https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/we-would-...
For reference, Switzerland had to change their banking secrecy laws decades ago due to pressure from the US, Germany and France, so you can guess how well other weaker countries will fare against such pressure. And let's not forget the famous Crypto AG scandal in Switzerland, so I'm not buying the famous "Swiss privacy" marketing fluff at all anymore as much as I like the country. Just like Crypto AG, every tech company is, or will be, infiltrated by alphabet agencies by cooperation or by force. If you want real privacy you have to self host, that's the only way.
Plus, I feel like we're focusing at the wrong issue here. Do we really want lawless places on this planet to exist where companies and individuals can escape the courts and law enforcement of their own nations? Something that will be exploited mostly for nefarious purposes than protecting privacy of law abiding people.
The real solution is holding powerful governments accountable against invasions of privacy by their voters, not creating lawless zones where companies and powerful individuals can go and hide to avoid laws they dislike. If laws are bad, just change the laws, don't normalize law avoidance. If you normalize law avoidance about one thing, why not about other things as well like theft, taxation, human trafficking etc? The whole point of developed western nations is democratic representation, the strong rule of law and fairness of the court system. Write to your representative.
Yes. If the alternative is a worldwide police state.
going through a shift toward authoritarianism of various flavors
> For the first time, an EU expert group has explicitly mentioned VPN services as "key challenges" to the investigative work of law enforcement agencies, alongside encrypted devices, apps, and new communications operators.
"VPN services may soon become a new target of EU lawmakers after being deemed a "key challenge"" https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-servi...
> Popular instant messaging applications that remained blocked despite the removal of the ban on VoIP services included WhatsApp, FaceTime, and Skype. The selective relaxation of the ban narrowed down the user’s choice to premium (paid) services, owned by state-run telecommunication firms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_the_Unit...
If it is just a VPN, a "cybercompany" does not need to be incorporated somewhere. If is is just virtual, it does not have to follow any laws in a jurisdictions. Servers can come and go...
I'm a little bitter, but for what I need it, I'll let it pass this time.
edit: it is a business account, but I have never been asked for this anywhere else. you have all the company required data, all my required data, why do you need my id? maybe personal accounts are treated differently.
- https://thejollyteapot.com/uses - https://thejollyteapot.com/2024/11/05/website-updates/
Does anyone have recommendations for domain registrars that support .ch and .li domains and ideally also supported by lego (my current acme client of choice)?
German inwx.com is not bad for country TLDs
Besides the blaming of informaniak, their email hosing for 18 Euros a year is actually a pretty good deal. If you can live with US hosting for email, purelymail.com is worth a look.
I wanted to take back control over my emails so recently I started to look long and hard at ProtonMail, Infomaniak (kMail), Mailbox.org, and others. In the end, I chose mailbox.org. I could have been really annoyed right now given how painful updating accounts/credentials and account migration are!
And not only by the judicial system. Also I do believe the net can survive anonymity just fine due to empirical evidence.
Personally, I think that privacy is a losing game, like gambling. The best case is that we all work within the parameters. But in any case, the amount of time and effort that is dedicated to privacy is keeping humanity from more important things.
The main annoyance I have with companies and organizations that engage in working with our private data is that eventually they will lose control of the data, and if bad things come because of that, we are the victims. This may be our physical and mental health data, and we could lose our jobs or have to pay higher insurance. This may be our financial data, and we lose our savings for retirement. This may be our personal historical thoughts that we don’t wish to broadcast, and we lose relationships and our jobs.
Privacy at one level is a luxury but at other levels are not, unless society as a whole embraces that we’re all unhealthy and we’re all flawed, but at that point perhaps things become too flexible and very bad things happen.
unless society as a whole embraces that we’re all unhealthy and we’re all flawed, but at that point perhaps things become too flexible and very bad things happen.
East Germany, the KGB, modern China, and many others have tried the route of getting rid of citizen privacy “for the common good” in similar ways, and it results in bad things.
AIs with superhuman intelligence may have all the data, may lean utilitarian, and similarly could it not just restrict people, commit genocide, genetically modify, drug, neuter, manipulate, and euthanize like the worst of the them? I don’t know how we combat this- go offline?
I would like humans to not waste much effort on privacy though, beyond what makes sense.
If you're fine with a US-based provider, https://porkbun.com/ also has good pricing and a tech oriented mindset. They don't support many ccTLDs though.
In general, https://tld-list.com/ is the best place to research domain registrars in my opinion.
https://steigerlegal.ch/2025/03/29/proton-ueberwachung-keine... (German)
And understable from a business perspective. If you are one of the few hosting companies that host truly anonymous VPN and email providers, you are going get some troublesome customers that likely are going to end up being expensive.
Everything can be justified as a business interest. Even criminal behavior could. So that argument is NOT acceptable. This is about a Swiss company, not Russia. If Switzerland wants to go there, let's at least be honest about it.
I still have to dig the current law proposal (my shame).
The conclusion I came to a few years ago is that anonymity in Switzerland is not something useful. Switzerland is not a police state, it mainly copes up with trying to get its citizens to being responsible. Whenever you make something wrong IRL, you have to assume the consequences. Same with online. I concur that my words are messed up.
What "shared values"? Most of the values people hold as "important" has people on the other side with the opposite values, and both of those are "correct".
There are no "shared values" that all humans agreed upon.
Murder is bad?
Stealing is bad?
I don't understand this train of thought, what exactly are you saying?
I can interpret it as "it's wise to end online anonymity and feed all personal information (including biometrics) to AIs to enforce social rules" which is, frankly, an absurd proposal even if you are extremely naïve, not even considering one single negative aspect of the loss of all privacy, being managed by a machine in a societal level.
Or I can try to interpret it as feeding all of this into AIs create insurmountable threats, to democracy, to the individual, etc. which is somewhat what I'd expect to logically follow from feeding all this personal data into AI models.
But none of these interpretations are actually possible for me to land at based on what and how you wrote, I can't make sense of it.
What I was trying to say is that simply being on the internet today — using AIs, corporate networks, and so on — almost certainly exposes your most personal and unique information (the kind of data that reveals your very identity) to the entities operating those systems.
Sadly, I was implying that anonymity is becoming an obsolete concept. Then I tried to think of a law that could help the Swiss government track down malicious individuals, and I wondered whether that could actually serve as something beneficial — a way to protect people and their freedom.