Chat Control 1.0 Defeated, Google-free Pay on Android, DuckDuckGo's Independent Index,

Our top stories this week:

  • Chat Control 1.0 was put out to pasture this week. Let's take a moment to celebrate a win and what this means for Chat Control 2.0
  • Volla is pushing for an open-source Google Play Integrity alternative in Europe, which would solve a long-time pain point for custom ROM users
  • DuckDuckGo has decided to start building their own independent search index

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Updates from the Team

New Video: Private Messaging

Our latest video about private messaging is now available for early-access members on YouTube and through our site. This video explains why private messaging matters, what's wrong with SMS, WhatsApp, and Telegram, and which ones we recommend instead.

New Video: ProtonVPN

Thanks to our community's feedback, we decided to put out a video about Proton's faulty killswitch on Apple devices to try to call attention to the matter.

Site Update: VPN Criteria

This week there was a lot of discussion back and forth about Proton's killswitch issue, which ultimately led us to clarifying our killswitch criteria and issuing a warning about Proton's shortcomings on Mac.

Releases · privacyguides/privacyguides.org
Protect your data against global mass surveillance programs. - privacyguides/privacyguides.org
GitHubprivacyguides

News

This week we saw news about the new Coruna malware and AI agents posing a security risk.

Coruna Malware Targeting iOS Spotted by Google Threat Intelligence
Google Threat Intelligence Group has identified a “powerful exploit kit” targeting iPhones running iOS 13.0 to 17.2.1 used by a surveillance company and crypto-stealing sites.
Privacy GuidesFria Reyes
AI Agents Beginning to Help Attackers Accelerate Stealing Your Data
While generation of malicious code, media, and phishing material are already making heavy use of AI, threat actors are “experimenting” with AI agents to automate decision making.
Privacy GuidesFria Reyes

Sources

Historic Chat Control Vote in the EU Parliament: MEPs Vote to End Untargeted Mass Scanning of Private Chats

"Chat Control 1.0" gave companies in Europe legal protection to voluntarily scan communications for the purposes of reporting illicit material. Still, this initiative was highly unpopular with privacy advocates because - while voluntary - it still amounted to mass warrantless surveillance. This week, the Pirate Party was able to amend the initiative to limit the surveillance to only individuals suspected of being involved in CSAM.

Historic Chat Control Vote in the EU Parliament: MEPs Vote to End Untargeted Mass Scanning of Private Chats
In a sensational turn of events in the fight against Chat Control, a majority in the European Parliament voted today to end the untargeted mass scanning of private communications. In doing so, the Parliament firmly rejected the error-prone and unconstitutional surveillance practices of recent years.
Patrick Breyeron 11. March 2026

Paying without Google: New consortium wants to remove custom ROM hurdles

A new coalition consisting of the groups behind /e/OS, Iodé, Apostrophy (Dot), and Volla are pushing for "Unified Attestation," a Google-free alternative to Google Play Integrity, which would also potentially open the door to Google-free NFC payment options. This has long been a pain point for many custom OS users. This would be released under the open source Apache 2.0 license.

Paying without Google: New consortium wants to remove custom ROM hurdles
Using banking and payment apps on Android smartphones with custom ROMs is a problem: A European industry consortium now wants to change that.
heise onlineAndreas Floemer

Duck Tales: Why DuckDuckGo is building its own web search index (Ep.22)

DuckDuckGo has historically always been a "metasearch" engine - or basically a proxy for Bing (and some other search engines, but mostly Bing). However, this week, they revealed that they've been working to grow their own independent search index. This move appears largely motivated by AI and wanting to have more control over the training data, but is still a welcome development nonetheless.

Duck Tales: Why DuckDuckGo is building its own web search index (Ep.22)
Why are we building our own web search index? And why does it matter?
Inside DuckDuckGoDuckDuckGo

Forum Updates

Remove ProtonVPN
Why should this tool be removed? ProtonVPN should be removed from recommendations as its kill switch for MacOs is known to not work: When switching to another ProtonVPN server On computer boot up → In both of these instances, the user’s real IP becomes exposed to any online service it is connected to prior to re-connection to new ProtonVPN server. On ProtonVPN’s official website they claim that “[regular kill switch] does protect you while switching servers with Proton VPN” : What is a kill…
Privacy Guides Community