Advisory: Second Annual Defend VPNs Day of Action 9/25

Last year, Fight for the Future engaged 20,000 action takers last year for the first annual Defend VPNs Day of Action through DefendVPNs.com and hopes to bolster that this year. Fight for the Future also leads a coalition of over 100 human rights, reproductive justice, LGBTQ, and digital rights organizations fighting back against online ID check mandates or “age verification” policies largely. Day of Action toolkit can be found here: https://fftf.link/VPNtoolkit

FRIDAY, September 25th — Digital rights organization Fight for the Future is holding their second annual Defend VPNs Day of Action, building on the 20,000 people who stepped up to fight for their right to anti-censorship and privacy tools for the internet last year. As online ID check laws and censorship efforts sweep the globe, users are rightly turning to VPNs so they can still access their online communities, vital resources, and information, which is their human right.

Instead of admitting that censorship and surveillance laws do not keep us safe online and in fact endanger vulnerable communities further, governments are now turning to their next target: VPNs. For this second annual Defend VPNs Day of Action, it is more imperative than ever to push back against lawmakers gutting our right to information and privacy online.

Since last year:

• Utah became the first U.S. state to force websites to surveil or block all suspected VPN traffic.
• Wisconsin narrowly avoided passing a VPN ban with its controversial age verification bill, while Michigan’s proposed total VPN ban remains in play.
• Australian lawmakers flirted with “closing the VPN loophole,” as thousands of young people circumvented the world’s first social media ban for youth under 16.
• Brazil made VPN usage an “aggravating factor” in crimes.
• The UK government seriously considered a VPN ban and is still considering restricting VPN use to bypass age-gating.
• Social media bans for young people went into effect in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the UAE, and were proposed in France, Massachusetts, and dozens more jurisdictions, setting the stage for even greater VPN scrutiny.

“The most vulnerable people in every country in the world depend on VPNs, to communicate with their families and friends, to seek healthcare and abortion care, and find the information and resources that are increasingly gated behind an invasive biometric scan or ID check,” said Sarah Philips, Campaign Director at Fight for the Future. “People are wary of the world we are looking at, where our data is being collected by exploitative Big Tech companies and sold to a company that could spike our insurance payments or what our grocery store charges us for bananas. What we look at and every site we visit could be used against us by ICE or our oppressive governments. In order to scroll through a subreddit, look at a cousin’s baby picture on instagram, or play video games on Discord, we might have to upload a government ID to a sketchy third party service we know could be hacked or directly to the tech company we’re being told not to trust for good reason. VPNs are a basic, necessary, and vital tool to protect us from everything from the most serious criminalization at the hands of an oppressive government hellbent on surveilling and censoring dissent to just wanting to protect ourselves from the steady leak of our data to be exploited. Using VPNs is not criminal. Using VPNs is a right that must be defended at all costs from governments who are doing their best to break down what little privacy we have in the current tech landscape.”