“The only way to prevent data from ending up in the wrong hands is to not collect it in the first place.” This is the claim included in an advertisement from one of the best VPN providers that ran on Monday, January 20, 2025 in the New York Times.
Through a cartoon-style FBI agent, Swiss company Mullvad seeks to shed light on the tensions between technologists and law enforcement over encryption.
On the one hand, the recent Salt Typhoon hack, which compromised all major US telecommunications companies, led US authorities to ask citizens to switch to encrypted communications. At the same time, however, the FBI referred to “responsibly managed encryption.” For Mullvad, this means one thing: creating backdoors for end-to-end encryption.
“This shows that they have not understood anything at all and are not learning from their mistakes. They do not understand the basics: if backdoors are created, they will be exploited by others, as happened in the case of the Salt Typhoon,” said Jan Jonsson. Mullvad CEO told TechRadar, adding that the campaign is a way to raise greater awareness about this issue.
US authorities installed backdoors to massively monitor their own citizens. Someone hacked into the back doors and millions of Americans’ communications ended up in unwanted hands. They are doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Announcement today… pic.twitter.com/XgwmBNx1VfJanuary 20, 2025
Encryption, which refers to encoding data into an unreadable format to prevent unauthorized access, is ensuring that your messages (for example, when you use Signal or WhatsApp) or Internet connections (think about how network applications work Virtual private (VPN)) remain private between you and the recipient.
Despite recognizing the importance of using encrypted messaging apps, authorities have long argued that police officers should be able to access these encrypted messages to catch bad guys.
This is also not a prerogative of the US authorities. EU lawmakers, for example, are also pushing for the so-called chat monitoring proposal. If enacted, this will require all encrypted communications providers to create an encryption backdoor to allow all citizens’ chats to be monitored for illegal content.
Ironically, on the day Mullvad decided to publish 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 does not belong in democratic societies. We want people to know their rights and demand them,” Jonsson said. “And we want politicians to realize that there is no such thing as anonymous data, that collected data is eventually leaked, and that it is time for authorities to stop massive surveillance of their own population and other populations.”
More privacy-focused ads from Mullvad
This was the third in a series of advertisements published 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 showed a leaking car and came in response to the Volkswagen data breach that exposed the confidential information of more than 800,000 electric vehicles. A leak, Mullvad explains, which shows that anonymous data does not exist.
Know?
Mullvad has been quite vocal against the EU’s CSAM (child sexual abuse material) proposal to scan all citizens’ chats. The VPN provider put up 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 where people’s lives are followed with the excuse that the data is anonymous when patterns in the data reveal the person behind it.”
A week later, on January 17, a second ad featured a short comic strip that shed light on some distinct, yet intertwined, issues surrounding Big Tech’s invasive data collection practices.
According to Mullvad, by tracking everything people do online, big tech companies are mapping people’s ideas before they are even expressed out loud, de facto undermining their right to free expression.
The VPN provider also believes that prohibiting the collection of metadata (that is, all information about data that is not the content) could also be an easy way to solve the misinformation problem at its root. This is because Jonsson said: “Personal data is what is used to create the algorithms that fuel the spread of misinformation.”
