“The only way to prevent data from falling into the wrong hands is to not collect it in the first place.” That’s the claim included in an ad from one of the best VPN providers around, published Monday, January 20, 2025, in the New York Times.
Through a cartoon-like FBI agent, the Swiss company Mullvad seeks to shed light on the tensions between technologists and law enforcement around encryption.
On the one hand, the recent Salt Typhoon hack – which compromised every major US telecommunications company – has prompted US authorities to call on citizens to switch to encrypted communications. However, at the same time, the FBI referred to “responsibly managed encryption.” For Mullvad, that means one thing: creating backdoors to end-to-end encryption.
“This proves that they don’t understand anything at all and don’t learn from their mistakes. They don’t understand the main thing: if you create backdoors, they will be exploited by others, as happened product in the Salt Typhoon case,” Jan Jonsson, CEO of Mullvad told TechRadar, adding that the campaign is a way to raise awareness about this issue.
American authorities have installed backdoors to mass surveillance of their own citizens. Someone hacked the backdoors and the communications of millions of Americans ended up in unwitting hands. They do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. Announcement in today’s newspaper… pic.twitter.com/XgwmBNx1VfJanuary 20, 2025
Encryption – which refers to scrambling data into an unreadable form to prevent unauthorized access – is ensuring that your messages (for example, when you use Signal or WhatsApp) or your internet connections (think how network apps work virtual private (VPN)) remain intact. private between you and the recipient.
Although they recognize the importance of using encrypted messaging apps, law enforcement has long argued that officers should be able to access these encrypted messages to catch the bad guys.
This is not a prerogative of the American authorities either. European lawmakers, for example, are also pushing for the so-called cat control proposal. If passed, this measure will require all providers of encrypted communications to create such an encryption backdoor to enable surveillance of all citizens’ chats for illegal content.
Ironically, on the day Mullvad decided to run his ad in the New York Times, the Financial Times published an article reporting the Europol chief’s support, once again, for “responsible encryption.”
“Mass surveillance has no place in democratic societies. We want people to know their rights and demand them,” Jonsson said. “And we want politicians to realize that anonymous data does not exist, that the data collected ends up leaking and that it is high time for the authorities to stop mass surveillance of their own population and that of others.”
More Privacy-Focused Mullvad Announcements
This was the third in a series of advertisements, run by Mullvad, in the popular American newspaper to raise awareness about the risks of intrusive data collection and sharing.
Published on January 8, the first ad depicted a leaking car and was a response to the Volkswagen data breach that exposed the sensitive information of more than 800,000 electric vehicles. A leak, Mullvad explains, which shows that anonymous data does not exist.
Do you know?
Mullvad clearly opposed the EU’s proposal to scan all citizens’ chats. The VPN provider displayed banners in Stockholm and Guttenberg when Sweden held the EU presidency in 2023. “We will continue to actively oppose mass surveillance proposals,” Jan Jonsson, CEO of Mullvad, told TechRadar .
Jonsson said: “We cannot have a society in which people’s lives are tracked under the pretense that the data is anonymous while the patterns in the data reveal the person behind it. »
A week later, on January 17, a second ad featured a short cartoon highlighting some distinct, but intertwined, issues with Big Tech’s invasive data collection practices.
By tracking everything people do online, according to Mullvad, big tech companies are mapping people’s ideas before they are even expressed out loud, effectively infringing on their right to free expression.
The VPN provider also believes that banning the collection of metadata – that is, any information about the data that does not constitute the content – could also be a simple way to solve the problem of misinformation at the root. Indeed, Jonsson said: “Personal data is used to create the algorithms that fuel the spread of disinformation. »
