Law enforcement requests - Private.coffee

How to contact us

Law enforcement agencies and other competent authorities should contact us via email at support@private.coffee. For security‑sensitive or confidential communication, please use PGP: F262CF22D540CDBB90D7A82BA5F5E7AA321941FA.

We are a non‑profit association based in Austria:

Private.coffee ‐ Verein zur Förderung von Privatsphäre und digitaler Souveränität
Brandhofgasse 7/1
8010 Graz
Austria

Please note that we are generally subject to Austrian and EU law. Requests from foreign authorities should normally be made via the appropriate mutual legal assistance (MLA/MLAT) channels.

What we need to evaluate a request

We carefully review every request and will only disclose data when we are legally required to do so. To evaluate a request, we typically require at least the following:

Full name of the requesting authority, unit and country.
Name, role and contact details (including official email address) of the requesting officer.
A clear legal basis for the request under applicable law (e.g. reference to the relevant Austrian or EU law, or an MLA/MLAT framework).
A specific description of the data requested, including relevant identifiers (e.g. Matrix user ID, service name, transaction ID) and the relevant time period.
Any supporting legal documents, such as a court order, warrant, or equivalent binding order, where applicable.
If possible, a qualified electronic signature ("Amtssignatur") to verify the authenticity of the requesting authority.

We may refuse or ask you to resubmit a request if it is overly broad, insufficiently specific, lacks a clear legal basis, or would be unlawful under Austrian or EU law.

General principles

We do not provide voluntary access to systems or “backdoors”.
We do not perform real‑time interception or surveillance.
Where data is end‑to‑end encrypted and we do not hold the keys, we cannot provide decrypted content.
We minimise the data we store and retain it only for as long as necessary, as described in our privacy policy.
Where permitted by law, we will notify affected users of requests concerning their data.

Law enforcement requests received

We publish a high‑level overview of law enforcement and similar requests we receive. Entries are anonymised and do not contain personal data.

Date	Category	Description	Action taken
2025-10-17	Censorship	We received a request from (someone claiming to be) Roskomnadzor (Russian media regulator) to remove access to two YouTube videos on piped.private.coffee that allegedly contained prohibited content under Russian law.	None taken. The content in question is hosted on YouTube, and we do not have control over its availability on that platform, even if we accepted the legitimacy of the request.