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European civil servants are being forced off WhatsApp
- throwa356262 5mo agoGovernments want to move away from “platforms over which we have no control,” says Dutch minister. Sure, that is fair enough. But why is EU not setting up their own servers for whisper or activity pub or whatever OSS protocols and just make that their only official and approved communication channel?
- galbar 5mo agoIt is my understanding that a lot of EU governments are setting up their own matrix servers.
- Arathorn 5mo agoThis is true. We just published a map of it: https://element.io/en/matrix-in-europe https://element.io/en/matrix-in-europe
- wolvoleo 5mo agoQuestion, with so many major orgs using it, are there no plans for manual status? The one thing I miss vis-a-vis teams is the ability to manually set myself away, appear offline, busy etc. Matrix shows me as active (green dot) when I have the client open but there's no way to override that. At least none that I found. I'm a bit surprised all these big governmental clients didn't ask for such a feature :)
- Arathorn 5mo agoThere's a big gap between lots of orgs using it, and lots of orgs paying for development of it. That said, BWI in Germany is currently funding custom status so it should be coming soon :)
- wolvoleo 5mo agoOhh nice to hear it's coming. But sorry that they are not contributing. That's pretty bad tbh.
- xethos 5mo agoClicking through and stumbling upon Croatia, which specifies only "Classified deployment", has left me absolutely cackeling. Seems hilarious that they're willing to say that they use it, but unwilling to state if it's for early testing, civilian-level beaurocracy, or Croatia's equivalent of specialized armed forces. That they publicly use it at all is great though, as it likely helps shift the Overton window of what's normal, and what fits standard useage of Matrix-Synapse
- DarkUranium 5mo agoI hope they don't, considering Matrix's handling of security is on the level of a bumbling toddler.
- Arathorn 5mo agoIf you're talking about https://matrix.org/blog/2026/02/analysis-of-reported-issues-in-vodozemac https://matrix.org/blog/2026/02/analysis-of-reported-issues-..., I'm not entirely sure that characterisation is accurate :)
- Arathorn 5mo agoIt's more that they haven't gone public with it yet, and it's not for us to out them :)
- p2detar 5mo agoI'd really want to see more examples of https://social.bund.de https://social.bund.de This is the Mastodon server of the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (BfDI). Embrace decentralization.
- p4bl0 5mo agoHere is one of the French government: https://social.numerique.gouv.fr/ https://social.numerique.gouv.fr/
- llacane 5mo agoActually European Commission has been on its own Mastodon server for a couple years: https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/public/local https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/public/local
- polski-g 5mo agoThey're setting up matrix servers. Nato uses matrix. Too bad the UX is dogshit and the end users lose their keys every 90 days. Even though they're explicitly warned, loudly and clearly, to not lose the keys. Matrix software stack isn't idiot proof; Signal is.
- wolvoleo 5mo agoThe key is only necessary as a backup these days. You can share the key from one client to another which works well. As long as the user has a laptop and phone it should be ok unless they lose both. But yeah it would be nice if the key could be escrowed somewhere for big organisations.
- p4bl0 5mo agoThey do, actually. For example the French government has its own Matrix platform https://www.tchap.gouv.fr/ https://www.tchap.gouv.fr/ and its own Mastodon instance https://social.numerique.gouv.fr/ https://social.numerique.gouv.fr/.
- jandrewrogers 5mo agoThe problem isn't setting up the servers, they already exist for the most part. It is getting anyone to use them. I've seen this play out a few times in Europe. People are extremely resistant to giving up WhatsApp. These rules are so widely flouted that no one takes them seriously, including the people making the rules. It is a bit of theater, meanwhile everyone continues to use WhatsApp. There is no will to actually make this change. If your boss keeps sending you messages over WhatsApp, why would you do any different?
- wolvoleo 5mo agoAt my workplace we only use WhatsApp for personal comms. Like chatting about which restaurant we go for lunch, who's at the office tomorrow, when is everyone's birthday, what did we do this weekend, that kinda stuff. For work related stuff we use teams and that it's kinda needed too because we can only link to internal resources there, like SharePoint.
- wink 5mo agoI mean at least you have teams as an alternative. Where my wife works they simply have a WhatsApp group because there _is_ no messenger, and while they don't use it for work stuff, they couldn't even have anything but group emails for discussing lunch plans or reaching someone who is not present at the office without calling (and in the case of reaching someone, they don't have access to anything on personal devices and they 90% have no work phones).
- pesus 5mo agoMaybe I'm just too American to understand, but it still baffles me that WhatsApp is used for business purposes. It makes a lot more sense for regular personal messaging, but it seems incredibly unprofessional to me. I would think it bizarre and a bit invasive if my boss tried to text or iMessage me. Are they at least using different accounts for work messaging? Not to mention the app itself was pretty mediocre last time I used it, but that's neither here nor there...
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- lbreakjai 5mo agoAren't they about to handle DigiD to the U.S? You know, the tool we use for absolutely any sort of identification when interacting with the government?
- esbranson 5mo agoThe fact that many replies mention Matrix and the Politico article does not is hilarious. Why even bother with major news orgs anymore?
- 440bx 5mo ago[flagged]
- lamasery 5mo agoI expect the downvotes are because rather than simply calling attention to and providing an interesting perspective on another area of weakness, you're also suggesting it's a mistake to address this one while the other exists, which suggestion isn't being well-received.
- 440bx 5mo agoI don't need a diagnosis of my point. Perhaps I should explain further. I'll say that it's more that the assertion that WhatsApp is a big issue is false. Civil servants know stuff is on the record, for example through screenshots from colleagues and the like which is a higher risk than actual control and security issues over WhatApp, so it's more of a distraction from the real security and ethical posture problems. Most of which occur though loose lipped jabbering to each other in the pub. Security hygiene is terrible. Literally the worst. It scares the shit out of me if I'm honest. If you think technology is a problem then the social issue are worse!
- spwa4 5mo agoThe problem with these efforts is always the same: organizations make their own messenger, and the fact that these organizations then have control over their own messenger ... means their employees won't use it. And that's ignoring that you can bet your firstborn they cut corners developing these messengers, so they're not pleasant to use to boot. In 2026 you still hear complaints of government employees that they only have 200 mb of mailbox space ... sigh People "don't trust" in the very abstract sense, Mark Zuckerberg. But in a very real sense they don't trust their manager at all, and they know their own manager can see their messages on the "sovereign" messenger. Zuckerberg wants to sell them stuff they don't want on occasion. Their manager ... well they're cheating their manager. Oh and it doesn't even buy extra security: the platform owners can spy directly through hardware backdoors, they can "update" any app on the phone, and they have the root keys to the secure element, and so it isn't secure to them. And if you look under the covers ... the backend is on AWS? No? Must be on Azure then. So annoying lots of people, reducing functionality, for no actual security. Sure sounds like EU governments are behind this ...
- gretch 5mo agoI've always found it ironic that people who distrust software from Mark Zuckerberg instead trust software from... 3 guys in a garage. "Those 3 guys in a garage would never sell us out! They are paragons of virtue!"
- palata 5mo agoIt's more trusting something you can audit and control (e.g. open source) vs trusting something you cannot audit and control (e.g. proprietary service by BigTech).
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- parrellel 5mo ago"We shall trust 27 different sets of 3 to 10 guys in garages and ensure they never become large enough to blackmail a large percentage of the world's governments safe in the knowledge we can in fact arrest them for illegal bs" does have an appeal however.
- hackerbeat 5mo agoGood. The US is gone.
- marssaxman 5mo agoDigital sovereignty would always have been a good idea, regardless of the present insanity.
- TacticalCoder 5mo ago> Good. The US is gone. Yeah. But then the EU lost the plot a very long time ago. There is one EU company in the 50 of the world by companies market cap. One. Just freaking one. It's ASML. From 2008 to today, in USD and inflation adjusted, the eurozone saw no growth. While both the US and China skyrocketed. There's been this little thing lately that kinda took off: it's called AI. Where's the EU? How much of a leader was the EU in this AI revolution? Explain how the EU is not long gone? The EU is not even sinking at this point: it sank years ago. And it's busy making sure it's turning into the third-world. I'm in the EU and honestly it's more than frightening.
- tremon 5mo agoWhat's frightening to me is that even in the EU people seem to think that unchecked consolidation of services is a good thing. I don't think it is a good thing at all that there exist companies with a budget larger than an average country.
- esbranson 5mo agoIs the budget of Saudi Aramco, of the King, larger than that of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, also of the same King? Why would that be not good, or bad? Think about every international dollar the Kingdom takes from Aramco: would Aramco or the Kingdom make more profit from it, including taxes on the percent more Aramco makes from it than the Kingdom?
- posperson 5mo agoEconomically the EU might not keep pace, but the built infrastructure to live an enjoyable life is there. I certainly had a delightful time visiting the winter markets across Europe, and it seemed like there were a fair number of people living well. While the Eurozone might not be a great place to start a new business it is still a going concern, enough that those top 50 companies all have a European presence.
- jccx70 5mo ago[dead]
- p1anecrazy 5mo ago[flagged]
- dotcoma 5mo agoIt’s just common sense.
- iririririr 5mo agoYou'd think right? But most of south american and southeast asia political scandals were cause by political figures using whatsapp and messages "leaking" thanks to a "hacker".
- illiac786 5mo agoMeaning, we can expect this not to actually happen any time soon.
- dr_dshiv 5mo agoEuropean civil servants are also usually banned from using AI — perhaps with the exception of Microsoft copilot. They live in a bubble where they just don’t know. This goes for most academics as well.
- ironman1478 5mo agoMaybe that's a good thing. I want people running my country to actually know how to do things.
- lpcvoid 5mo agoNo idea why this is down voted. Ai makes people dumber and kills problem solving skills over a long timespan.
- j_maffe 5mo agoWhat do you mean by most academics? In Europe? That's just blatently untrue.
- jampekka 5mo agoWhat are you on about? I don't know of any software or services that would be banned at my university. People use all sorts of LLMs extensively. At least in Finland also civil servants are free to use what AI services they want, given they don't put in sensitive information. Just like they can use any search engine they want.
- troupo 5mo agoAh yes. "It's so bad that people in government agencies cannot give sensitive info to US companies or blindly rely on LLMs for their decisions since nothing has ever happened when people in governments blindly trusted black boxes" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-warning-for-europe-over-risks-of-using-algorithms/ https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-wa...
- com_kieffer 5mo ago
- 948382828528 5mo ago[flagged]
- recursive 5mo agoCould you give an example of someone that could be called a "civil servant" without euphemism?
- 9dev 5mo ago"What have the Romans ever done for us?"
- hulitu 5mo agoRaped the women, killed almost everybody in the village, burned the village to the ground but, kept some boys to ... tell the world how great the Roman civilisation is. "Terrific race, the Romans. Terrific".
- casey2 5mo agoEurope has been irrelevant since 2008. Basically 0 growth and pensions larger than paychecks. Even if young Europeans had the skills or the desire, which they don't, they wouldn't have the capital. The US is preparing to siphon most of the EUs wealth with this AI bubble. This title is just one in a long line of smoke and mirrors meant to distract Europeans from the fact that trillions are being spent to build datacenters in the US.
- mjfisher 5mo agoI hope most people have a broader definition of "relevance".
- wolvoleo 5mo agoTrillions of made-up money. And really I'm super glad I don't live in the US with the nightmare regime there. Money isn't everything. Things cost a lot less here too. I don't need to have two jobs to pay for rent and healthcare, when I get fired I'm getting welfare. I don't get shot by random civilians carrying guns or even the ICE Gestapo. Those things really matter too.
- esbranson 5mo agoBut also besides the point.
- themafia 5mo ago> “Everyone in Europe is getting more and more awake on sovereignty ... For us it’s data sovereignty.” If Julian Assange wasn't the wakeup call necessary to put this into action then I don't think the whims of a few government ministers amount to a hill of beans. Good luck.
- Yaa101 5mo agoI understand the move but I also see bears on the road. When the politicians control their communication apps then it is sooner or later also very convenient for politicians to ask the operators to disappear conversations that shouldn't have taken place or conversations that somehow are political liabilities.