European civil servants are being forced off WhatsApp | Hacker News Reader

European civil servants are being forced off WhatsApp

politico.eu

126 pointsaa_is_op87 comments

Governments 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?

It is my understanding that a lot of EU governments are setting up their own matrix servers.

This is true. We just published a map of it: https://element.io/en/matrix-in-europe

Question, 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 :)

There'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 :)

Ohh nice to hear it's coming.

But sorry that they are not contributing. That's pretty bad tbh.

Clicking 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

I hope they don't, considering Matrix's handling of security is on the level of a bumbling toddler.

If you're talking about https://matrix.org/blog/2026/02/analysis-of-reported-issues-..., I'm not entirely sure that characterisation is accurate :)

It's more that they haven't gone public with it yet, and it's not for us to out them :)

I'd really want to see more examples of https://social.bund.de

This is the Mastodon server of the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (BfDI). Embrace decentralization.

Here is one of the French government: https://social.numerique.gouv.fr/

Actually European Commission has been on its own Mastodon server for a couple years:

https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/public/local

They'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.

The 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.

They do, actually.

For example the French government has its own Matrix platform https://www.tchap.gouv.fr/ and its own Mastodon instance https://social.numerique.gouv.fr/.

The 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?

At 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.

I 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).

Maybe 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...

most of the world is using WA for biz. US is an outlier

Most biz dont have the kind of money to hand over to Goog workspace or M$. therefore, you get what its free, and thats WA biz

Isn't there a worry about the messages not being private and being read by Facebook? I have that same worry with Google and Apple both.

Alot of people use iMessage or WhatsApp for out of band messaging.

The global usage is nuts. All of my Indian friends live on WhatsApp even if they are iPhone users. When I was in Portugal and Spain recently it’s literally the way businesses work.

Plus, you’re out of your mind for putting Teams on a personal device.

You guys use iMessage and go all weird unless the bubble is blue, so I’m not sure why you can’t understand that other countries have their own cultural messaging practices.

WhatsApp is a much nicer platform for business (and messaging in general), and the rest of the world would find the American idea of "professional" rather laughable.

It was kind of a cultural shock that people companies) in the US still leave messages on my voicemail. Last time I remember using the voicemail in the EU was like 2005 or around that time

Aren'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?

The fact that many replies mention Matrix and the Politico article does not is hilarious. Why even bother with major news orgs anymore?

It’s just common sense.

You'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".

Meaning, we can expect this not to actually happen any time soon.

I 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.

Good. The US is gone.

Digital sovereignty would always have been a good idea, regardless of the present insanity.

> 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.

What'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.

Is 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?

Economically 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.

> infrastructure to live an enjoyable life is there

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but living in the US ain't exactly like Escape from New York or Escape from LA. For every Mississippi there is an analogous place in Europe, and for every Liechtenstein there is an analogous place in the US. I'm not sure if your comment is a counterargument or neutral commentary.

> For every Mississippi there is an analogous place in Europe, and for every Liechtenstein there is an analogous place in the US

Neither are true.

Name a single metropolitan area in the US with infrastructure on par with any single European one.

New York City. Compared to small cities like London, Paris, or Rome there are areas where it's not on par, but its multimodal transport, energy, heating, water, sanitation systems is larger and more comprehensive than most cities in Europe.

We have to pick some metrics, but I bet per capita buses and train cars are dwarfed by even cities well below the tiers you listed compared to NYC.

Buses and train cars are a small part of infrastructure, regardless of whether it's the only part of infrastructure certain information ecosystems speak to. But sure. $30 billion per year over many decades for those parts, in one city, provides pretty extensive systems that don't even make sense in smaller cities.

> I bet per capita buses and train cars are dwarfed by even cities well below the tiers

And I will find even smaller US cities with even better metrics.

> And I will find even smaller US cities with even better metrics.

You won't. There is no city in the US you can get around better than even a 3rd, 4th, 5th or 6th tier European city. Its silly to even argue.

This is all empty political rhetoric.

Billions of people exist in the EU. In real terms it has not gone anywhere.

Obsession with preserving political dogma, rhetorical forms, atheist appearing syntax and semantics (language that does invoke specific concepts of theology); political and economic abstraction that do not represent reality is not much different from religion.

By your measure every nation effectively died out centuries ago as some originating principles died with their originators of those principles. Yet here we are still discussing France and Russia and the US as real things. They only ever existed as ethno objects to begin with; things that only exist if we talk about them as existing.

So what if some rhetorical specifics that used to define the economic and political foundations of the EU mutate. That's immutable reality for you. It's bound to happen due to generational churn.

People who live there can still use the term EU to define whatever political structure and economic model they land on next.

how many billions?

If you have a point, one of billions, make it.

If you feel the entire premise is wrong over a B and not an M go away. I don't have time for pedants who play "guess my problem."

they were incorrect, it's ~450 million[0] (still 120 million more people than in the USA, i will note)

[0]: https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...

Economic growth has been slow in the EU, but it's mostly a demographic issue. There are too many retirees, too few children, and the size of the workforce is stagnant.

Measuring economic growth in someone else's currency can be misleading. By the same metric you used, Eurozone economy grew by ~100% between 2002 and 2008.

>There is one EU company in the 50 of the world by companies market cap. One. Just freaking one.

And this is a good thing. All 50 of them should be broken up anyway.

>I'm in the EU and honestly it's more than frightening

I'm in the EU and I love it. It's not perfect, but I wouldn't want to live in any other place. And in the coming fight for digital freedom EU is almost always on the right side.

Who, do you think, controls the OS ?

The 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 ...

I'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!"

"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.

It'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).

> 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

Legally mandate its use for official communications.

So the managers also demand their employees don't use it you mean? Because then it can be used against them in court? (cfr. email "retention policies" legal departments demand these days?)

In most European countries we don't have this extensive discovery thing that the US has. It's not really a problem.

Yes, you do. First of all, in UK, it's almost exactly the same. In Europe under Napoleon law (most of the continent), it's the judge who decides to assign someone who gets to do discovery.

Which means in practice the state (police, Tax service, ministries, ...) get to do any discovery they want, including things that would never fly in the US (e.g. have you ever known a judge to allow discovery on a bank account and blocking it for the duration of the case?) And in private cases, usually there is very limited discovery, and only by an independent lawyer, not on either side, assigned by the judge.

It's very different, with different pros and cons. Given that large companies keep leaving the EU, and I bet this is a (granted, minor) factor in that.

And they'll keep doing what Boris Johnson was doing when in power: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/boris-johnson-covid...

They'll do it anyway.

This is helpful because it makes the criminality stand out.

Because, yes, in democracies we have public records laws.

> the fact that these organizations then have control over their own messenger ... means their employees won't use it.

Not sure what you mean here; I happily use whatever work email and messenger systems are provided for work. Most people do. I don't actually mind that IT services have access; they are in any case covered by GDPR.

In some cases there has been a legal crackdown on back channels: https://www.ft.com/content/68c26cf6-52d5-11e3-a73e-00144feab...

The Boris Johnson problem remains, but it can at least be made against the rules for normal work purposes.

(Remember not to type crimes into a computer, people)

> (Remember not to type crimes into a computer, people)

Please ignore that. It’s daft talk. Definitely record your abuses of power.

https://youtu.be/9Klj0H6YMLQ?si=L7DrQgF0pI07zLE9

“Videotaping this crime spree is the best idea we ever had!”

That doesn’t really apply in the EU, because your manager or even your org don’t have any right to read your messages, that would constitute a crime actually.

I suspect the reason would be far simpler - people use what they are used to, and WhatsApp is the de-facto standard Messenger app all over Europe.

Well, on the work messenger, you talk about work.

For private discussions, you do that on your private device, with a private messenger.

I would say that the digital sovereignty is more about "Entity X doesn't want the US to have access to all of their internal communications". Typically a non-US company or a non-US government should care about that.

> “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.

European 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.

Maybe that's a good thing. I want people running my country to actually know how to do things.

No idea why this is down voted. Ai makes people dumber and kills problem solving skills over a long timespan.

What do you mean by most academics? In Europe? That's just blatently untrue.

What 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.

Ah 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://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-wa...

The European Commission actually has an internal AI chat platform with a selection of different models, and recommendations on which to use based on the classification level of the information that will be shared with the AI model.

Some are hosted internally (LLAMA models), other are sourced from commercial providers (Mistral, OpenAI).

About the only thing I learned from your comment is that most replies as of now only refute half of it. And it's also besides the point.

Europe 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.

I hope most people have a broader definition of "relevance".

Trillions 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.

But also besides the point.

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