Simplified Privacy questions the legitimacy of France’s new heavy VPN restrictions, when their own government failed to secure data on their citizens. In a shocking new hack, the data of 43 million French citizens was leaked onto the darkweb.
According to Bleeping Computer, the hack was of a French government unemployment agency and included massive sensitive personal details including. Quote,
-Full name
-Date of birth
-Place of birth
-Social security number (NIR)
-France Travail identifier
-Email address
-Postal address
-Phone number
This hack was not the first time the French government showed a complete inept disregard for data. Both euronews and upguard report on previous repeated incidents also involving millions of users’ data over the course of years. [2][3]
Therefore, given the rampant corruption with the French government’s data policies and inept security enforcement, it is surprising that the French parliament is pushing for heavy VPN restrictions. This new “SREN Bill” would prohibit VPNs from outside the EU and force/enable massive digital spying on citizens.
This bill has the goal of forcing social media companies to identify users to restrict free speech, and then forcing VPN companies to cooperate with this identification. Since foreign VPNs would not have to comply with the flawed legislation, the bill seeks to ban foreign VPNs.
To quote Techradar’s article “France VPNs might be banned amid SREN Bill’s new “unreasonable amendments”,
Nonetheless, around 30 deputies from the French center-right party, Horizons, tabled a series of amendments to the SREN Bill during a hearing held on September 30, 2023. Their aim is to prohibit Google and Apple from offering VPN-type apps that are not directly subject to European and French laws.
SREN Bill also plans to force ISPs to block access to websites blacklisted by French authorities under Article 6, and adds to the controversial proposal of granting police power to spy on citizens through phones
Forcing technology companies to collect people’s sensitive information, such as recording intimate audio conversations, and all their social media habits, creates massive databases of potentially vulnerable databases for cybercriminals. Simplified Privacy has grave concerns about such a broad and powerful expansion of government power, when they have not proven the ability to handle even basic identifier data on their citizens.
These social media restrictions show the importance of uncensored communications, follow Simplified Privacy on Session messenger or Nostr. Here’s a video on how to use Nostr, our npub is:
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The sources to this article can be found here.