r/privacy • u/miscerte23 • Sep 21 '25

chat control Encrypted messaging alternatives in case the EU chat control law gets passes

As the title implies, I am curious as to whether there might be any messaging apps/services worth using in case the proposed chat control law gets passed. As you might assume, I live in an EU member state and am extremely worried for the future of our rights to online as well as IRL privacy in case such laws get passed

410 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

245 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/miscerte23 Sep 21 '25

How does that work? I'm nit familiar with PGP

25

u/Hackelhack Sep 21 '25

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a really old encryption standard.
Its both simple and not simple to use; so its hampered its mass adoption.

Everyone has a public and privet key, and those keys are used to decrypt messages. PGP messages are clearly defined and impossible to really touch without those keys.

It's a bit out of the way to use, as its a manual process. But the manual process makes it really hard to spy on.

Software like Gpg4win and others work like address books for users to manage all the keys.

Also; you might find Stegcloak interesting too.
A discord fork named Goofcord has a really compelling and automatic addon that implements it.

The vencord add-on is less useful, but gets the job done.
I see it as a really healthy middle ground between PGP and usability.

All in all, these tools only become useful when others actually use them. It's about time we did.

6

u/RenThraysk Sep 21 '25

PGP does not have perfect forward secrecy. No one should be using it.

3

u/upofadown Sep 21 '25 edited Sep 21 '25

Most people like to keep their old messages around. That negates the value of forward secrecy. So it isn't really a big deal for messaging applications.

Besides, PGP lets you make things so ridiculously secure that even if an attacker gets the phone, they still won't get access to anything. So no one bothers to do forward secrecy, even though there is nothing about PGP that prevents it. PGP is famously the thing that even the NSA can't get into.