Citizens of the European Union may soon find that they have a lot more online protection than their American friends, as the EU is currently looking at new legislation that requires end-to-end encryption on all types of digital communication. The law would also ban “backdoors” on popular messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram that give governments access to encrypted information in certain cases.

End-to-end encryption is when information is encrypted from the time it’s composed on the sender’s device, to the time it’s received and stored on the receiver’s device. With end-to-end encryption, no one but the two people speaking with each other has access to the information — not even the company who owns the messaging service. The new legislation would require any messaging service to provide end-to-end encryption, in order to protect the privacy of EU citizens.

A section of the proposed legislation reads:

With respect to backdoor access to encrypted data, the legislation says “when encryption of electronic communications data is used, decryption, reverse engineering or monitoring of such communications shall be prohibited.” That means that governments would not be able to force messaging companies to give them access to any data on their services. These “backdoors” essentially make encryption irrelevant, as they give the government power to access the data, even if a company has policies against that access. However, there are companies that do not hold encryption keys to the data on their platforms, making it unclear exactly how these “backdoors” would work in some cases.

The proposed legislation comes during a particularly harrowing time for privacy advocates in Europe, as the recent terrorist attacks in England have prompted Conservatives in that country to push for decryption laws that would give them access to communications between suspected terrorists. Lawmakers there worry that an encryption law would put their citizens at higher risk of terrorist attacks. However, if the UK leaves the European Union, it is unclear whether or not this law would actually affect them.

In the meantime, for users in and out of the European Union who want to make sure that their private communications remain private — from both governments and attackers — there are platforms and services which protect users privacy with encryption. Tenta’s browser, for example, encrypts all of your online activity. We don’t have access to your data and therefore will never be able to sell it or share it with the government, even if they ask for it. For the modern citizen of the internet, there’s not much reason to wait on governments to protect your privacy. You can do it yourself.