This is just a crappy article from a crappy mainstream media.
Now, France is definitely not the best place in the world for privacy-minded fellas. AFAIK, we're one of the last remaining western countries to have laws governing the import/supply of cryptographic tools[1] (basically, you have to declare it to the French cyber authority). We have a law that defines a presumption of guilt when the way money is handled "can only be justified by an attempt to conceal the origin of funds"[2], which now includes the use of privacy techniques in the context of crypto-currencies.
So yes, this police fella saying that "when this system is present on a mobile phone, it is a clear indicator of technical sophistication and an intent to conceal" is very concerning. But it's mostly that:
loads of people feel unsafe
most people don't care about privacy, even when we now have weekly data breaches (incl. quite frequently public services).
This is just a crappy article from a crappy mainstream media.
Now, France is definitely not the best place in the world for privacy-minded fellas. AFAIK, we're one of the last remaining western countries to have laws governing the import/supply of cryptographic tools[1] (basically, you have to declare it to the French cyber authority). We have a law that defines a presumption of guilt when the way money is handled "can only be justified by an attempt to conceal the origin of funds"[2], which now includes the use of privacy techniques in the context of crypto-currencies.
So yes, this police fella saying that "when this system is present on a mobile phone, it is a clear indicator of technical sophistication and an intent to conceal" is very concerning. But it's mostly that:
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/id/JORFTEXT000000646995/2025-11-19 ↩
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI000051740488 ↩