Digital identity and freedom: the citizen petition launched by Mad2Moi's founder
Digital identity and freedom: what the citizen petition launched by Mad2Moi is asking for
A few numbers to set the scene. In 2024, the European Union adopted the eIDAS 2 regulation, which provides for the rollout of a European digital identity wallet (the “EUDI Wallet”) accessible to 80% of Europeans by 2026 (source: European Commission). At the same time, the EU project known as Chat Control — a text formally called “CSAR” (Child Sexual Abuse Regulation) — aims to force messaging services to automatically detect illegal content, including inside end-to-end encrypted conversations (EDRi analysis).
These two efforts, distinct but converging, are drawing up an infrastructure of access: who gets to talk to whom, sign what, access which service, and under which verified criteria.
It’s in this context that Daniel Ricklin, founder of Mad2Moi, filed an official citizen petition with France’s National Assembly, the lower house of the French Parliament:
👉 Petition n°i-5871 — French National Assembly
Read the official petition. It takes 2 minutes. There’s no obligation to sign — it’s a submission to the French Parliament, open to French citizens and residents. Form your own opinion.
This might only be a beginning. But beginnings are often quiet.
What the petition asks for, in 3 points
- Guarantee free choice in the face of digital identity — preserve the right not to depend on a single digital identifier to exercise one’s freedoms online.
- Prevent access to essential services from depending solely on a digital identifier — banks, messaging apps, social platforms, dating apps: none of these services should be allowed to be conditioned on presenting an official identity.
- Protect fundamental freedoms, privacy and the right to remain free online — ban social-scoring mechanisms that aggregate digital behavior, and reaffirm the confidentiality of correspondence in a digital context.
Why would a dating app founder file a petition?
At first glance, it makes no sense. Mad2Moi is a French dating app launched in 2020. Today it counts more than 23,000 active members, human moderation, and no manipulative algorithm.
Why would its founder get involved in digital identity — a topic seemingly far removed from racing hearts and successful matches?
Because it isn’t far removed at all.
When a society sets up a framework where every online interaction can be tracked, verified, scored, authorized, it isn’t just political freedom that erodes. It’s relational freedom. It’s the very possibility of meeting someone, falling in love, opening up to a stranger, without some third-party authority — algorithmic or administrative — inserting its verification logic into the heart of intimacy.
A dating app is one of the most intimate spaces in the digital world. If that space, too, becomes subject to strong identity checks and social scoring, the entire relationship between privacy and online services changes in nature.
Mad2Moi was born during the health crisis — not as a political crusade, but as a response to a very real relational fracture: millions of people in France who could no longer meet each other the way they used to, because external criteria had forced their way into their romantic choices.
Five years later, the stakes have grown.
The softness of the cage: the possible drift
What makes the current moment concerning isn’t Hollywood dystopia. It isn’t a face on a screen screaming “Big Brother is watching you.”
It’s the softness of the slide.
It’s the app that offers to “simplify your paperwork” by linking your banking profile to your civil identity. It’s the form that suggests using a national digital-ID login “to save time” (in France, that’s FranceConnect; most European countries now run an equivalent). It’s the platform that asks, “for your security,” for a photo of your ID card plus a selfie. Each mechanism, taken in isolation, is understandable. It’s their accumulation that draws, without any law explicitly requiring it, an environment where anonymity gradually becomes impossible.
The risk isn’t an organized conspiracy. The risk is structural: a build-up of technical, contractual and commercial layers that slowly turns a convenience into a de facto obligation.
The implicit scoring nobody names
While European digital identity is being debated in public, several behavioral scoring mechanisms have quietly settled, at low volume, into private systems:
- your bank’s algorithm, deciding whether a transfer to a stranger deserves a “verification” call;
- your dating app’s algorithm, deciding whether your profile “deserves” to be shown;
- your messaging app’s algorithm, automatically scanning your attachments;
- your rental platform’s algorithm, deciding whether you’re a “trusted customer” based on your history.
None of these scores carries an official name. None appears in any law. But they exist, they decide, and their accumulation produces, for every individual, a diffuse, private, fragmented mechanism of social rating that is hard to challenge. France’s data protection authority, the CNIL, points out (its scoring factsheet) that automated decisions and profiling must meet precise safeguards — safeguards that these cumulative mechanics make, in practice, very difficult to actually exercise.
Chat Control: when intimacy becomes suspect
One of the most discussed elements right now, and one of the pillars of Daniel Ricklin’s citizen petition, is what’s commonly known as Chat Control.
The principle: force messaging services (WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, but also dating apps, forums, private chats) to automatically scan content exchanged between users — including inside end-to-end encrypted conversations — looking for child sexual abuse material.
The stated goal is legitimate and beyond dispute: protecting children.
But the tool itself raises major technical and legal questions, as pointed out by analyses from La Quadrature du Net and EDRi (European Digital Rights).
Because a mechanism that scans every private conversation of every user to detect one specific case is, by nature, a mass-surveillance infrastructure. Once in place, nothing technically prevents widening the scope of “illegal content” being searched for: terrorism-related content (an extension already floated in working drafts of the text), “hateful” content (a definition that shifts with political majorities), “disinformation” (a vague notion), content that challenges dominant scientific or medical authority.
This is one of the well-known effects of any dual-use infrastructure: the initial scope rarely expands on its own, but it often expands under pressure of an emergency.
For more on the subject, Mad2Moi published a technical article (in French):
👉 Chat Control: why your private messaging is at risk
The key point: on Mad2Moi, private messages between members are not automatically scanned. Moderation exists, it’s human, it’s governed by clear rules, and it doesn’t involve letting a silent algorithm run behind users’ backs to monitor every word typed.
The digital fatigue of the French — and a wider echo across the West
To understand why this petition resonates right now, it helps to look at what’s happened over the last five years — starting in France, where the story is especially sharp, but echoing well beyond its borders.
2020-2022: Covid. Lockdowns, movement permits, health passes, contact-tracing apps, temporary digital credentials. Millions of people in France — and, in various forms, across Europe and much of the world — discovered what it concretely means to need an authorization to go outside, to enter a café, to travel.
2023-2024: inflation, media distrust, the TikTok / generative-AI wave. A collective realization that the “reality” served up by our feeds is increasingly constructed, filtered and ranked by opaque algorithms. This is when the concept of digital fatigue really took hold: exhaustion from notifications, constant social pressure, and perpetual validation — a phenomenon documented well beyond France, across most connected societies.
2026: health fears return, on a loop. This is the test year. Will people give in to the next wave of anxiety-inducing coverage? Or have they, collectively, learned something?
The Hantavirus episode is particularly telling: while news channels tried to loop the same footage of hazmat suits and quarantines, social media answered with irony instead. In France as elsewhere, the hashtag #hantavirus became, within days, a playground for mass mockery.
The Hantavirus media moment illustrates something simple: a significant part of the public — in France, but visibly elsewhere in Europe and beyond too — refused to board the anxiety-inducing narrative pushed by mainstream media. A form of collective emotional resistance, which isn’t activist, but is clear-eyed.
This fatigue, this distrust, this defensive irony — these are the symptoms of a broader awakening, in France and in other democracies alike, regarding the trust placed in institutional narratives and the digital-governance infrastructures that come with them.
Digital identity and dating apps: why this topic is sensitive
Digital identity isn’t just a technical tool: it’s an infrastructure of access. Depending on how it’s imposed or made mandatory, it can change the relationship between citizens, platforms and institutions.
For a dating app, the question is even more sensitive: intimate preferences, private conversations and relational choices should never become scoring or social-control data. That’s a boundary worth protecting explicitly, because once crossed, it never restores itself on its own.
That’s exactly the trap Mad2Moi identified in the middle of the health crisis: behind every “protective regulation,” there’s often an anti-competitive effect that reinforces the players already in place. The largest platforms have the armies of lawyers and the infrastructure to comply; smaller, more human, more local players may not survive these technical layers.
Generalized digital identity and Chat Control, in their harshest versions, are effectively enormous barriers to entry for any new European platform. The likely result: an even stronger concentration of digital power among a handful of international players. The opposite of what these regulations claim to defend.
Humans before scoring
“I want to meet someone who loves me for who I am, not for what my profile score says I am.”
This sentence, seemingly harmless, probably contains one of the most powerful forms of resistance of our time.
Because loving someone means refusing to reduce them to their data. It means accepting their contradictions, their unpredictable side, their shifting opinions, their unexpected passions. It means refusing the verdict of an algorithm that concluded, after fifteen optimized parameters, that this person was “not for you.”
A dating platform that decides on your behalf who you “deserve” isn’t a dating platform. It’s a sorting system.
A messaging app that scans your words before the other person reads them isn’t a messaging app. It’s a panopticon.
The fight for digital freedom isn’t only a technical fight. It’s also an anthropological one: it’s about defending the very possibility of being human — that is, being imperfect, contradictory, surprising, free.
Discover Mad2Moi — dating without scoring, without manipulative feeds, with human moderation and private messages that are never scanned.
What you can do, without overdoing it
If any of this resonates with you, there are a few simple gestures that require neither activism, nor outrage, nor a hashtag.
1. Read the petition. Whether or not you sign it — and if you’re not French, you likely won’t be eligible to — read it first. Petition n°i-5871 — French National Assembly. Reading an official text and forming your own judgment, without an algorithm having recommended or discredited it for you, is already an act of digital sovereignty.
2. Share the article, with real people. Not for the engagement score. So the conversation actually happens.
3. Choose your platforms consciously. If you want to meet someone, ask yourself which platform best respects your privacy. How to protect yourself from scams and opacity (in French) covers the same reflexes that apply to digital freedom in general.
4. Refuse the fatigue. Don’t let the flood of anxiety-inducing information lull you to sleep. Taking back control starts with deciding, every day, what you give your attention to.
Daniel Ricklin: the man behind the petition
Daniel Ricklin isn’t a professional activist. He isn’t a columnist. He isn’t a politician.
He’s a French entrepreneur who founded Mad2Moi in 2020 and spent the last five years building a platform that swims against the current while the entire industry converged on the same recipes: algorithms, scoring, identity verification, automated moderation, aggressive monetization.
He refused, line by line, those default choices.
What makes him credible on the subject of digital freedom isn’t a diploma. It’s the fact that he has been living what he defends for five years, with a platform that works, that pays its employees in France, that moderates with humans, and that refuses behavioral-manipulation techniques.
His petition isn’t a marketing stunt. It is, quite literally, the logical continuation of five years of technical choices pointed in the same direction.
The question that remains
Maybe none of this will come to pass. Maybe the harshest versions of European digital identity, Chat Control and implicit social scoring will be held back by legal, democratic, civic and media counter-powers.
Maybe.
But maybe not.
And the real question, at its core, isn’t “what’s going to happen?”
The real question is: do you want to wait to find out before deciding what you think about it?
Silence is a vote. Inaction is a vote. Continuing to mindlessly use platforms that contribute to this slope — that’s a vote too.
The opposite vote is to start asking the question. To read a petition. To choose different platforms. To talk to someone close to you about it. To refuse, gently but firmly, to be reduced to a scored, tracked profile.
Maybe real progress isn’t about controlling everything.
Maybe real progress is giving humans back the right to simply be human. Imperfect. Unpredictable. Free.
That’s what Mad2Moi has been trying to defend since 2020. That’s what Daniel Ricklin is defending today before the French National Assembly. And it’s, perhaps, what you can choose to defend too — at your own scale, at your own pace, without shouting or hatred.
👉 Read the petition n°i-5871 — French National Assembly (French citizens and residents can also sign it there)
FAQ — Digital identity, freedom and online dating
What is digital identity?
Digital identity refers to the set of information (civil status, identifiers, verified attributes) that lets an online service or an administration recognize a person without physical contact. At the EU level, the eIDAS 2 regulation provides for a European digital identity wallet (the “EUDI Wallet”), which will let Europeans identify themselves and sign documents electronically across all member states.
Why does digital identity raise a question of freedom?
Because a generalized digital identity changes the relationship between free choice and access to services. If banks, messaging apps, social platforms or dating apps start conditioning access on official identification, pseudonymity — one of the foundations of online privacy — mechanically recedes. The debate, then, is less about the tool itself than about whether its use is mandatory or optional.
What’s the connection between digital identity and dating apps?
Dating apps touch on intimate dimensions: sexuality, opinions, personal preferences, relational choices. Linking that data to a verified civil identity creates a specific risk: profiling, algorithmic scoring, behavioral surveillance. That’s why this sector calls for particularly strong protection against data centralization and systematic identification.
What is Chat Control?
“Chat Control” refers to the proposed EU regulation (sometimes called “CSAR”) that would require messaging providers to automatically detect child sexual abuse material, including inside end-to-end encrypted communications. The goal is legitimate, but the mechanism is heavily criticized — notably by EDRi, La Quadrature du Net and numerous cryptography experts — for its risks to the confidentiality of private communications and the precedent it would set. The text has been debated repeatedly within EU institutions since 2022.
Why does Mad2Moi take a position?
Because Mad2Moi has defended, since 2020, a more human, less algorithmic, less opaque way of meeting people, respectful of personal freedoms. The platform refuses to automatically scan private messages, moderates with humans, and doesn’t use opaque scoring mechanisms. The petition launched by Daniel Ricklin extends that same line onto civic ground.
Alicia Walker writes for Mad2Moi on society, digital freedom and human relationships in the age of platforms. This article is an editorial opinion, not an instruction. Think for yourself.
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