Switzerland, that bastion of democratic rights in the heart of Europe, has been a haven for companies offering digital services that don’t want to cave to the Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and 14 Eyes transnational security alliances, which allow signatory nations to share their citizens’ online data and activity.
Until recently. Nineteen human rights and digital rights organizations have called upon Switzerland to abandon its controversial proposed legislation that would require services such as VPNs, social media apps, and messaging apps to retain customer usage data.
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They fired their shots in an open letter on February 4, 2026. Organizations who’ve signed include Amnesty International Switzerland, European Digital Rights (EDRi), Privacy International, and numerous other groups, both international and Swiss.
the stakes
People use VPNs to maintain their online privacy. Such services hinge on a transparency that pledges no customer activity is recorded. Should the Swiss law go through, companies such as Proton VPN would be forced to keep this data on hand, which the government could later request.
It’d be an invasion of privacy. Now expand this beyond VPNs to many more types of online services and apps, and you’re looking at a huge shift in how Switzerland could approach people’s basic online rights.
Proton, maker of a whole suite of privacy-focused products—including my favorite free VPN (by a country mile), Proton VPN—has based itself in Switzerland since its inception in 2014. That hasn’t stopped them from rattling the saber that if Switzerland goes through with the controversial law, they’ll leave Switzerland for, ostensibly, a country with friendlier laws that don’t require such data retention on its customers.
That’s the kind of fire that I like to see from privacy and security software, not the weak-willed sort of caving into authorities and political pressure that we see too often from big, corporate companies.
