EU Commission proposes Chat Control to fight Chat Abuse — By severely limiting our Digital Privacy
PROBLEM:
The EU wants to oblige internet providers to scan ALL Private chats, Messages, and Emails automatically for suspicious content — generally and indiscriminately. The stated aim: To prosecute child pornography.
HOW DOES THIS AFFECT YOU?
This gives internet provider ACCESS to ALL your:
- Private Chats: WhatsApp, Signal, Instagram Chat, Messenger, TikTok…
- Messages: SMS, iMessage, Forums, Comments…
- Emails: Your internet provider, Your job, Gmail, Outlook, Protonmail, Tutanota…
…and EVERY activity will be scanned in REAL TIME and ALL the time and will try to find whether we share text, videos, photos, and other material that contain any child abuse material.
Most of our private chats today use End-to-End-Encryption (E2EE) — which means that only you and the other side (friend…) can read the chat content. With the new proposal, someone will by law have access to your every chat and will actively scan it.
WHERE’s THE CATCH?
While child abuse is of course serious matter and we need to take all the measures to protect children, this proposal causes another serious problem: It completely destroys our privacy and gives external access to almost ALL our digital data.
THE MAIN PROBLEMS OF THIS SOLUTION:
- The proposal is super disproportional: it tries to fight the worm with a bomb
- It makes all of us guilty in advance (prosumed criminals)
- It uses methods that have serious flaws: automated content detection is an experimental technology that makes a lot of errors (false positives)
- Additionally, by this proposal, they allow themselves a 10% error rate — in simplest words this, in theory, means that 10% of good photos might still get you in trouble — which is pretty much absurd (more here)
(https://netzpolitik.org/2022/geleakter-bericht-eu-kommission-nimmt-hohe-fehlerquoten-bei-chatkontrolle-in-kauf/)
LET’S PUT ANOTHER PROBLEM (CORRUPTION) IN THE LANGUAGE OF THIS ACT
There has been some level of Corruption among Political representatives in the EU.
This represents a serious threat to the stability of the EU, each member state, and EU citizens. As a result, we canpropose that every member of the EU parliament and EU commission should make their bank accounts (every transaction) fully transparent so we can check whether they are committing some act of corruption.
WHAT’s EU CITIZEN OPINION?
72% are against it (see picture).
SO WHAT YOU CAN DO?
- Go to the proposal site and write a strong opinion against it (we have time until the 12 of September):
https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/12726-Fighting-child-sexual-abuse-detection-removal-and-reporting-of-illegal-content-online_en - Ask your EU Parliament representative (and party) how are they going to vote and put pressure on them
- Ask your local representatives about their position and question them
ALL THIS IS WAY BETTER EXPLAINED HERE:
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/messaging-and-chat-control/
Germany asks the EU Commission 61 critical questions regarding Chat Control, the law requiring the mass surveillance of private messages:
