[edg5000]

Agreed. Although to be the devil's advocate for a moment: Governments can currently easily tap email, and phone tapping is more feasible at scale due to machine transcription. So the apps gave use a temporary safe haven, which may get compromised by Chat Control. And before email we had mail, handled directly by the government, although reading mail is more difficult without leaving traces.

[0points]

> And before email we had mail, handled directly by the government, although reading mail is more difficult without leaving traces.

At least in my country, there has been serious laws protecting the users from police opening letters (1962:700; Postlagens tystnadsplikt). This was changed in January 2023 because people exploited it to send drugs thru post office [1].

Of course without any protests in Sweden because again people don't realize their rights to privacy are taken away from them.

1: https://www.svenskhandel.se/nyheter/nyhet/lagandring-ger-moj...

[poly2it]

I'm increasingly annoyed by the extent at which our state (Sweden, EU) is willing to sacrifice our rights to hinder the usage of recreational drugs by a minority of the population. How can it be that alcohol is endorsed so widely, given that we know many of the drugs we are being sacrificed to stop are safer, less addictive and less potent [1]? It's perhaps cynical to ask, but are we protecting the citizens, or the alcohol industry?

1: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rational_harm_asse...

[rdm_blackhole]

Sweden is a nanny state. Can't buy booze on Sundays and the government shop's are only open 5 hours on Saturday.

Yet I can go to certain neighborhoods in Stockholm and get pretty much every thing under the sun and that's open 24/7.

[JoshTriplett]

The devil doesn't need an advocate here. "Temporary safe haven" is the kind of phrasing the advocates of anti-privacy policies use to argue that this "temporary" state of affairs should be destroyed.

[bee_rider]

> And before email we had mail, handled directly by the government, although reading mail is more difficult without leaving traces.

This is the source of some massive disconnects between people and their governments, I think. They had some permission, which we basically agreed on as a society, when their tampering was obvious and/or limited in scale (just due to practical constraints). We gave our consent to be governed with those constraints in mind.

Nowadays they are continuing without those implicit constraints and they don’t want to have the conversation about implementing new explicit constraints. This isn’t the deal we agreed to, really, it is just what they can get away with without permission. You can rule over a populace without their permission, of course—it’s just very different from the sort of pleasant (albeit never perfect) relationship that willing populations and their elected officials have had recently.

[edg5000]

Good point about those constraints. It's bad when governments have a superhighway of information with an email provider. If they have to go through a painful process for each email, it would be like the paper envelope. But if they have an arrangement with the email provider where they can access whatever they want, that would be a terrible downgrade for the people compared to the paper mail days indeed. We have proof that such mass data collection happened in some countries.