A padlock

I use the Switzerland-based service Proton for my personal email and VPN, so news that the Swiss government is considering amending its surveillance law isn’t great news.

It looks like the specific thing they’re targeting is the metadata — i.e. not the content of the message, but where it was sent from and to whom. That’s the kind of information that Meta collects when people use WhatsApp. By way of comparison, Proton is more like Signal messenger in they don’t harvest this kind of metadata.

You might wonder why this is important, but putting together a story based on metadata isn’t exactly difficult. And, as is well-attested, if you have enough metadata, you don’t really need the content of the messages.

Consultations are now public and open until May 6, 2025. Speaking to TechRadar, NymVPN has explained how it’s planning to fight against it, alongside encrypted messaging app Threema and Proton, the provider behind one of the best VPN and secure email services on the market.

Authorities' arguments behind the need for accessing more data are always the same – catching criminals and improving security. Yet, according to Nym’s co-founder and COO, Alexis Roussel, being forced to leave more data behind would achieve the opposite result.

“Less anonymity online is not going to make things better,” he told TechRadar. “For example, enforcing identification of all these small services will eventually push to leaks, more data theft, and more attacks on people.”

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“It’s not about end-to-end encryption. They don’t want to force you to reveal what’s inside the communication itself, but they want to know where it goes,” Roussel explains. “They realize the value is not in what is being said but who you are talking to.”.

“The whole point of security and privacy is not being able to link the usage to the person. That’s the most critical thing.” Roussel told TechRadar.

Source: TechRadar

Image: Arturo A