News

Happy holidays! Our office will be closed entirely on Dec. 25th and Jan 1 so our team can take time to celebrate this festive season with their families and friends. Our office will be open with limited hours and staff from Dec. 23-Jan 3, so please be patient with us while we work to respond to your inquiries during this time.

For general questions, check out our website's searchable Help section. For any technical problems with your Calyx hotspot, please give tech support a call at 877-216-9603 to troubleshoot your device and get started on a warranty replacement if necessary. We thank you for your patience and understanding, and wish you a Happy New Year!

As 2024 wraps up, have you thought about your plans in the coming year? At the Calyx Institute, we took a look back at our work in 2024, and are making new year’s resolutions to level up our privacy tool development and maintenance, deepen our community support with grantmaking, and provide our supporters with accessible resources to address their privacy needs.

The year 2024 saw both advances and challenges for digital privacy and internet freedom with AI and other emerging technologies on the rise. In the U.S., 19 states have passed comprehensive privacy laws, marking an effort to broaden and fortify rights to data privacy. Countries in both Asia and Latin America carried on with the trend to create data protection regulations highlighting AI governance, cybersecurity, biometric data collection, and cross-border data transfer. The European Union (EU) adopted the AI Act, the first comprehensive legal framework to regulate AI, aiming at furthering the protection of personal data that started with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws. Despite policy efforts, social media and platform companies are doubling down on massive surveillance with the aid of AI to sustain their data-harvesting business models. Billions of people suffered severe data breaches online, including their financial and health records.

All of these trends and emerging issues made our mission at the Calyx Institute more critical than ever: we will keep defending digital privacy, advancing connectivity, and striving for a future where everyone has access to the resources and tools they need to remain securely connected.

In 2024, we expanded the depth of digital tool development around our flagship Android operating system, CalyxOS, while continuing our endeavor in bridging the digital divide with Calyx membership premiums’ hotspots.

This year, CalyxOS expanded to support 26 mobile device models. We successfully launched the CalyxOS version 6 based on Android 15 source code in October, simultaneous to the official Android 15 release. Throughout 2024, we started making CalyxOS available for more Pixel, Motorola, and Fairphone models while sustaining security updates for older models even if the manufacturers had ended their maintenance for these devices. We keep all security updates automatic over-the-air every month with full usability checks to minimize cyber attacks and elevate digital experience for people who are using CalyxOS. In addition, we are steadily and consistently revising and improving core features and services for everyday use, such as Setup Wizard, SeedVault for phone backups and restoration, Panic Button, Work Profile, and location service settings. Looking ahead, we are preparing to launch more CalyxOS features that are crucial to a wide range of use case scenarios so that people can have more flexibility to customize protection for their personal data based on their individual needs. Stay tuned for more news about CalyxOS!

As our Internet membership program continues to grow, we are proud to be facilitating more members than ever with our mobile Wi-Fi hotspot membership that enables them to get connected when they need it in places where connectivity resources are scarce. Our members’ generous contributions make all of Calyx’s work possible, and we are proud to show our thanks by helping bridge the digital divide, especially in moments when our members need it most. As Hinde, a longtime member from South Carolina, shared, “[Our Calyx] mifi device saved our bacon here in SC during Helene. Operated and connected flawlessly. … We were able to keep in touch with friends and family and relay messages for many more of our neighbors, too. We could regularly check the outage maps and communicate with the utilities so they were able to address potentially dangerous situations quickly and we could stream video to keep up with developments regionally.”

In 2025, we look forward to bringing you even more ways to enjoy the benefits of your Internet membership with us, including a new Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) program to provide our members with upgraded flexibility and convenience. Whether you’ve just joined us or have been a member for many years, we’re so thankful for your trust in our work.

To ensure our tools serve the needs of our global community, we are excited to kick off a comprehensive community research project in 2025 to get insights from various stakeholder groups, which will guide our future enhancement both in the CalyxOS development and membership program. Talk to us on social media, or reach out to us via email, and let us know how we can do better in bringing back control over your privacy and staying connected!

2024 also marks four years since we launched our first grant program at Calyx. This year, Calyx funded Sunset Spark’s work to develop a multi-purpose curriculum focused on privacy, internet infrastructure, and the role of the public and private sectors in our digital world. As a nonprofit organization offering free education in science and technology in the heart of Brooklyn, Sunset Spark equips children and young people from diverse backgrounds with digital literacy and skills they need to enhance self-protection in today’s digital life. This curriculum aims to close the gap in digital inequality and assist K-8 school teachers in recentering technology education on privacy and freedom topics – concerns that are timely and relevant to students and their families. Learning from this and our previous work, we are coming back in 2025 with an even bigger and more refined grant program to support passionate people and projects in the internet freedom ecosystem.

Calyx has always been passionate about building community resources in addition to tool- and grantmaking-support for people to get more native in FOSS tools and digital privacy. As we reflect on research work we published throughout the past years, we are strategizing for a more integrated plan to provide research and educational resources on privacy, security, and other imperative topics in the digital realm. In 2025, we will regularly share a series of bite-sized digital privacy and security tips, and launch more collaborations with Calyx’s partners in promoting valuable resources for individual online safety and security.

Join our community effort!

None of our work can be done without you. It is the individual support from each of you that allows us to synergize efforts to keep digital privacy and connectivity accessible to our members, communities and beyond. As 2025 approaches, there are more ways you can join this movement to protect your rights to data privacy and internet access. Here’s how:

Become a Calyx member

The best way to support Calyx’s mission is to become a member. Sign up for a membership today! You will receive a thank you gift for your generous support. You can also let us know how we can make our membership program better by emailing us at help@calyxinstitute.org.

Donate to Calyx—and double the impact with employer match!

Every contribution, no matter the size, brings us one step closer to fulfilling our mission. You can double the impact of your gift instantly if your employer matches your donation. Click here to learn more about how employer donation matching can take your donation even further with a few easy steps.

Stay connected to Calyx updates and news

Starting in 2025, we will send regular community updates and resources to everyone who is interested. You can support us by staying up to date with our news and subscribing to the Calyx newsletter! Keep an eye out for the invitation to subscribe in Q1 2025.

If you prefer social channels, you can follow and engage with us on Mastodon, Twitter/X, Facebook, and Instagram, or join our Matrix channel.

Spread the word

Don’t forget to share our digital privacy news and resources with friends and family! By spreading the word about Calyx’s mission and membership program, you can help us continue defending digital privacy, advancing connectivity, and working toward a future where everyone has access to the resources and tools they need to remain securely connected.

Together, we are building a movement to reshape our digital future towards privacy and internet freedom for everyone!

Thanks for all your support,
The Calyx Institute Team

Our CalyxOS Privacy Champion membership is back, now with the Pixel 7a as a membership premium! CalyxOS phone memberships are a great way to invest in a more private phone experience, as well as support our nonprofit mission to develop and distribute free online privacy tools. Plus, they make great gifts! You can learn more and sign up here

A new CalyxOS Privacy Champion membership that includes a Pixel 7a pre-flashed with our CalyxOS privacy-focused operating system is $700 for the first year and $10 to renew if you'd like to continue supporting our work maintaining and improving CalyxOS.

CalyxOS offers a suite of features inspired by our core principles of Privacy By Design, like encrypted backups, secure communications, control over when and how your apps communicate, and more. These advances pair perfectly with the Pixel 7a's excellent technological capabilities, including Google's improved Tensor G2 chipset, which provides better performance and faster processing speeds compared to the Tensor G1 chipset in the Pixel 6a. The 7a also features a dual rear camera system, 8GB RAM, up to 90Hz Smooth Display, and wireless charging. You can view more details here

Want to make your CalyxOS phone membership even better? Combine it with our unlimited wifi hotspot membership! Our CalyxOS phone memberships do not come with any wifi or data benefits included, and can be used with any phone or data carrier.

Thank you for your membership and support,

The Calyx Institute

We are excited to announce that Contributor Plus memberships will now come with a brand new device: the Franklin JEXtream RG2100! This hotspot supports 5G connectivity, Wi-Fi 6, USB tethering, 5x LTE Carrier Aggregation, and has an internal 4x4 MIMO antenna. As with all Calyx Membership hotspots, wifi data is unlimited and unthrottled.

Sign up for a new Contributor Plus membership to get a JEXtream 5G hotspot + a year of unlimited data. A new Contributor Plus membership is $600 for the first year, and renewal dues are $500/year or $175/quarter.

If you are in the middle of your membership period, you also have the option to order the JEXtream as a replacement device for a $250 donation. Just log in to your account with us, click Devices, and then click Order Replacement Device.

Before you decide if a Contributor Plus membership is right for you, check your area on T Mobile’s map to make sure you have adequate 5G coverage. As with all our memberships, the Calyx Institute cannot offer test hotspots or offer refunds if service is inadequate or non-existent. Our wireless hotspots and data plans are offered as a thank you gift to member donors who support our research into privacy protecting communications technology, and are not a commercial transaction.

You can read more about the JEXtream 5G hotspot here. If there are any other questions we can answer for you about our memberships or the hotspots we offer as membership premiums, please let us know at help@calyxinstitute.org.

Living in an RV offers unparalleled freedom and adventure, but staying connected on the road can be a challenge. In the digital age, where connectivity is key, mobile hotspots are a game-changing solution for RV dwellers. These portable devices give nomads the ability to stay connected, work remotely, and enjoy the conveniences of modern life, while also embracing their wanderlust.

Off the Beaten Path
RV living is all about exploring new destinations, not knowing where you might be tomorrow. Mobile hotspots liberate nomads from the constraints of traditional connectivity options. Unlike fixed internet installations, which are limited to specific locations, mobile hotspots leverage cellular networks, so wherever there is cell service, a hotspot user has full internet access. Calyx's hotspots connect to T-Mobile's US network. Anyone with a Calyx hotspot can stay connected to friends, family, work and school on the go anywhere that T-Mobile's cell network covers. Check out T-Mobile's coverage map here: https://www.t-mobile.com/coverage/coverage-map.

Uninterrupted Remote Work
Many RVers work remotely. The best and easiest way to telecommute is by using a hotspot that maintains a reliable internet connection. Mobile hotspots offer consistent internet, allowing RV dwellers to work from home, wherever home happens to be that day. Whether you're a freelancer or remote employee, a Calyx mobile hotspot ensures you can do everything you would do if you were in the office: write, research, communicate, attend meetings, collaborate with colleagues, and meet deadlines.

Low-Maintenance Connectivity
Setting up a fixed internet connection in every new location you choose to stop for a day or two is complicated, not to mention expensive and time-consuming. Mobile hotspots such as the ones Calyx offers its members eliminate the need for multiple subscriptions and installations, providing a hassle-free solution for those who prefer a simpler approach.

Entertainment on the Go
Living on the road doesn't mean sacrificing entertainment. Calyx hotspot memberships allow RVers to stream their favorite shows, movies, games, and music. Whether you're parked in a bustling city or nestled in a serene natural setting, you can enjoy unwinding with your favorite media.

The freedom to explore without sacrificing connectivity, the ability to work remotely, and the cost-effectiveness make mobile hotspots a must-have for modern nomads. Embrace the digital age while enjoying the serenity of RV living – Calyx hotspot memberships are the key to unlocking the full potential of life on the open road.

Of course, it’s not surprising that we think Calyx hotspot memberships are a great choice, but we’re thrilled that the Mobile Internet Resource Center has included us as one of their Top Pick Plans within the Non-Profit tier.

Please check out their review of our Membership Program and see how we stack up against other nonprofit wifi programs here.

Here's their overview of our Sustainer membership, featuring the Mifi X Pro hotspot: Sustainer membership review

They have also done an overview of the Franklin T10 hotspot, currently available with our Contributor membership: Franklin T10 hotspot review

UPDATE: Happy New Year!

As we welcome the new year, we're thrilled to share some incredible news that is a testament to the generosity and commitment of all our members.

Thanks to your support, we have not only met but exceeded our year-end giving goal for 2023. We'd hoped to raise $50,000 in December, to continue our work providing digital privacy tools, services and advocacy for free to everyone online. We actually surpassed that goal, and raised $84,830 in new memberships and donations during our campaign! Everyone at the Calyx Institute is grateful for your decision to stand with us. We wish you all a happy and healthy new year.

Welcome our Year-End Giving Campaign! At this time of year-end reflection, gratitude and generosity, we hope you will join us in protecting privacy and free speech online. Together, we can make digital privacy more accessible for everyone.

This campaign will help us continue funding some of the projects we're most excited about, like providing meet.calyx.net, a free videoconferencing service with no log-ins and no time limits; funding the Global Gathering's Equity Fund to help break down financial barriers for digital rights activists from marginalized communities; and developing CalyxOS as a privacy-focused smartphone operating system for anyone who wants to enjoy their phone AND their privacy too.

How can you help?

Become a Member: Signing up for a Calyx Institute membership is the best way that you can support our work and enjoy the benefits of being part of our mission! Become a member by clicking here and we'll send you a gift to thank you for your vital ongoing support.

Donate: Your financial support is crucial to the success of our mission. Every contribution, no matter the size, brings us one step closer to reaching our goal.

See if your employer offers a donation match: You can double the impact of your gift instantly if your employer matches your donation. Check to see if your employer participates in donation matching here.

Spread the Word: Share our campaign on social media, through email, or by word of mouth. Encourage your friends, family, and colleagues to join us in making a difference!

Your contribution will not only help us reach our fundraising goal but will also create a ripple effect of positive change for privacy and free expression online. Thank you for continuing to support us and believe in our mission!

UPDATE: Sustainer hotspot signups are open again, and we are fully stocked on both Sustainer and Contributor level hotspots. The Contributor Plus level of membership is not available for signup at this time while we evaluate a potential new hotspot offering for that membership level. Thank you so much for bearing with us!

Supply chain delays have slowed down our latest restock of Mifi X Pro hotspots, so new membership sign-ups and replacement Mifi X Pro orders are temporarily paused while we restock our supplies and fill current orders. We expect to have these devices back in stock within the next few weeks, so please stay tuned for updates. Thanks so much for bearing with us!

When Nick Merrill founded The Calyx Institute 13 years ago in 2010, the privacy landscape was very different. The iPhone was still a relative novelty, most of the web was still not encrypted, Edward Snowden had not yet made his heroic disclosures, and the scale of government and corporate surveillance was just a fraction of today's ubiquitous information over-collection and exploitation.

From our shoestring budget beginnings, we've grown into a bustling non-profit organization, with an incredible and committed team, advisory panel, partner organizations, and a strong network of supporters. With our members' generous support, we've developed new technologies, improved access to online privacy tools, published and translated educational materials, trained journalists and activists, while inspiring and continuing ongoing litigation in the fight for privacy and against surveillance. In short, The Calyx Instituate has grown steadily, and now enjoys strong revenue and a very sustainable program model as our growth accelerates.

Our founding aim was to increase awareness about online privacy, surveillance and accessibility through software development, advocacy and outreach. Looking to the present day, it is striking to reflect on how that has manifested. Through our mobile internet hotspots, we offer many of our over 11 thousand active members a more privacy-respecting way to be online. CalyxOS provides usable security and privacy without sacrificing essential mobile phone functionality. Additionally, the sustainability these programs have enabled is allowing us to experiment with programs like our Fusion Center Microgrants Fund

As we move into the next phase of the organization's growth, we are reimagining how leadership can best support and enable Calyx's ultimate impact. As founding Executive Director, Nick Merrill has provided vision, leadership, sacrifice, and heavy lifting to put the organization, and our community, in such a strong position.

In reflecting on how we can continue to grow, both Nick and the Calyx board are in agreement that we need to expand and fortify our leadership structure. To enable that growth, we plan to take an iterative approach to evolving Calyx. Nick will be moving into a newly-created role of President, enabling him to focus primarily on external advocacy, community engagement, creative vision, technology and fundraising.

In parallel with this transition, The Calyx Institute will be seeking an experienced Interim Executive Director to facilitate our next chapter and to serve as a bridge to our future leadership structure. The Interim Executive Director will have an active role in that planning process, and will have the option of applying for the permanent Executive Director position.

To quote Nick, "My passion will always be focused on the community and the work, and I'm looking forward to partnering with new team members to increase our capacity and our impact."

At this critical juncture, we want to express our gratitude on a number of fronts. First, to the Calyx staff, who have led brilliantly in their respective roles while weathering complexity and stress that come with the kind of organizational growth their work has enabled. We also want to thank our community and our members, without whom none of this would be sustainable or even possible. We are also indebted to the funders and major donors who have provided us with dedicated resources at many steps in our journey. And finally a heartfelt thank you to Nick, for his vision, his leadership, and his commitment to evolving alongside the organization.

We are all excited to see what lies ahead, and we welcome anyone reading this to join in collaboration and solidarity with Calyx as we help chart a course toward a more private and surveillance-free future.

- The Calyx Board

We are excited to announce that Sustainer memberships will now come with a brand new device: the Inseego Mifi X PRO 5G (M3000B)! Like the Mifi M2000, this hotspot supports 5G connectivity, Wi-Fi 6, Advanced Carrier Aggregation, USB tethering, and has an internal 4x4 MIMO antenna. In addition, this new device features a 1 Gbps ethernet port and a battery preservation mode that allows the device to stay plugged in for longer. As with all Calyx Membership hotspots, wifi data is unlimited and unthrottled.

Sign up for a new Sustainer membership to get a Mifi X Pro 5G hotspot + a year of unlimited data. A new Sustainer membership is $750 for the first year and $500 to renew every following year.

If you are in the middle of your membership period, you also have the option to order the Mifi X Pro 5G as a replacement device for a $400 donation. Just log in to your account with us, click Devices, and then click Order Replacement Device.

Before you decide if a Sustainer membership is right for you, check your area on T Mobile’s map to make sure you have adequate 5G coverage. As with all our memberships, the Calyx Institute cannot offer test hotspots or offer refunds if service is inadequate or non-existent. Our wireless hotspots and data plans are offered as a thank you gift to member donors who support our research into privacy protecting communications technology, and are not a commercial transaction.

You can read more about the Mifi X Pro 5G hotspot here. If there are any other questions we can answer for you about our memberships or the hotspots we offer as membership premiums, please let us know at help@calyxinstitute.org.