This project didn't appear out of nowhere. Below is an honest explanation of the EU debate around Chat Control and how REVANGE — technically, not legally — responds to it.
"Chat Control" is the common name for an EU regulatory proposal aimed at preventing and combating child sexual abuse online (the CSAM Regulation). Successive drafts, debated since 2022, would have allowed authorities to issue messaging providers with orders to scan private messages — potentially including those protected by end-to-end encryption — for material depicting child abuse.
The regulation's goal — protecting children from exploitation — is unquestionably right. How successive drafts proposed achieving it is what drew opposition from a large part of the digital security community, because mass-scanning private communication — even in good faith — in practice requires either breaking end-to-end encryption or scanning content on the user's device before it's even encrypted (client-side scanning). Critics argue both approaches create a backdoor that could eventually be used more broadly than originally intended.
When your messages flow through one large company's infrastructure, that company is the sole target of legal orders. Change the law in one jurisdiction, and you change the rules for millions of people at once.
Scanning content on-device before it's encrypted technically bypasses the protection E2EE provides — the message has already been analyzed before it ever leaves the phone.
REVANGE doesn't belong to any global tech conglomerate. A single regulatory decision or pressure from one government doesn't change the rules for a billion people at once — and end-to-end encryption stays the default regardless of what happens to other platforms.
We want to be fully honest here: REVANGE isn't a legal shield, and we don't claim any messenger is "immune" to future law in any jurisdiction. What we actually provide:
Messages and voice calls are end-to-end encrypted by default, not as an optional add-on.
REVANGE Community runs on our own infrastructure, outside the big platforms' ecosystem — no ads, no data sales as a business model.
An independent project, built without investors and without a business model based on selling data.
