What’s your resolution for 2025?

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