“The only way to prevent data from getting 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 that ran in the Monday, January 20, 2025, New York Times.
Through a cartoon-style FBI agent, 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 all major US telecommunications companies – prompted US authorities to urge 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 back doors for end-to-end encryption.
“This proves that they have not understood anything and do not learn from their mistakes. They do not understand the basics: if you create back doors, they will be exploited by others, as happened in the Salt Typhoon case,” Jan Jonsson. CEO of Mullvad, told TechRadar, adding that the campaign is a way to bring more awareness to this issue.
US authorities installed backdoors to mass-surveill their own citizens. Someone hacked the back doors and millions of Americans’ communications ended up in unintended hands. They do the same thing over and over and expect different results. Advertisement in today’s… pic.twitter.com/XgwmBNx1Vf20 January 2025
Encryption – which refers to scrambling data into an unreadable form to prevent unauthorized access – is the guarantee that your messages (such as when using Signal or WhatsApp) or internet connections (think of how virtual private network apps ( VPN) works) remains private between you and the recipient.
Despite acknowledging the importance of using encrypted messaging apps, law enforcement officials have long argued that police officers should be able to access these encrypted messages in order to catch the bad guys.
Nor is this a privilege of the US authorities. EU legislators, for example, are also pushing for the so-called Chat Control proposal. If passed, this would require all encrypted communications providers to create such an encryption backdoor to allow monitoring of all citizens’ chats looking 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, yet again, of “responsible encryption.”
“Mass surveillance has no place in democratic societies. We want people to know their rights and demand their rights,” Jonsson said. “And we want politicians to realize that there is no such thing as anonymous data, that data collected eventually leaks, and that it is high time the authorities stopped mass surveillance of their own and other populations.”
More of Mullvad’s privacy-focused ads
This was the third in a series of ads, run by Mullvad, in the popular US newspaper to raise awareness of the risks of intrusive data collection and sharing.
Released on January 8, the first ad showed a leaky car and came in response to the Volkswagen data breach that exposed sensitive information on over 800,000 electric vehicles. A leak, Mullvad explains, that shows there is no such thing as anonymous data.
Do you know that?
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 be active in opposing mass surveillance proposals,” Jan Jonsson, CEO of Mullvad, told TechRadar.
Jonsson said: “We cannot have a society where people’s lives are tracked under the excuse that the data is anonymous, when patterns in the data reveal the person behind it.”
A week after that, on January 17th, another ad featured a short cartoon that highlighted a few distinct, yet intricate, problems associated with Big Tech’s invasive data collection practices.
According to Mullvad, by tracking everything people do online, Big Tech companies map people’s ideas before they are even voiced, de-facto undermining their right to free speech.
The VPN provider also believes that banning the collection of metadata – that is, any information about data that is not the content – could also be an easy way to tackle the problem of misinformation at its root. That’s because Jonsson said, “Personal data is what is used to create the algorithms that fuel the spread of misinformation.”
