If the EU attacks EU citizens’ privacy further, how will this impact non-EU Kompakt users?
We’re seeing more and more that the attack on Internet and phone users’ privacy is expanding everywhere in what appears to be a coordinated effort to attack freedom and privacy.
If the EU continues down that road, how will it impact
Non-EU citizens
EU citizens
Will there be different versions of Mudita OS for difference geographic regions?
Will Mudita have to move to a free country (as Proton has threatened to do) to protect users from unwarranted surveillance?
@Aqua Can you be a little bit more specific about which laws your are referring to, when you ask about how potential EU privacy regulations (or surveillance measures) might affect Mudita Kompakt users, both inside and outside the EU.
If you’re referring to chat control: this will impact mostly third-party messaging apps. Mudita Kompakt uses sms, which is anyway not encrypted. I don’t think sms will be in scope, otherwise all dumbphones will be forbidden.
The EU, UK, Canada and Australia are collectively currently threatening to do a number of things to destroy privacy and expand surveillance, or they have implemented these plans. In the EU, the effort is known as Chat Control. https://cybernews.com/privacy/chat-control-eu-backlash-reactions/
Among other things, they are pushing hard to:
Read everyone’s chats, in part by having a government-made app on your phone that reads every thing you type and does screenshots
Require ID to use any online service, lying that it’s to “save the children”
@Aqua Mudita Kompakt does not have it’s own messaging app, and we really cannot control how Sideloaded apps, like Whatsapp or Signal handle this directive.
When it comes to SMS, that form of communications is not encrypted end-to-end. So there’s no “breaking encryption” problem.
Most mobile carriers don’t store or analyze SMS beyond what’s required for delivery and lawful interception. To comply, they would need new infrastructure for scanning, which is expensive, raises legal issues, and may not be feasible in practice.
In political discussions and media coverage, the spotlight has been on encrypted messengers (WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, Telegram, etc.), since that’s where the technical conflict is sharpest. However, due to the fact that Mudita is not a decision maker behind those apps, I don’t see how this applies to our product.
BTW I found Signal’s statement from last year about it: https://signal.org/blog/pdfs/upload-moderation.pdf
Effectively, EU could threaten, call for app removal from Google Play or something (lol), but eventually they’d have to block reaching .apk websites or downloading from a messaging app website directly, or make some bigger prick moves that would cause Signal or alike cease operations in the EU.
I’ve been in contact with the Belgian MEPs (you can just e-mail them) about chat control. The European Parliament already had a proposal on the table without chat control or client-side scanning. The discussion about chat control was mostly held in the Council. The vote on chat control was supposed to be on September the 12th but has been postponed indefinitely. It doesn’t look like chat control will be implemented in the next years.
There is also an initiative by the European Commission to do age verification. As a parent and activist to postpone smartphone introduction to children, I’m slightly in favor of this. I’m using Cloudflare’s family DNS to block access to gambling, adult content and malware on my home network, but many parents are not that technical. The Commission made an open-source application to anonymously provide websites with a “+18 yes/no” indicator. It’s open-source, so we can verify if it really does just that. It’s a much better solution than leaving it up to websites to pick their own provider, which is what’s happening in the UK and triggered a whole shitshow. It’s also a better solution than parental controls which monitor browsing behavior in detail and sends it to Google/Apple/Microsoft. The question still remains if age verification is worth it and will not lead to further monitoring eventually, including blocking certain political views. The best solution, imho, is to not give smartphones to kids under 16, full stop.
Lastly, there are some ideas in the EU to enforce access to encrypted data by law enforcement and ban VPNs. Such things are ridiculous and cannot even be implemented without breaking all encryption everywhere including for enterprise. Under further scrutiny every such proposal will fall, just liek chat control did. I wouldn’t worry too much.
Absolutely. Smart phones are addictive so they should have the same statutory age limits applying to other addictive products e.g. tobacco, alcohol, gambling. In the UK, the minimum age for those other things is 18. So, it should be for smart phones.
I’m active in an NGO to promote the postponing of smartphones to kids.
The problem is not only smartphones. Parents also give their iPad to kids. Some schools who banned smartphones now mandate personal laptop devices without any restrictions. But an age verification is not going to change anything either. We need to change the norm.
I think political control is the ultimate goal. People like Ursula von de Leyen are trying to establish thought-crimes that are somehow “dangerous” to democracy, while Kier Starmer is doing the same in the UK. Democracy is just a euphemism for their own not-to-democratic control. They’ll eventually force phone makers to include spyware for on-device scanning (initially in the form of the EU age verification app, which will be a Trojan horse, see here https://grc.sc/1044)
I agree, kids shouldn’t have phones. Social media are driving people crazy, especially kids.
@Aqua Actually this app is still quite innocent. At least it’s open source so we can verify it really doesn’t store anything else (until countries make their own closed source version). But the app is useless.
it won’t help. Already parents now install parental controls on their kid’s smartphone but then allow social media anyway. Or they give their own device or their own iPad, logged in to social networks. Here, parents or an older brother or the older kids at school can just scan the QR code one time and there is lifetime access to said app. So you can already guess what the next step will be… verification of uniqueness…and then you get an identifier which can be linked back to you.
People won’t care about the privacy anyway. In Belgium we now have a closed-source app, Itsme, made by the private sector, to identify yourself (name and everything) and it stores where you’ve been. Nobody cares or sees the problem. It also doesn’t run on devices without Google Play certification.
Why can’t my government supply a similar functionality through their government website or said Itsme app? It just needs to supply a one-time token to a website. The EU app is completely useless except lower friction.
Privacy activists complain about this app, but governments already can control your web activity through your IP address. At home at least.
I don’t see any reason to make such a sweeping generalization. What are you data sources?
If it’s government officials, they are maybe 0.0001% of the population and they’ve got a vested interest, especially if they are aligned with authoritarians like the World Economic Forum.
If it’s influencers, they are maybe 0.000001% of the population and they’re just paid to say things mostly.
If it’s people that you know, they’re a tiny subset as well unless you’re extremely social.
If it’s social media, that’s heavily influenced by bots and paid individuals.
Downplaying the dangers of the planned mass surveillance is not helpful. Indeed almost everyone I talk to doesn’t care about privacy. They say stupid things like “I don’t care, I love Google, they can listen to me anytime”.
When client-side scanning is applied, NOTHING you do on a digital device will be safe or private. Your privacy will be gone completely, because everything you type will be scanned BEFORE it even enters any app.
But privacy is a fundamental right, and one of the pillars of democracy. Yet the EU and other players want to make you believe that you are a criminal if you insist on privacy. That’s the core issue of this whole agenda. Who wants to live in a police state, where every move is being tracked ?
So everyone reading this thread will have to make a choice: ignore what’s happening and believe their slogan “If you got nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”, or realize that EVERYONE has something to hide: their privacy.
It is not any government’s business what individuals do or say, and AI (with an error rate of 80%) is certainly not capable of judging people’s thoughts or words correctly. Ultimately, EVERYONE will be found guilty at some point, if these laws are passed.
People need to stand up and fight for a free world, or follow the masses and find themselves vanishing in a flock of controlled sheeple, deprived of any and all rights. If these laws are passed in the EU or even globally, then the only way out is to get rid of all digital devices and go back to snail mail and pigeons.
Where does Mudita stand on this issue ?
Security and privacy should always come first. So adding a front camera for example is detrimental to privacy, because “bad actors” will use whatever they can AGAINST you. This means that any kind of perceived additional convenience is also an additional potential security risk/threat. Getting a de-googled phone with an offline switch doesn’t make sense when you ask for the addition of a front camera, syncing and dozens of other features you could easily have by default if you bought a standard phone in the first place.
Where do the forum members really stand on this issue ?
In Poland, you can’t trade your own plant seeds unless you’re certified in a way. People are selling those as collectibles or arrange parcel locker trade via Telegram like it was MJ lol.
You may not have anything to fear and then all of a sudden things you did for years become illegal or requires some extra effort or money so it’s easy to have you on the spot after storing what your routines, habits, hobbies and confessions are.
At the moment I feel a bit powerless tho, so I’d say make people aware so they could get back to good ol’ face to face social gatherings, LAN parties etc.
A phone with a front camera could have a shutter mechanism like you see on Thinkpads. I personally have a sticker on my iPhone’s front camera and only rarely remove it for videoconferencing etc.
On a scale of threats from 1 to 10 though that’s maybe a 3. Much higher on the scale is when companies listen to you via the microphone that’s on your phone (or the one in your car) that steals more sensitive information.
You can buy a dummy 3.5" headphone dongle that fools a phone into thinking you’re using ear buds and then apps can’t listen anymore.
There’s a great deal of surveillance happening that people don’t know about e.g. TVs that record everything you watch. If you hook up your laptop to the TV when working from home, it records your work screens too.
