ALT
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COM
Be based.
Based on human rights.
A brief summary on why I started to transfer my digital life into decentralized and open platforms .
Start readingIntroduction
Hi, I'm Valentin. At first I only wanted to host my XMPP server but I decided to host this page too, so maybe I can explain myself a bit. So I guess you are curious about wtf is this. Well...sorry to disappoint you but the final purpose of this page is yet to decided, until then, I can share some of my thoughts on privacy and technology .
What is privacy?
Privacy is a human right. It can come in many forms, but at its core it only means one thing: control over who you share your information with. It is a right that protects the individual from the abuse of power by the state and other entities. Losing privacy means losing control over a piece of your life.
Maybe you want to tell your mother how much you love her, but not the government. That is your decision, and yours alone.
Privacy is essential for the development of the individual and society. It is a right that is essential for the protection of other human rights, such as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom of assembly .
Of course, ethics are not black and white ; in some cases, one right takes precedence over another. For example, in most countries in the world, it is evident that the police can breach privacy to protect citizens. It just comes down to the what, who, how, and when questions .
Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the United States government, leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) that revealed the extent of the systematic surveillance by the agency's program. This surveillance was an untargeted collection of phone and internet data from millions of people around the world.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that the personal data of millions of Facebook users had been harvested without consent and used for political advertising and manipulation.
The Israeli Pegasus spyware was used to target more than 300 Hungarian phone numbers of journalists, activists, and opposition figures in Hungary and other countries. European Parliament Report NAIH Official Statement
Privacy-preserving communication
Private messaging in a normal, democratic world should be the standard . Sadly, this is not the case. Most normie applications widely used by people are nowhere close to being private . The bar is so low... In a normal conversation, wouldn't anyone be weirded out if someone else stood next to them, listening and writing down everything they say?
Whenever you send a message on most applications, it works via a client-server model . This means that your client (likely your phone or computer) sends the message first to a server maintained by the service provider, and then the server will forward it to the recipient's client. This is done so the two communicating clients don't have to be online all the time to receive messages. The server stores and forwards because it is always online.
Common network protocols nowadays implement encryption layers, which are cryptographically proven to guarantee that only the two network devices, in this case, the server and your client, can actually understand the messages. However, without any further transformations, the server can still read the messages. Your soyware applications like Facebook, Gmail, Instagram, Snapchat, and so on do exactly that.
Transport Layer Security is an application-agnostic security layer that enables two communicating sockets (call them endpoints to simplify things) to have secure communication, guaranteeing confidentiality and integrity . It utilizes asymmetric cryptography to establish a shared secret between the endpoints, and then continues with symmetric cryptography to encrypt the communication using the established secret.
We can't really trust the server. Server administrators can be bribed, compelled, or blackmailed, and the companies holding these servers really don't care about privacy at all, unless that's their whole business model, like Signal. In math we trust, so researchers built protocols made out of cryptographically secure primitives for secure, encrypted communications between clients. This way, the server can only see random gibberish , and only the sender and the recipient actually see the messages. We call this communication end-to-end encrypted (E2EE). In this scenario, it doesn't matter if the server has malicious intent; the universe would go cold before they could break the encryption securing the communication.
We have E2EE, so we are all safe now, right? Not exactly. We still have to trust and take the word of the service providers that they actually implement a secure E2EE protocol without any backdoors for nation-states, companies, or anyone else. One way they could prove there is no sketchy stuff in their application is if they open-sourced it and made the whole messaging transparent. This way, anyone, including security researchers, would be able to verify that it is indeed secure. But guess what? That is not the case. Most companies are strictly closed-source because they want to keep their code base a secret from competitors. When you use closed-source software, you are betting that this one company is better at security than the entire world's security community. That's a big gamble. Even if the company isn't evil to the bone, they would still comply with secret government court orders without letting you know, of course.
Leaked NSA documents state that multiple US companies, for example, Microsoft, collaborated with the agency, providing backdoors to their services. In the case of Skype, this meant that Microsoft helped the NSA circumvent the encryption behind it, enabling access to people's conversations. Communications could be collected without a warrant if the NSA operative was 51% sure the suspect was a foreign citizen. You can't make this shit up.
There is no universal solution to privacy-preserving communication, since the problem itself is complex and has multiple parameters. What's the best application out there to communicate privately? It depends. There are multiple solutions that suck way less than the mainstream applications used by the general populace. In cybersecurity, the term threat model is commonly used to assess what an attacker is capable of with plausible reason. Based on this threat model, multiple risks arise, and a defender has to linearly match the risks with the amount of effort put into countermeasures. For example, regarding communication, your grandma and a political activist or journalist would have vastly different threat models. However, I think we should not forget that privacy is a non-negotiable human right. It's not like your grandma should have less privacy just because there is a smaller chance someone else will try to breach it. This is especially true in the world we live in, where untargeted surveillance is a constantly returning topic. I won't compare private communication methods here, since there are already plenty of better-written comparisons out there, but I will argue why I started using XMPP.
Privacy is under attack
The free and open spread of various symmetric and asymmetric encryption schemes was a huge win for privacy. As I already mentioned, the basis of all democratic institutions is that each individual is free to think and speak without fear of retaliation. Maybe not on the public subway while annoying the hell out of everyone, but there must be a platform where this is possible.
Privacy is very sexy in the eyes of criminals, too. Entire illegal economies thrive in the shadows of privacy, hiding from police forces. I don't think there is a single illegal activity that didn't benefit from the appearance of private communication. From the perspective of secret agencies, E2EE and the spread of these platforms were a matter of national security. Given this desperate fight against illegal activities and people going dark, it is not surprising that a backdoor into these privacy-preserving platforms is a wet dream for every agency and government.
In particular, one criminal activity is constantly in the spotlight of the media and political debates concerning private messaging: the distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). It is rightfully a focused goal to prosecute everyone involved in CSAM, and we can safely say this is a common denominator in European society.
The narrative of the governments is that people who prefer private communication are either a) terrorists or b) CSAM distributors. That is the casus belli against the proliferation of privacy. The first is convincing because people fear terrorists, and the second is convincing because we naturally want to defend our children.
During the 1956 uprising in Hungary, freedom fighters fighting against the Soviet regime were all called terrorists.
You might think that mass surveillance doesn't affect you because you don't have anything to hide, being a perfect, law-abiding citizen. This is one of the first arguments people bring up. As I already mentioned, privacy is not about keeping secrets. It's about holding back anything YOU decide to, because you have a RIGHT to control information related to you. Secrets are made from data, but secrets are highly dependent on time. Data about you might not be criminalizing right now, but this can change at any time. Your messages won't be judged by the present, but by the system that reads them tomorrow. Who makes the laws deciding what is right or wrong? Furthermore, do not think that you are irrelevant. By definition, mass surveillance targets the general populace. A million average people hold way more political and economic power than a dozen celebrities or politicians. To control the masses, one needs to control the life of the average person who makes up that mass.
12,000 arrests in 2023, United Kingdom, for "offensive" posts.
The worst part isn't just that they want to breach privacy, but the fact that you know they are doing it. The danger comes from the fact that a surveilled person behaves completely differently. People don't search for things they normally would. They don't speak out or question things they normally would. Humans become their own censors, self-policing themselves due to the psychological effects of surveillance. The Panopticon is a prison design first proposed by Jeremy Bentham, where inmates become docile simply because of the ever-watching guard tower.
based on the work of Patrick Breyer, digital activist, former Member of EU Parliament
The EU Commission proposed to oblige providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content – generally and indiscriminately. The stated aim: To prosecute child sexual exploitation material (CSEM). The result: Mass surveillance by means of fully automated real-time surveillance of messaging and chats and the end of privacy of digital correspondence.
Other aspects of the proposal include ineffective network blocking, screening of personal cloud storage including private photos, mandatory age verification resulting in the end of anonymous communication, appstore censorship and excluding minors from the digital world.
Chat Control 1.0On July 6, 2021, a majority of Members of the European Parliament had already agreed to the voluntary use of chat control (Chat Control 1.0). So far, only unencrypted US communication services such as Gmail, Facebook/Instagram Messenger, Skype, Snapchat, iCloud Mail, or Xbox make use of this. In 2024, the EU adopted an extension of the voluntary Chat Control 1.0 regulation by two years, until April 3, 2026. In March 2026, the European Parliament rejected a second extension of the regulation, so that the interim regulation expired on 4 April 2026. However, on 9 July 2026 the European Parliament allowed the suspicionless mass scanning of private communications (“Chat Control 1.0”) to pass, a measure it had rejected twice in March. Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation (314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions), the motion to reject it failed to secure the required absolute majority of 361 votes. As a result, mass scanning is now permitted again until 2028.
The fact that Chat Control is moving forward against the will of the majority of voting MEPs is a farce and damages democracy. It is also interesting that beforehand the actual vote, on 7 July this proposal was voted to be priority and be brought to the parliament out of line. This is important since, they definitely knew that during the summer season with a large portion of MEPs being on leave, the absolute majority (361 MEPs) needed to reject the law, would be way harder to gather. But hey, think of the children!
Chat Control 2.0On 11 May 2022 the European Commission presented a proposal for a follow-up regulation for the mandatory use of chat control by all providers and would even have applied to so far securely end-to-end encrypted communication services (Chat Control 2.0). A public consultation by the Commission on this project had revealed that a majority of respondents, both citizens and stakeholders, opposed imposing an obligation to use indiscriminate message and chat control. Over 80% of respondents opposed its application to end-to-end encrypted communications. Parliament has positioned itself almost unanimously against indiscriminate chat control in 2023. Following protests, mandatory chat control was finally removed also from the EU governments’ draft law late 2025.
So as of today, 2026. 08. 03, the followings are true:
- US tech companies are once again allowed to scan private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion. This affects direct messages on platforms like Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, as well as emails via Google’s Gmail and Apple’s iCloud.
- Public social media posts and files hosted in cloud storage could already be scanned without this exemption law. Furthermore, private messages can, independently of the regulation, always be reported by users, or monitored by authorities using targeted, court-ordered wiretapping under national law.
It's not me or the critics who state that the effectiveness of Chat Control is debatable; it is the EU Commission itself. In their own report , after 4 years of Chat Control 1.0 being active, they concluded there is not enough data to give a definitive answer. It's not us who have to prove that it won't work (yet we still do); it's the other way around, it is them who should prove that it actually defends our children. In the same report, we can see that in 2024, only 36% of reports actually came from messaging and chat applications. This is significantly lower than the year before, where it was 61%. This indicates a trend where people harming the rights of children are migrating to E2EE applications and other private networks.
End-to-end encrypted messaging platforms are excluded from Chat Control, following large public outrage against breaking encryption.
So I raise the question: what's the whole point? The criminals who should be prosecuted get away by using E2EE applications, but the avergae user using mainstream applications pay the price with their privacy gone. I'm not saying that we should extend Chat Control to E2EE messages, hell no. I'm saying that we are being scammed. Are we trading in our privacy and future generations' privacy for something that doesn't even work? Mass surveillance is being built, but with a purpose vastly different from defending our children.
Chat Control also diverts funding and motivation away from actual solutions against CSAM. There is no easy or universal solution that preserves privacy and human rights while simultaneously solving CSAM or terrorism. If someone tells you otherwise, they are lying to you. Police forces already suffer from all the false positives (reports which are not actually CSAM), and to decrease the number of FPs, more aggressive monitoring would be needed. However, even if FPs are low, for example below 1%, in case of a million reports, that would still mean 10,000 ordinary people who would be investigated falsely. Without proper context your grandma sending you your old childhood picture, where you don't have any clothes on, your grandma might as well be flagged as CSAM distributer.
For now, thats all about Chat Control from me. If you are not convinced please visit the linked page from Patrick Breyer!
Nice try feds, but communication with my buddies is already maximum-encrypted by remaining strictly inside my head!
To be continued...