GDPR explicitly exempts government entities. Still, way better than not having it IMO.

Regulating governmental intrusions into privacy would take a completely separate and probably much larger bill.

Tor.

And the correct term is anonymizing proxy. Having the term VPN overloaded to mean two completely distinct things is rather annoying and/or confusing.

I’m fairly sure I’ve seen an NNTP based imageboard that distributed it’s content through that protocol and different instances had overlap of boards. That’s about the closest match to federated system you’re going to find with this model I think. Interesting concept. Not something I’d want to interact with personally though.

Certainly not as powerful as common office suites, but https://cryptpad.fr/ is not only open-source but also has already running instance (and has end to end encryption for your documents)

https://syncthing.net/ is a good general file synchronizer. Requires devices too be online simultaneously to sync, but gives you transport encryption with forward secrecy.

It’s probably the best one when it comes to web-based videocalls. I had much better experience with native apps (e.g. Mumble) when it comes to sound quality though.

For anonymous proxy (which is what you seem to mean instead of VPN) I just keep using Tor for almost everything. Sure, some services do block it - more than your usual commercial offering. But TBF that mostly saves me time from tying to deal with them.

Original WhatsApp was XMPP with phone number for your username. Pretty much what https://quicksy.im/ does now.

WhatsApp today is completely different beast.

It’s been a year or two, but last time I tried it their app worked fine on x86 Android in qemu. Not the most efficient way to run it, but at least it’s isolated from the rest of the system.

Slight difference is that Zuck has had control from the start, whereas other companies might have had “don’t be evil” leadership that was… optimized away for financial reasons.

Not that it really matters nowadays. Just an observation.

Honestly it was mostly a Discord competitor if anything. One with FOSS clients for desktop and Android.

The private chat is baseline implementation just to tick a box rather than anything practically useful.

Re profiling, I don’t think instances will bother doing that (unless they start running ads). However, they also don’t prevent anyone from building that profile themselves from observable behavior. And creating such database might constitute original work by itself. Now, they don’t get as fine-grained interactions as you would with tracking-infested sites. But they will get the most valuable ones such as active participation.

I’m not convinced by Session’s decision to remove forward secrecy. I don’t care if it’s malice or incompetence, they shouldn’t be in business of encrypted messaging either way.

And their lack of transparency on their share of underlying network and the associated costs for new entrants doesn’t make them smell like a cryptoscam any less.

My personal advice is avoid. You’ll be far better off with simplex, or xmpp+omemo for something not paired with phone number.

EU is not doing it yet, however there is strong push from interested parties within and outside of the EC:

https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the-eus-fight-over-scanning-for-child-sex-content

Including illegal use of targeted advertising / misinformation campaign:

https://eupolicy.social/@ilumium/111226868912928077

Look at https://simplex.im/ then. It’s work in progress but the design is good.

But I’m glad to have a better Signal client too.