… what should we do?
I guess it all depends on how it would be implemented, which is something I have a hard time imagining at this moment.
How do you imagine day to day online life in a post-Chat Control EU world? Which ways of communicating would still be private? Is there anything we can do at this point to prepare for the worst outcome?
Chat control is more of a threat for the less tech literate masses. It will have to be implemented client and / or server side. If you use foss software it’s basically impossible to enforce chat control, because some dude in his basement can always fork any project that may get targeted by it. If you’re privacy conscious and using linux, degoogled android and decentralized messengers you’re already out of reach of chat control.
Which doesn’t mean that it isn’t a threat and we shouldn’t fight it.
This is what I don’t understand, how will the EU enforce Chat Control when we can use software that doesn’t implement backdoors? Maybe the EU will be happy to get the majority of messages from the mainstream proprietary apps, but what if they want to get the rest too? I’m worried that this will lead to very bad places. Could they ban F-Droid? Will I end up on a list if I use unauthorized software? Who knows.
My fear is that they will start off by applying this to Messenger, WhatsApp etc. Then, in a few years, when criminals and tech-savvy people move to XMPP etc, they will say “the laws aren’t working, we need to apply it at the OS level instead”, and since iOS and Android have a big market share it’s very easy for them to do it. At that point, trying to communicate with friends becomes very hard. It’s one thing to get them to switch apps, but asking them to switch phone or OS is a whole other hurdle.
I’m trying to contribute both code and money to make XMPP, and mobile linux as good as possible before that can happen. I feel we need to buy time, by delaying and delaying chat control as much as possible, to make the free software, federated systems better and appealing to regular people. And then we can use that technology to buy time to push for political changes. I feel the only long-term solution here will be a political, rather than technical one.
It all feels like an impossible task, but I feel all we can do is try as hard as we can to make the world more like the one we want.
So, part of this is (I’m thinking) that supporting the companies selling Linux phones would be a good thing. Expanding the market, funding research and prototypes for future products, etc. Is there a user consensus of which companies/phones would be the best bet for this? I’ve read a lot of conflicting reviews. Or, which are popular phone models people use?
Agreed completely!
I think there are two main schools of thought - one is to buy linux-first mobile devices, and the other is to make linux work on android devices people already have.
At the moment, linux on android devices is in a better state. From what I read, calls, battery, suspend etc. generally works well on the OnePlus 6/6T and Pocophone F1.
For the linux-first approach, I’m very fortunate to have both a PinePhone Pro and Librem 5. They are both improving, and I’ve been daily driving one or the other for a couple of years, but they do still involve some sacrifice. I’m not sure they’re ready for “regular people” yet, but they keep getting better.
Personally, apart from buying the devices themselves, I prefer to contribute directly to the projects focusing on the software. I feel you can’t go wrong supporting PostmarketOS and Mobian. They are doing heroic jobs and have come a huge way in a few short years. Because they work upstream-first, any benefits one achieves are shared with everyone else in the ecosystem. And any benefits apply just as well to the linux-first phones as to the ones that originally ran android.
It’s a long mountain to climb, but we’ve seen with Linux on the desktop that, over a period of years, things do get better. You used to have to pick your hardware carefully to get Linux installed. Now, you can install it pretty much anywhere, and most likely everything will work.
I feel eventually, the hardest problem in getting people to switch will be that proprietary apps won’t work well. I think all we can do is to improve our free software alternatives to the existing ones, especially those with network effects like chat apps, as much as we can.
Every small step we can take is an important one. It’s easier to get people to switch to Linux if they already use free software, as free software often does a better job targeting Linux than proprietary software does. Meanwhile, it’s easier to get people to switch to free software if they run Linux, as that’s the path of least resistance on that OS.
Briar is the messaging app I would switch to. It was designed for protesters. No central servers, peer-to-peer, defaults to sending messages through tor, it can also send using wifi, data, or bluetooth.
