Join us 2026-03-13T21:00:00Z for This Week in Privacy #44, to catch up on the latest Privacy Guides updates and to discuss trending news in the privacy space.
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With all this VPN killswitch issue (on macOS and Linux via GUI) Proton talk, I would have thought you’d highlight this in the title itself to keep up the pressure on Proton to fix its marketing and the app.
Note that the news from this week are about Chat Control 1.0, which is a temporary derogation to the ePrivacy Directive in place since 2021 that allows providers to perform mass scanning on a voluntary basis. It was extended once in 2024 and now they want to extend it again before it expires on April 6. The good news from yesterday is that Parliament voted against it. It’s now headed to trilogue (negotiations between the EU Commission, Council and Parliament).
Chat Control 2.0 is the one people usually mean when they talk about Chat Control, and it’s the one that contained mandatory scanning including for E2EE apps. This part was removed when the proposal finally made it through the Council after years of being blocked, but age verification for messaging/email providers and app stores, as well as voluntary mass scanning like in the 1.0 version are still on the table. It’s currently in trilogue with the next round of negotiations scheduled for May.
So sadly Chat Control is not dead yet, but getting rid of 1.0 in the coming weeks would be a good start.
What are your thoughts on piracy when it comes to trying to stay private whilst gaming?
With the way that most video game storefronts collect your data in the same way as most other sites, specifically your interests while browsing the store and your play time of owned games.
I also haven’t found a store that allows you to make an account relatively anonymously and pay with something like Monero.
GOG seems to be the best option when it comes to not having your gameplay tracked as the files they give you are non-DRM, meaning you only need to use their storefront to buy the files, and you can then use them independently of GOG.
However, their library is tiny compared to Steam as many game publishers don’t want to release DRM-free files, or they have exclusivity deals with other store fronts like Valve or Epic Games.
So, it appears that the only way to play video games privately, similarly to other media like shows, movies, audiobooks, and music, is to get the files for them illegitimately.
I suppose the way to appeal individuals against piracy would be to quickly go into the storefront and buy the game without giving them any data that you can prevent, but this still isn’t a great solution for privacy.
The GrapheneOS spokesperson has spoken strongly against https://uattest.net/ on social media, and saying that GOS will never collaborate with the other projects in the degoogled Android space. Aside from the false accusations (iodé, has never said anything disparaging at all to the folks at Graphene either in public or in private -far from it - they think it’s a great project) I don’t think this initiative is any kind of exclusivity grab by volla, murena, iodé etc by any means, they will surely extend to any ROM that supports bootloader relocking and very likely volla reached out to GOS for collaboration. But at the same time, what they propose as a solution (convincing developers one-by-one not to use the play integrity API) doesn’t seem capable of moving any political will against Google’s monopolistic model, nor does it invite collaboration. I mean both solutions can coexist, right? @PG staff, what is your take on this?
