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Signal reaffirms it will leave European market rather than agree to help governments surveil users [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2024-06-02  

Signal, which makes a popular private messaging service, reaffirmed that it will not comply with demands to compromise user privacy in Europe. France has reportedly revived a stalled EU surveillance plan with some bizarre bureacrat-brain compromise ("agree to have your chats scanned or you can no longer share & receive pictures,videos and links") that could only be possible if there were no end-to-end encryption in the first place, i.e. "upload scanning."

"Signal strongly opposes this proposal," Signal president Meredith Whittaker wrote on social media. "Let there be no doubt: we will leave the EU market rather than undermine our privacy guarantees. This proposal–if passed and enforced against us–would require us to make this choice. It's surveillance wine in safety bottles."

Asked how, Whittaker said Signal would just continue to provide services until the EU took action against it for noncompliance: "To be clear–we will stay to the end. We stand with the people in Europe & their right to privacy, whatever the Commission does But we won't comply with any mandate to undermine our privacy guarantees. And noncompliance would result in our being barred from the market."

I believe that's more or less that status of Signal in the U.K., which passed the Online Safety Bill last year but it's Britain, so the only real enforcement mechanism is waiting for tabloid newspapers to get upset about something.

Signal has established some bona fides for user privacy in the U.S. domestic context. The company is based in California.

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/02/signal-reaffirms-it-will-leave-european-market-rather-than-agree-to-help-governments-surveil-users.html

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