About Krotze
In Germany there is a right to anonymous communication. This matters above all with a view to a possible infiltration of the branches of state power by anti-democratic organisations, against which legal resistance by citizens would then be made harder.
Constitutional protection
Anonymous communication is protected through the case law of the Federal Constitutional Court by several fundamental rights:
-
Freedom of expression (Art. 5 Abs. 1 GG)
The right to free expression also includes the right to voice an opinion anonymously or under a pseudonym. The state may not, as a blanket rule, require citizens to "show their face" in order to take part in public discourse.
-
General right of personality & informational self-determination (Art. 2 Abs. 1 i.V.m. Art. 1 Abs. 1 GG)
In principle, every person may decide for themselves when, how and to whom they disclose their personal data and their identity.
-
Secrecy of telecommunications (Art. 10 GG)
Protects the confidentiality of communication (content and traffic data) against state access.
Why anonymous communication matters for protecting democracy
Protection against surveillance
If state structures were infiltrated by anti-democratic forces, seamless surveillance would be the most effective tool for smothering opposition and civil protest before they can form. Anonymity protects whistleblowers, journalists and citizens who want to expose wrongdoing.
The right of resistance (Art. 20 Abs. 4 GG)
The Basic Law expressly provides that all Germans have the right to resist anyone who undertakes to abolish the democratic order, if no other remedy is available. To be able to organise such resistance at all, tap-proof and anonymous communication is an essential technical precondition.
The tension in practice
In political and legal practice, however, anonymity is not an absolute right — it stands in constant conflict with law enforcement and the prevention of danger:
Identification requirements
When buying SIM cards (ID requirement since 2017) or registering for many online services, anonymity is already clearly restricted in Germany.
Encryption vs. surveillance
Debates about chat control or state backdoors in messaging services (such as WhatsApp or Signal) show that security authorities want to restrict anonymous spaces in order to fight crime. Critics consistently stress that such tools could be abused immediately in the event of an autocratic change of government.
One app, many servers
Krotze can be run by anyone, and the app is not tied to a single instance. You can hold an identity on several servers at once — krotze.com and a friend’s self-hosted one, say — and see all their channels in one list, each tagged with the colour and short code of the server it lives on. Every identity is separate: a different username, a different key, nothing that links them, so the operators of two servers cannot tell that both belong to you.
That spreads trust the way it should be spread: no single server sees all of your conversations, and a server that disappears takes only what lived on it. Notifications from the other servers pass through the server you installed the app from, which forwards them to your device without learning who you are elsewhere.
Where Krotze fits in
Krotze is a practical contribution to this fundamental right: a chat without an account, without an e-mail address and without a phone number. An identity consists only of a freely chosen username and a secret key that never leaves your device — requests are signed with it rather than transmitting it. Private 1:1 conversations go one step further: their text messages are end-to-end encrypted between the participants' devices, so the server stores only sealed envelopes it cannot read. The server builds no profiles, keeps no IP-based analytics and knows no real names. What does not exist can neither be surveilled nor handed over, nor abused after a change of power.
Add to that ephemerality: channels delete themselves completely after a configurable period of inactivity, uploads expire automatically, and every deletion is final — no backups of deleted content exist. Krotze is no free pass, though: illegal content is reviewed and removed when reported (see the terms of use). It is data minimisation put into practice — communication that leaves no traces, just as the Basic Law grants everyone.