Donations spotlight: Help Fight for the Future expand the internet’s transformative power for good

Note from the CREDO Mobile team: This November, Fight for the Future is among three amazing groups that will receive a share of our monthly grant. Funding from the CREDO Mobile community will be vital to the nonprofit as it works to ensure that the internet continues to hold freedom of expression and creativity at its core.

 Read this important blog post about Fight for the Future, then visit CREDODonations.com and cast your vote to help send much-needed grant money to the group to assist its efforts—and the efforts of our other outstanding November grantees.

Founded in 2011, Fight for the Future Education Fund (Fight) is a queer women-led team of strategists, activists and technologists who have been behind the largest online protests in history. Our mission is to ensure a just internet and promote technology as a force for empowerment, not exploitation.

Our high-visibility campaigns focus on technologies and policies that disproportionately impact and harm Black, Brown and Indigenous people and communities, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and others who face systemic oppression.

We achieve victories previously thought impossible through a unique tactical approach that integrates technology, coalition-building, advocacy and bold messaging to mobilize activism at a mass scale. In the past year alone, our victories have included: organizing hundreds of prominent musicians to boycott venues that use facial-recognition technology and fighting its discriminatory use in schools and sports arenas like MSG and Citi Field; overcoming an industry lobbying blitz to successfully get strong net neutrality protections restored; and, in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, successfully pressuring one of the world’s largest tech companies to finally encrypt user’s private messages.

But the threats continue to grow. As Fight Director Evan Greer recently wrote in a call to action, “The stakes couldn’t be higher. Big Tech has colonized much of what we used to call the internet, creating a near monopoly on channels for speech and employing a surveillance-driven business model that’s wreaking havoc on democracy, eviscerating privacy and civil rights, and endangering the lives of the most vulnerable.”

There is so much work to be done. But we’re up to it. With continued advocacy and activism, we’re leading the charge to protect the digital freedoms that make a just and equitable society possible. Here’s a look at some of the most critical issues Fight is tackling now.

Stopping the spread of biometric surveillance technology

Facial recognition and other biometric surveillance technologies—like palm scanning and emotional AI—are becoming increasingly pervasive and intrusive, infringing on civil liberties and putting people in danger. This surveillance is basically impossible to opt of, puts our highly sensitive biometric data at risk of abuse by hackers and other bad actors, has led to a number of discriminatory and wrongful arrests—traumatic events that can forever change the course of someone’s life—and imperils our democracy with its chilling effect on privacy and the freedom of movement, expression and dissent.

As a leader in the fight against facial-recognition technology, we have mobilized a coalition of over 40 racial justice, LGBTQ+ and human rights organizations to push for a federal ban and dealt major blows to the spread of facial recognition. Our campaigns have successfully kept facial recognition off of 60 college campuses, halted its use at major music festivals and rallied over 100 artists and 30 venues to reject it. Our live protests against its discriminatory and harmful use at MSG and other sports and music arenas, including most recently at New York’s Citi Field, have been covered nationally. As one of the first organizations in the U.S. to start campaigning against the use of facial recognition in retail stores, we were thrilled to recently add to our scorecard a win against Rite Aid, the result of an FTC enforcement action that cracked down on Rite Aid’s discriminatory surveillance. We are also working to ensure that the Biden administration addresses and prioritizes the AI harms associated with facial recognition, particularly in schools, public housing, healthcare and law enforcement.

Each rejection of this technology is an immediate win for everyone’s security, safety and autonomy, especially for individuals and communities who have long faced systemic discrimination. But there is an urgent need for more advocacy to stop the spread of facial recognition. We’ll keep amplifying the alarm about its dangers, launch large-scale campaigns that empower thousands to send mass comments to federal agencies and pressure companies to reject facial recognition and other biometric surveillance tech until we get an outright ban that protects us all.

Expanding privacy: Reproductive justice and the fight for private messaging

In an era of increasing surveillance, the fight to protect personal privacy is all the more urgent. And with the onslaught of anti-abortion and anti-trans bills, the need for secure, private communication is more critical than ever. Without end-to-end encryption, platforms can access private messages, leaving many individuals—particularly those crossing state lines for abortion or gender-affirming care—exposed to law enforcement, hackers and even nosy employees.

Our campaign to make private messaging safe was launched immediately after Roe was overturned and focuses on the essential role of default end-to-end encryption in safeguarding marginalized communities, including gender-affirming care funds, abortion seekers, trans activists, sex workers, immigrants, racial justice activists, workers who are organizing, journalists and human rights defenders. We built out a 70-plus intersectional coalition to drive tech accountability, including racial justice, LGBTQ+, climate and reproductive justice organizations and we have relentlessly pressured Meta, Slack, Discord, Apple, Google and others to adopt privacy preserving policies.

We’ve now made huge gains in this fight. This year, Meta officially launched default end-to-end encryption for Messenger, and Instagram, Google, Apple and Discord have expanded its use. Our efforts have been vital in safeguarding the privacy and security of millions of at-risk individuals and we’ll continue to step up pressure on all messaging platforms. We’ve also expanded the campaign to hold Big Tech accountable for surveillance and censorship practices that threaten bodily autonomy and we’re pushing rideshare companies to ensure location-privacy practices and policies that protect those seeking care across state borders.

Stopping data brokers and restoring personal privacy: Getting a national opt-out registry

Data brokers are another insidious threat to personal privacy. Companies you have likely never heard of, like Acxiom and RELX, have a staggering reach into the most private corners of our lives, collecting and selling detailed information on over two-thirds of U.S. residents, tracking our daily movements, relationships, transactions and activities.

This massive data trove enables wide-scale surveillance and puts vulnerable communities, including those fleeing domestic violence, social justice advocates, abortion seekers and others, at particular risk. The sale of personal data collected not only fuels surveillance but also exposes individuals to hacking, doxing, AI scams and discrimination in housing, employment, banking and other areas.

To stop data brokers in their tracks, Fight for the Future has built a coalition of 30-plus organizations to push the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on corporate data-collection practices and abuse. Central to our campaign is getting the FTC to create a national opt-out registry, which would limit data exposure, mitigate the surveillance of vulnerable individuals, restore personal privacy and security, and help protect everyone from the harms of nonconsensual data collection and sale.

The fight for internet justice: Defending net neutrality

High-speed internet enables people across society to access education, employment, healthcare, entertainment, banking, commerce and community, and is critical to everyone’s ability to participate fully in civic and cultural life.

Yet millions of people in the U.S. still lack reliable, affordable internet access. For over a decade, Fight for the Future has been at the forefront of the battle for broadband access and net neutrality, which ensures that internet service providers cannot prioritize certain content, such as that of Big Tech like Amazon or Meta, or throttle access to others.

In 2015, Fight built the tech and led the messaging that made net neutrality a household word and clinched the victory that established net neutrality protections. When those protections were repealed in 2017, we led the charge that helped generate the passage of the Save the Internet Act in the House. And, in 2024, after more than a year of pushing hard for a fully staffed Federal Communications Commission, we won back net neutrality.

How did we do it? We relaunched our campaign hub Battle for the Net, built a coalition of over 140 signers, mobilized a wide range of supporters, from individuals and businesses to veterans and first responders, to generate tens of thousands of comments and published an open letter signed by over 275+ influential artists, including Tom Morello, Amanda Palmer and Cory Doctorow, that emphasized the importance of strong Title II net neutrality protections for their livelihoods.

But the battle is far from over. Big Tech continues to push for monopolistic control of the internet, threatening to send us back to a web of inequity and walled access. And Supreme Court rulings like the recent reversal of the Chevron doctrine mean net neutrality and hundreds of other agency rulings could be struck down by the courts.

Fight remains steadfast in our efforts. We’ll keep defending net neutrality and working for broadband affordability and justice to ensure that the essential human right to connect is protected.

To learn more, go to FightForTheFuture.org.