This is really a human right issue. No one should be required to carry an attacker-controlled tracking device, especially not for interacting with the government. It's funny that the EU uses all this mobile attestation BS more than the US does. So much for sovereignty and consumer protection. No monopoly Google can build is as good as the government forcing you to accept their terms.
>No one should be required to carry an attacker-controlled tracking device
What about being required to carry a your-own-government-controlled tracking device?
Because the US or Chine government can't harm me in Europe via the data they collect from me, But the EU authorities can if they want to, so naturally I fear them more if they were the ones hoovering my data.
What are the odds they're using this on-shore tech grab to implement their own domestic version of China's social credit score system, to easily get data on their own citizens who commit "wrong-think", without having to through the effort to twist the arm of US entities every time they want to do that?
Food for thought, but I do think we're living the last years of online anonymity, it's inevitable.
Every government is an attacker.
The odds are very low. It all depents on the people. So far, the European citizens are very privacy senstive. The European institutions are characterized by a huge devision of power. There is no chance that European instutitions can impose their will against a considerable majority of people. If people turn away from liberal democracy, that's another matter. But then everything is lost anyway.
> There is no chance that European instutitions can impose their will against a considerable majority of people
The EU commission just passed chat control to have government mandated software in every phone
It's substantially neutered from the original proposal, with most of the scary parts taken out. I'd count that as a win as far as how antidemocratic the EU commission is.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/after-years-controvers...
Given how many world leaders form the west had absolutely the most vile chats with Epstein about doing despicable things to people, I'd totally want chat control but only for our leaders. They certainly proved that's who needs it the most to keep us safe.
Do you have a citation for this? I can't find anything showing that 2022/0155(COD) has passed the EU Council or Parliament (nor can I find any scheduled votes). [1]
The most recent related information I could find was some movement to extend the temporary derogation of the ePrivacy Directive, which expires on 2026/04/03, to 2028/04/03 but even that did not seem to have passed yet. [2]
The very fact they're trying to extend the temporary derogation hints to me that they think it'll take some time yet to pass Chat Control (if at all).
[1] https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/procedure-file?refer...
[2] https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/procedure-file?refer...
If you want to over simplify at least do it right.
35 years ago, a good chunk of the current EU was under a Soviet-imposed totalitarian rule. Spain was a dictatorship until 1975. And it's been just 80 years since WWII.
It always boggles my mind that most Europeans are absolutely convinced that nothing like that could ever happen again. Meanwhile, many people in the US are convinced that the government will be coming for them any minute now.
They literally get arrested for posting memes.
They who and what?
> So far, the European citizens are very privacy senstive.
Only from corporations, but not from their own governments. A lot of Europeans put a lot of blind faith into their governments and the EU, and criticism of these institutions is usually met with accusations of being a bot, MAGA or russian troll.
>The European institutions are characterized by a huge devision of power.
Didn't really stop them passing whatever rules they wanted during Covid, did it? Or today with Russia and Ukraine situation. Sure is convenient that we keep having more and more crisis and boogiemen that governments can leverage to deflect accountability and bypass the wishes of the population, for our own good of course.
>There is no chance that European instutitions can impose their will against a considerable majority of people.
Famous last words. People always can be, and routinely are, manipulated to vote against their own best interests, even if everyone claims manipulation doesn't work on them. The propaganda industry is HUGE. Why do you think Germans supported to tie themselves to Russia's gas and destroy their nuclear power. Was it all their original thoughts or was it a massive campaign of dis-/mis-information designed to get everyone on board the same train? And mass manipulation like this is every other Tuesday these days. See Cambridge Analytica.
A individual person can be smart, but people together as a collective voting block, are stupid, and the elites treat us like cattle, as seen in the recent files.
> Sure is convenient that we keep having more and more crisis and boogiemen that governments can leverage...
The problem with this phrasing is it makes it sound hyperbolic, but it is important to remember the world is large and there are always, in a literal and normal sense, multiple major crises going on at any moment.
People who don't pay much attention to politics sometimes get confused about why crises elevated by the corporate media get ignored. A big answer is becuase they are elevated for political reasons, usually the crisis is fairly routine in absolute terms.
>there are always, in a literal and normal sense, multiple major crises going on at any moment
True, but my point I wanted to draw attention to, is HOW these crisis are handled now, not that there's many of them.
Every crisis now seems to be exclusively used as a vehicle to justify taking away just a little bit more of your freedom and anonymity, or implement more fiscal policies that will leave you footing the bill but just so happens it will be enriching the wealthy as a side effect.
Because such policies shoved out the door in times of crisis, don't pass through the lengthy public debates and scrutiny regular policies have to go through, so it's the perfect opportunity to sneak and fast-track some nefarious stuff in.
I'm not that old yet, but I don't feel like this backdoor was misused to this extent in the past, like pre-2008 I mean (except 9/11 of course). It definitely feels like politicians have gooten of taste and are abusing this exploit now more with every little opportunity.
> So far, the European citizens are very privacy senstive.
In some areas, sure - like GDPR.
In other areas, absolutely not - like chat control.
As another commenter pointed out, it seems as if government mandated privacy intrusion is OK, while violations by corporations are quickly shutdown. It’s like the opposite of how it works here in the US.
> chat control
The Danish proposal for indiscriminate chat control did not receive enough support and was retracted last autumn. Similar proposals have been put forward regularly over the past 30 years and have so far come to nothing just as regularly.
For the conservative (and sometimes not so conservative) non-experts things like this sound like an easy win. So every new generation of politicians has to be educated about it again.
> chat control
The Danish proposal for indiscriminate chat control did not receive enough support and was retracted last autumn. Similar proposals have been put forward regularly over the past 30 years and have so far come to nothing just as regularly.
>it seems as if government mandated privacy intrusion is OK
Once you give people an outside boogieman(Putin, Trump, Covids, etc) or a self inflicted false flag crisis(surge in violent crime rates for example) to shake them up to their core and put the fear in them, you can then easily sell your intrusion of privacy in their lives and extension of the police state, as the necessary solution that protects them.
When you start lose control of your people because their standard of living has been going downhill for 2 decades and they realize the future prospects aren't any better so they hate you even more, you can regain control of them by rallying them up on your side in a us-versus-them type of game against external or internal aggressors that you paint as "the enemy". The media is your friend here. /s
This isn't an EU or US exclusive issue, it's everywhere with a government issue. The difference as to why the EU people seem to be more OK with government intrusion compared to the US, is that EU always has external aggressors the government can point to as justification for invasiveness and control, while the US has been and still is the unchallenged global superpower so it has no real external threats ATM, meaning division must be manufactured internally (left vs right, red vs blue, woke vs maga, skin color vs skin color, gender vs gender, etc) so that the ruling class can assert control in peace.
Either way, we all seem to be heading towards the same destination.
Amen to that.
I agree 100%. Europe is just ahead of us for the time being, but our turn is soon approaching...
Tracking device might be the wrong thing to focus on. The US has other ways of messing with foreigners who depend on services provided by US companies, like suddenly cutting off those services in the case of ICC judges.
IIRC, ICC judges lost access to their O365 work email accounts. Worst the US can do to me is turn off my Steam, and Gmail but I can easily live without those.
Now imagine being debanked by your own government because they don't like what you're saying and becoming unemployed, homeless and dead. I don't think they're remotely comparable.
For example, a few years ago, a power tripping gov bureaucrat turned off my unemployment payments over a technicality. Luckily, I had enough money to pay a lawyer to sue them and won, but it was tight. What if I hadn't had the money to hire a lawyer? Since I was in a foreign country, with no family or close friends to fall back on. I was exclusively relying on the welfare state I paid into for years, that then turn its back on me for shits and giggles.
So I don't think you understand just how bad it can be for you if your government decides to turn on you and fuck with you, if you're comparing this to losing access to your work email account.
See the famous case of UK postal workers that got fucked by their government trying to hide their mistakes.
According to AP News (https://apnews.com/article/international-court-sanctions-tru...) at least one judge had his bank accounts closed. So it's not just your own government who can debank you in Europe.
Of course in this judge's case there might still be some banks who are willing to work with him even at the risk of getting sanctioned as there weren't language in the news that he was completely debanked which I assume they would highlight if it was the case.
You most likely use a Windows PC and an Android phone. If Uncle Sam viewed you as a threat actor, he could ask both companies to send you a signed and verified update to either your OS or apps they control, running whatever he wants.
> IIRC, ICC judges lost access to their O365 work email accounts. Worst the US can do to me is turn off my Steam, and Gmail but I can easily live without those.
They lost access to everything american, including Visa and Mastercard. It's in french and maybe not the best source but it's not paywalled :
https://www.tf1info.fr/international/nous-sommes-attaques-le...
> "Payments are mostly cancelled," he continued, "as almost all cards issued by banking institutions in Europe are either Visa or Mastercard, which are American companies."
They are not completely debanked since they can go to the bank and withdraw cash, but it's a crippling situation to be in.
It's all the same. How is suing Google any different, if you instead get debanked by Google for violating their "terms"? The only solution is untraceable, permissionless money, like Monero. Why do you think governments try so hard to ban it?
Being de-Googled is a hardship, though there are replacements for virtually all its services. I acknowledge you are well informed on this topic.
It is not unreasonable for governments to pursue avenues for laundering money. I recognize that you likely don't believe governments should prosecute money laundering, but that view is not aligned with the majority of citizens in your country.
Ah money laundering, the government's 2nd favorite excuse to bypass due process, remove freedom, and impose arbitrary punishments, after "emergency" and before "think of the children".
The government can prosecute money laundering and all the other crimes, but it's not an excuse to impose extrajudicial punishment. Until they stop, having some cash and crypto is your only means of defense.
I understand your threat model is centered around the risk of a government persecuting you. This will naturally conflict with incentives of people whose threat model centers around a lower severity but higher frequency event of systematic violence performed by criminal enterprises, with a necessary condition being ease of moving money. Both representative and totalitarian governments seek to aid investigation of criminal activity by following the movement of money.
I'm unsure about your reference to extrajudicial punishment, is it referring to de-banking associated with AML and KYC regimes in the US? If so, I agree that unjust things are unjust. I believe we should seek to fix those injustices directly through lobbying lawmakers, rather than rejecting an entire system that has significant security benefits.
I am sympathetic to people who have a fatalistic attitude when it comes to political reforms. Having other financial instruments as a backup is a good practice.
I'm not necessarily opposed to KYC or even government being able to audit transactions in general. But there is too few legal protections both from the bank and the from the government itself for this to be acceptable in a free society.
It's not entirely hopeless I guess. For what it's worth, the US government recently issued an EO that purportedly stops banks from debanking you for political reasons. Hopefully a future administration would take care of the other part.
After a fair trial and appeals process, right?
Because financial sanctions are one of our main tools to pressure enemy countries into calming the fuck down in hopes of avoiding an actual kinetic conflict.
In 2025, North Korea managed to steal from the world over 10% of its GDP worth in cryptocurrency.
> if you instead get debanked by Google for violating their "terms"
Since when is google a bank?
>The only solution is untraceable, permissionless money, like Monero. Why do you think governments try so hard to ban it?
Because untraceable currency is mostly used by criminals for crime.
Your bank (like most European ones) requires you to pass attestation to use their services. If you don't accept Google/Apple's terms, you can't access it without extreme difficulty.
I can always access my bank via a web browser or even in person at the teller at a branch somewhere, or as a last resort via snail mail from attorney, but most importantly even if I get locked out somehow by google, the account still runs and I won't be homeless as my salary and rent auto-payments keep going regardless if you can access it or not.
How is this comparable to your government debanking you meaning that no bank, landlord, layer or job will touch you?
It's less severe for sure, but I'd rather live without undue interference based on someone else's whims, unless I broke a law.
I... don't think you understand debanked. There is no movement OUT of your account. Deposits will be processed all day long. The intent is to tie up access to as many of your assets as possible. If you think anything of yours will just keep on going if you end up debanked, you're sadly mistaken. In addition, based on the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act as amended by the PATRIOT act, covered entities are forbidden from disclosing to you anything about why your account is frozen.
It's as close as you get to a complete shunning from modern society. You're reset to the cash you hold on you and keep custody of. And yes. In the U.S., the list that manages who can and cannot transact is centralized under OFAC. So it is at the whims of Executive whether or not any financial activity can be done with you.
The premise here is that you lose access to a European bank's mobile app because the US government compels Apple or Google to disable your app store accounts. Not that your relationship with the bank is frozen.
> Now imagine being debanked by your own government because they don't like what you're saying and becoming unemployed, homeless and dead. I don't think they're remotely comparable.
You don't have to imagine it.
Alina Lipp, Thomas Röper, Xavier Moreau, Col Jacques Baud, Nathalie Yamb. The last two are Swiss nationals. The Baud case is interesting because he's a Belgian resident who now can not even buy food or pay his bills while living in his own home.
Carrying this device is the key here. Eventually we all need to carry it around, track us everywhere.
Yeah it seems that some politicians have noticed that they can enact a lot of self serving authoritarian legislation that wouldn't fly otherwise if they push it as populist independence-from-US thing. Can't let a good crisis go to waste, of course.
One only needs a few looks at what the EU Commission has been doing lately to see that if left unchecked their plan is a UK-like total surveillance state.
I don't disagree but that wasn't the point here. The point is they are handing even more control to a different US entity. Putting my tinfoil hat on, I assume the authoritarians are intending to simply buy the data from the American companies to circumvent legal restrictions, as in the Five Eyes arrangement.
> It's funny that the EU uses all this mobile attestation BS more than the US does
Attestation in on itself isn't unwarranted which (to me) is an important security measure. Attestation as commonly implemented on Android via Play Integrity (the way banking apps are known to do) is restrictive, sure: https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu... / https://archive.is/snGEu
> important security measure
It's a security measure against the owner of the device, in other words, an attack. Would you be okay with me using a remote control to forcibly slow down your car so I can merge? Using attestation this way is fundamentally incompatible with ownership. If the bank wants some assurance about a device, they need to sell or issue one to me, like credit cards or point of sale machines, which are explicitly not your property.
The fact that the assurance is provided by a third party you have little recourse against just adds insult to injury.
>against the owner of the device
Would you consider MFA to be a measure against you, the owner of the device, because it makes it harder for you to login?
>If the bank wants some assurance about a device, they need to sell or issue one to me
They are offering you free software and are operating under a security model tied to these specific devices. You're still free to walk into their branches, or use their physical cards, if you prefer not use their limited selection of devices.
>Would you be okay with me using a remote control to forcibly slow down your car
Car manufacturers do this as well though. Some of this is for the benefit of their customers (preventing theft from easily cloned keys). Some of this is not for customer benefit, like locking down infotainment systems.
Banks however are only interested in preventing fraud.
> MFA to be a measure against you
Not really, unless the MFA involves the same type of attestation involved in the process. TOTP is fine, and you can put it in your password manager to avoid phones, and can be done without consenting to any spying. And I don't really own the account anyway.
> use their physical cards
The premise of this discussion is these will get replaced by the hostile phone app, since the Europeans are too lazy to make a proper replacement.
> locking down infotainment systems
I don't agree with that either, but you can presumably buy a car without one, and you'd still be allowed to drive. What if the government says, you can't drive anymore UNLESS you use the locked down infotainment system and consent to all the ads/spying that comes with it?
> Would you consider MFA to be a measure against you, the owner of the device, because it makes it harder for you to login?
In theory - of course, it shouldn't make it any harder for _me_ to login, it's just that in practice the friction is inevitable since it can't distinguish between me and someone else without it.
> You're still free to walk into their branches, or use their physical cards, if you prefer not use their limited selection of devices.
The point is that this freedom is going away. I'd absolutely want to use their physical cards (there are smartcards with e-ink displays which would be a great thing for confirming payments), but no, they're slowly taking this away, starting by limiting transfers done without their mobile app.
And _their_ mobile app needs to invade __my__ property by locking down the system. I understand this might be neccessary to ensure the UI can be trusted, but this shouldn't happen on my device as it restricts my ability to do completely unrelated things.
> If the bank wants some assurance about a device, they need to sell or issue one to me, like credit cards or point of sale machines, which are explicitly not your property.
In this example, a banking app is not making the entire Android device non functional when it refuses to work when remote attestation like Play Integrity fails.
It is colluding with a third party to increase their power. What devices pass Play Integrity? Yeah, the same ones with all the telemetry and spying that you can't remove. I thought the government is supposed to protect consumer rights, not to tilt the playing field even further.
Like I said, I'd be fine if they offer a viable alternative, like a card or a physical authentication dongle (which doesn't require spyware to use).
An important security measure for who, though? The servers at the bank should "never trust the client" in case the attestation is bypassed or compromised, which is always a risk at scale.
If it's an important safety measure _for me_, shouldn't I get to decide whether I need it based on context?
I think it's fair for banks to apply different risk scores based on the signals they have available (including attestation state), but I also don't want the financial system, government & big tech platforms to have a hard veto on what devices I compute with.
It's an anti-brute-force mechanism. It's not for you, it's for all the other accounts that an unattested phone (or a bot posing as an unattested phone that just stole somebody's credentials via some 0-day data exfiltration exploit) may be trying to access.
Sure, banks could probably build a mechanism that lets some users opt out of this, just as they could add a Klingon localization to their apps. There just isn't enough demand.
If you work on mobile apps you will notice that full attestation is too slow to put in the login path. [This might be better than it used to be, now in 2026].
I don't think a good security engineer would rely on atty as "front line" anti brute force control since bypasses are not that rare. But yeah you might incorporate it into the flow. Just like captchas, rate limiting, fingerprints etc and all the other controls you need for web, anyway.
I know I'm quibbling. My concern is that future where banks can "trust the client" is a future of total big tech capture of computing platforms, and I know banks and government don't really care, but I do.
> total big tech capture of computing platforms
Correct. And the end of ownership, privacy, and truth too. If something can betray you on someone else's orders, it's not yours in the first place. You'll own nothing and if you aren't happy, good luck living in the woods.
> you work on mobile apps you will notice that full attestation is too slow to put in the login path
Hm, Play Integrity isn't that slow on Android, from my experience.
> don't think a good security engineer would rely on atty as "front line" anti brute force control since bypasses are not that rare
I'm not privy to device-wide bypasses of Play Integrity that ship with Trusted Execution Environment (which is pretty much all ARM based Androids), Secure Element, and/or Hardware Root of Trust, but I'd appreciate if you have some significant exploit writeups (on Pixels, preferably) for me to look at?
> My concern is that future where banks can "trust the client" is a future of total big tech capture of computing platforms
A valid concern. In the case of smart & personal devices like Androids though, the security is warranted due to the nature of the workloads it tends to support (think Pacemaker / Insulin monitoring apps; government-issued IDs; financial instruments like credit cards; etc) and the ubiquity & proliferation of the OS (more than half of all humanity) itself.
> Insulin monitoring apps
A monitoring app doesn't even interact with systems you don't own. Just put a liability disclaimer for running modified versions.
> warranted
Decided by whom? And why is Google trusted, not me? At minimum, I shouldn't face undue hardship with the government due to refusing to deal with a third party, unless we first remove most of Google's rights to set the terms.
> A monitoring app doesn't even interact with systems you don't own. Just put a liability disclaimer for running modified versions.
This is unserious when Insulin overdose can be fatal.
> And why is Google trusted, not me?
(Hardware-assisted) Attestation on Android doesn't require apps to "trust Google".
> I'm not privy to device-wide bypasses of Play Integrity that ship with Trusted Execution Environment (which is pretty much all ARM based Androids), Secure Element, and/or Hardware Root of Trust, but I'd appreciate if you have some significant exploit writeups (on Pixels, preferably) for me to look at?
Hi, you don't have the break the control on the strongest device. You only have to break it on the weakest device that's not blacklisted.
The situation is getting better as you note, but in the past the problem was that a lot of customers have potatos and you get a lot of support calls when you lock them out.
> think Pacemaker / Insulin monitoring apps; government-issued IDs; financial instruments like credit cards; etc
I agree with you on the need for trustworthy computing. I mainly disagree on who should ultimately control the trust roots.
We can only hope they continue to be found so there would at least be a small cost for this kind of indignity.