Switzerland abolishing anonymity online

[Borgi]

Hi guys,

Yes, you read right. Switzerland is abolishing anonymity online, by requiering any sevice that is used by more than 5000 people and has communication features baked into it, to register people via their passport and phone number. (I have linked some sources down below) This opens the door for companies worldwide to require user registration:

Using MS Teams at work? They know who EXACTLY you are. Wanna play Minecraft? Too sad you can chat within the game? Order something via eBay? Communicate via WhatsApp, Signal, Threema, Discord? You are registered..... Reddit? This Forum? If there are more than 5000 people registered on it and it can be accessed from Switzerland, registration would be necessary.... Not even VPNs are safe....So forget Proton... Or any other service

There are four things that are especially worrying to me, apart from any big corporation in the world being able to put a name and face to every action you take in the internet that is.

Firstly, the signaling power. Switzerland is a very prominent country. It adopting such policies, could open the door for other countries worldwide to do the same

Secondly, the safety concerns... Can you trust a small company with a couple thousand customers to keep your data safe enough?

Thirdly, how they make it even more difficult for small companies and organisations to compete with huge globe spanning corporations....

And Lastly, the way how it was implemented. Switzerland is well known for its direct democracy, that lets people prevent things like these from happening. Problem is, that not all parts of law can be voted on and they chose to put the regulations into exactly one of these parts. The way they did it might even be illegal and conflict with higher law, but as far as I know there is no institution of the judicial branch that has the power to prevent it, because of a flaw within the system (which might be something Im wrong Abo, but there definitely is no Constitutional Court in Switzerland, which would be the institution responsible to rule over this). The whole thing went completely under the radar of most media, so there was no public outcry either.

What are your thoughts on all of this?




Here are some of the source documents:

A news article in German:
https://www.republik.ch/2025/05/07/die- ... u-kopieren

A Reddit post in English, that pushed me onto the whole affair yesterday, with further links to other sources:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Switzerland/s/GZjNAzstBN

A link to the website of the swiss government with the new law linked in a document at the bottom:
https://www.news.admin.ch/de/nsb?id=103968

[Thoughtless]

Concerning but lets wait for a response before we panic. Not saying we shouldn't make plans for every eventuality. We should just keep in mind what companies will be most at risk and what they can do to fight back. Primarily the companies based in Switzerland. Companies like signal can and have pulled out of countries that they consider, according to their standards, impossible to work with.

I am extremely interested in what Andy Yen has to say.

[Pearlple]

The plans were rejected, looks like we can breathe easily for a moment.

[December_W_Wolf]

The plans were rejected, looks like we can breathe easily for a moment.

Not to mention a brief read of said article reveals every big party rejected the proposal, gives me hope it won't be happening at least for the next few years.