about the Online Safety Act are not opposing child safety. They are asking for a law that does both: protects children and respects fundamental rights, including children’s own freedom of expression rights.”

The petition shows that hundreds of thousands of people feel the current Act tilts too far, creating unnecessary risks for free expression and ordinary online life. With sensible adjustments, Parliament can restore confidence that online safety and freedom of expression rights can coexist.

If the UK really wants to achieve its goal of being the safest place in the world to go online, it must lead the way in introducing policies that actually protect all users—including children—rather than pushing the enforcement of legislation that harms the very people it was meant to protect.

Read the briefing in full here.

Update, 17 Dec 2025: this article was edited to include the word reform alongside repeal. 

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