EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0

miroljub

And so, step by step, in the name of child protection and similar excuses, we lose liberties and rights one by one. Welcome to the Brave New 1984 We World. Big Brother loves us. We are living through the time best described by Zamyatin, Orwell, and Huxley.

petcat

I don't want to hear about the EU's "strong digital privacy" laws and protections ever again.

budududuroiu

Roberta Metsola's actions this week jeopardise the legitimacy of the EU project as a whole. It's clear that member countries use the EU as a blame-laundering mechanism to pass domestically unpopular laws, but the forcing of this vote under the urgency procedure that requires absolute majority to reject, on the last EP session before summer break is so blatant that it might awaken people that might've overlooked the structural failures of the EU and finally radicalise them EDIT: bad wording, it's not that the urgency procedure causes the voting to require absolute majority, it's that an absolute majority second-reading is forced through an emergency procedure which is designed for first readings of legislation that's the implied meaning above

largbae

This article seems to make good points about how useless and invasive Chat Control 1.0 is, but then posits Chat Control 2.0 as the answer. Is the latter not also terrible for privacy, demanding backdoors in all encrypted chat tech?

londons_explore

The defence against this is widespread truly peer to peer messaging services, where there is no company at the middle to tell you add backdoors. Who is working on that? I suspect the main challenge is not technical, but human - persuading users to switch messenger apps is almost impossible.

mrtksn

FTA: What changes with the return of Chat Control 1.0—and what stays the same: *What is coming back:* US tech companies are once again allowed to scan private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion. This affects direct messages on platforms like Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, as well as emails via Google’s Gmail and Apple’s iCloud. *What remains unchanged:* Public social media posts and files hosted in cloud storage could already be scanned without this law. Furthermore, private messages can always be reported by users, or monitored by authorities using targeted, court-ordered wiretapping. *What is still NOT being scanned:* End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures. So, E2E is unaffected?

pelagicAustral

Rest assured, someone is already working on circumventing this. Necessity is the mother on invention.

make_it_sure

what are the actual consequences of that? they can read any Whatsapp encrypted chat? What changes?

like_any_other

> In these talks, the EU Parliament is pushing for a paradigm shift in how we approach online child safety, demanding: [..] Strict security standards for messaging apps (“Security by Design”) to prevent cyber grooming. It's dispiriting to see a supposedly pro-privacy politician launder backdoors as "strict security standards".

vrganj

Brought to you - as always - by the Conservatives. Conservatism is just fascism with a slightly nicer image.

Avicebron

I'm curious where I can go to see real regularpeople who support this, is there like a different side of reddit, comments section? I don't know anyone who is blatantly anti-privacy and I want to hear their reasoning. Otherwise this just seems to be the EU rolling into a weird distributed autocracy without anyone blinking an eye.

ben_w

(Based on https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/07/07/eu-to-extend-t... and https://www.euractiv.com/news/how-the-epp-pushed-the-chat-sc... as well as the stuff in the link). Here's a quote from the article itself, which works for both pro and con arguments: "What is still NOT being scanned: End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures." As I'm not trained in law, I have no strong opinions on if this proposal is a net positive or negative, almost any big name LLM will do a better job than I can manage by looking at the legal text, stroking my goatee and saying "I recon…". But what I can say that I've just seen a headline about a class action lawsuit in the USA due to grok making CSAM and the company failing to assist the police in their investigations, and another about Meta facing a lawsuit in India for delivering advertising for CSAM on Instagram. My steelman in favour of the legislation: The regulation closes a legal gap that would otherwise force platforms to stop using existing CSAM detection systems; it's a temporary framework that doesn't require universal mandatory scanning or ban E2EE, just keeps the legal basis for companies which choose to use detection/scanners while lawmakers continue negotiating a more comprehensive longterm solution. My steelman against the legislation: Scanning private communications, even allowing companies to "voluntary" do this, sets the precedent that the confidentiality of private correspondence is conditional rather than fundamental. Also, automated scanning inevitably has false positives. Also, has chilling effect on free speech, undermines trust in encrypted messaging. Also, situationally, that it's "voluntary" means offenders can migrate to platforms which don't "voluntarily" do this.

teekert

This is a nice piece of democracy right here: "a measure it had rejected twice in March. Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation (314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions), the motion to reject it failed to secure the required absolute majority of 361 votes. As a result, mass scanning is now permitted again until 2028." "Oh no we can't get a majority to pass the law!" "Have you tried getting a majority to not pass the law?" "Worth a shot!" "It worked, should we also do this multiple times?" "Of course not! Pass the law, quickly!"

truthbe

Once you realise the age group that are in that bracket of european law making you realise it's gen X AKA the helicopter parent generation and it all becomes less shocking.

pmontra

> apps that are safe by design for children How do we design such apps? Let's rule out age attestation (to allow only some age ranges) or scan of content because they are orthogonal to apps. What are the design patterns that prevent adults to meet kids? No messaging?

wiradikusuma

From Google: "The law seeks to require digital platforms and messaging services (like WhatsApp and Gmail) to automatically scan users' private messages, emails, and photos to detect and report illegal content" -- EU policy makers are really honest people, hats off to them. There's no way politicians in my country allow their chats to be scanned, because they're very corrupt.

flanked-evergl

I'm honestly confused about why this is on topic for HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. Don't get me wrong, I feel a desire to engage with this as well, but there is nothing I can possibly say about this that is not political, because this is purely a political choice.

EGreg

I do not believe solutions to these issues will be found with government regulators. I believe they can be enabled by new technology that is designed to balance interests on all sides and actually enforce the guarantees IN CODE AND PROTOCOLS. Having said that, I don’t think the tech industry is what it once was, dominated by cypherpunks working to create a better world. It has been captured by greed and “moving fast and breaking things”, as well as infighting. Greed (both in the form of web3 numbers go up, and benefiting from the greater fool while delivering no utility) and moving fast (web2 facebook / VC / dump shares on the public / lock in / extract rents). So no wonder the government eventually steps in, when the industry spends a decade without adults steering the ship. We have giant platforms controlling everything, and the rest has devolved into zero sum games and memecoins. The tech industry hasn’t led or even organized enough to get behind technology that can liberate users. Instead it’s been captured by for-profit interests. Mozilla and Apache are rounding errors. Here is what open source can do when it comes to mass surveillance, and this would also solve the Flock problem here in the States, too: https://community.qbix.com/t/balancing-privacy-and-accountab... More broadly, here is what needs to be done across the board: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

ChrisArchitect

Related: Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0 Explained https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818311 Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819008

thomas_witt

If the EU just were to redirect the resources they're currently allocating to regulations like AI and Chat Control rather towards developing a genuinely competitive OpenAI or Anthropic alternative …