This refers to the agreement on the 26th november, it still needs to pass the parliament and each country will decide individually about it. The Council’s agreement serves as a common position, but it is not the final law. The text now has to go through trilogue negotiations with the European Parliament and the European Commission
If it passes, pretty soon the "voluntary"part will vanish. Looking at other privacy-related shit that started like this, people won't even be notified it happened.
There is this splendid scene in the film Barry Lyndon by Stanley Kubrick. During the Seven Years’ War, an English spy in Prussia is exposed. Captain Potzdorf (sic!) arrests him with four men at bayonet point and, after unmasking him, asks:
"Shall I force you to join the Prussian army, or will you enlist voluntarily?"
A simar allusion is constantly referred to throughout Ninefox Gambit, a book by Noon Ha Lee. The "Kel" are the military, who through various sci-fi technologies physically can't disobey a superior, and the term "volunteers Kel-style" keeps coming up.
But yes. A lot of the time people get hung up on the consent part, and completely forget about the uncoerced half of the deal.
I mean I've just seen this happening. I'm a medical professional in the EU, and up till recently we had a new online system to organize patient files. This was supposed to let medic professionals access those files in an easier, faster way.
Besides the obvious privacy concern (a dermatologist shouldn't be able to see your gynecogy files; a random medical professional shouldn't be able to log into the apo and check a random person's file), the government just sent medical professionals a memo saying that
- this will become mandatory
- the patients will not be notified this is now mandatory
- if a patient wants to erase certain parts of their files, they can't; same for a medical professional. Both of the. have to address a joint request to the concerned authority, who is supposed to erase the files. However, nobody will be notified that their request was granted; if the doc forgets, or if for some reason the request doesn't reach whoever it has to reach, you'll never know
It sounded like a questionable but fine idea at first. It's now a neat way to ensure nobody has any medical privacy. And tbh I don't see why the same wouldn't happen here.
Although to be sure this doesn't even need to happen for chat privacy to be effectively dead.
Probably. Pretty sure it won't be just medical insurances; car insurances or home insurances will probably be able to fabricate a reason why they need a doc on board too.
I mean, even using the "think of the children!" argument, bad actors will now be able to bribe any medical professional and get access to anyone's entire medical history.
They could use this filter out people from jobs, apartment/house rentals, all you need is a doctor who you can rely on to provide the details. It could be used to deny access to phone service/internet/business opportunities. Can't imagine why some of that might happen but if it can be abused it will be.
Probably. Pretty sure it won't be just medical insurances; car insurances or home insurances will probably be able to fabricate a reason why they need a doc on board too.
i can already see corpos screen "potential applicants" for "medical anomalies"
It absolutely baffles me how some people worship their politician(s). You don't have to hate every one of them but even ones that do align with your values I still look at with a skeptical eye.
That's exactly what I mean. Same reason I'm against taking rights away from extreme right wingers. This shit always escalates to a point where everybody pays the price.
Also after letting that dude drive into a christmas market in Magdeburg last year (6 dead more than 300 injured) while he posted on facebook how he was going to do something like this.
Some even told the police, but nobody seemed to care.
Now they want to tell me that they need chat control to do a better job? What a macabre farce.
how did that happen? I thought after the first car attack years ago on a Christmas market it became standard procedure to have all gatherings of that nature secured with roadblocks?
Exactly. If they can tap everyone's private messages, what comes next? Tap everyones private talks via phone microphones? After all, you could be talking about something illegal with your friends. Remember, this is to protect the children! If you disagree, you are evil! You can really justify anything with that argument.
To have it pass, they changed the law and removed the mandatory part out of it. So now, no service is forced to comply with this, but they are allowed to do it if they want to-
Which means that many services, like Whatsapp, will likely add AI-based checks to all messages.
From what I understood and mind you I may be wrong, but if certain companies don’t do it they could be considered high risk and penalized by the EU in some way.
Still, that's sooo much better. It means that stuff like Signal or Telegram will probably not comply. And anything under the Meta umbrella was already unsecure and doing shit like this, so no change there.
If Meta wanted to do that, they already would have. It has never been illegal for any service to scan the messages their users exchange for anything, as long as the data was only used internally or it was stated in the legal documents nobody actually reads.
They have added E2E voluntarily after a lot of public pressure following the NSA-Snowden-Scandal.
Which also makes it weird to allow, but not actually force it now, because it has always been allowed.
They could probably do it with much less backlash tho. If they said they removed E2EE because of "EU regulation" I'd guess most people would just get mad at the EU (partially rightfully so) without even looking at the regulation itself and seeing Meta is just as much at fault.
I'm sure getting a law for it on the books in the first place is the biggest hurdle, after that I'm sure it will be easier to keep tweaking it closer to full-1984.
this is either misinformed, or just intentionally misleading, probably to generate more buzz for the topic. the countries marked "supports" are countries whose governments approved the changes made to the original proposal.
if you click through, you will find plenty of countries marked as "supports" where every single representative either opposes the proposal, or the opposing ones are in clear majority. for example, austria, the first on the list, has 10 representatives against the proposal, and 10 undeclared, yet is marked as "supports" because their government said "sure, you can change the proposal you already put forward".
Actually proud for czech politicians for fucking once. I just wonder whether I can contact representatives of other countries too if my country is already opposed
Can I start yelling on them through different phone numbers and writing aggressive emails or something?
Your entire Facebook history can be downloaded any time you want. That's over 20 years of posts, pictures and comments. It's a listed option in your profile. Even if you closed your account years ago.
Why is this important? Because Facebook isn't the only social media company and it's not the only one to keep complete backups of everything you do. All the way from account creation.
Google automatically backs up your entire WhatsApp history to Google Drive too, even though it's a Facebook program run by Meta.
It's genuinely bewildering how much data these bastards have on us, whether we're aware of it or not, and whether they tell us who they're sharing it with. "Carefully selected partners" my ass.
Google automatically backs up your entire WhatsApp history to Google Drive too, even though it's a Facebook program run by Meta.
For some time now you've been able to turn on End to End Encryption for your Google Drive backups with your own password. Whether you believe they are actually encrypting it or not, at least it's an option.
It's not just chats. It'll scan pictures and links, too. Absolutely insane how something like this can be supported while the politicians are exempt from it.
Services that encrypt end to end will need to implement the scanning feature clientside to scan on the endpoint, or be banned in the eu. Seems like this bill didnt get anywhere before they changed scanning to be "voluntary" for vendors, but if the alternative to implementing it is to not be allowed into the eu market... its not really voluntary is it?
And of course EU officials, lawmakers and government bodies are excempt from the whole thing, just to sprinkle a little corruption on top of the surveillance state.
Definitely not, and they really can't stop people from encrypting messages on any platform, by just manually putting it through something like openPGP and seemingly texting each other incoherent strings of text. What's insane is that this will hurt ordinary people, and anyone engaged in activities with any degree of criminal sophistication will just do these things manually through open source software.
The latest change that allowed chat control to go through is that it isn't mandatory for companies to comply. At least that's how i understood it, please correct me if Im wrong.
That would mean that the encryption apps like wire or whatever can still stay hidden. That renders this law completely useless against crime but that were never their goal with this.
Because the "user" sprinted towards it ("social media") a while ago. The "user" wanted to be the main character. Now countries want to be the audience.
All the reps are undecided or against, but Belgium is listed as for? I don't understand. I emailed them and some of them confirmed that they were against.
It's about government stance. The Belgian government supports the proposal but not the parliament. It can be a bit confusing, but the parliament and the government are different branches. The parliament is more privacy friendly.
Chatcontrol is the gateway to get control over the internet. To access anything a child might access, EVERYBODY needs to identify to proof he or she is an adult and is allowed to access it. See what is happening in Australia already as an example of real world implementation.
In the future it will connect with the digital wallet containing your drivers license, digital Euro's and all that they will add to it in the future. Like your public transport access for example.
It will give them full control over your digital life and the digital life will impact your fysical life. How?
Finances once cash money is taken out of the picture will be digital only.
Call me a conspiracy theorist all you want. In my opinion you have to be stupid not to see their intentions. So, I don't mind at all.
I'm oversimplificating but: The law will be discussed more, sent to parliament, and if it passes as is, the various messaging services will get an universal hallpass to add checks on incoming and sent messages to check for things.
They removed the mandatory part, so no service is actually being forced to do it, but can you really trust Meta not to say "Sure, let me add a good old AI check on all messages"? It's a slippery slope.
The article is wrong on that: The decision is given to providers, not EU countries. It's said so even in the sources they cited, here, and here's the proposal
contacting the MEPs did nothing. out of 80 or so emails, i got only 1 reply from a dutch MEP that could be boiled down to "think of the children!", and a lot of notifications "email deleted without being opened".
European politicians for ya, they were never accessible by the public the way American reps are. it's frowned upon I feel like even to make a stink in Europe to your local lawmakers. do tell me im wrong though id love that.
Utter garbage! This shit violates the GDPR on so many levels and has nothing to do with actually protecting children. What a fucking sad timeline to live on. All this data hoarding on people by governments and massive corporations is doing nothing but making the rich even more wealthy while destroying our planet on the side. Not to even mention the mass surveillance aspect of this shit. I'm sick of it.
Chat Control 2.0 is worse than the first draft. Everybody here (and criminals also) know how to trivially circumvent encryption ban with free uncensorable tools. But with Chat Control 2.0 they are proposing "age", identity verification for email services. Your existing email providers will hold your email addresses hostage until you deanonymize yourself, associating your real life identity with all previous data, emails they collected from you. You will be locked out of every service you ever registered with with email. Including services you paid for. They are trying to completely wipe out anonymity on the clearnet. Of course this won't affect criminals at all. But they will completely fuck up everyone else who wants to use the internet, in the name of "protecting the children".
They are also toying with the idea of "client side scanning", which is just mandatory spyware that reads your offline files on every device, smartphone, computer you own.
If this passes in the EU, it's coming to America too, don't worry.
Iirc it was client side right? Can someone tell me how they're planning on preventing revanced patches for common apps, and prevent people from using open source solutions (like Signal)?
And if they implement it client side, couldn't you just download a foreign APK without the chat control features implemented?
Most MEP's are there for a fat paycheck and that's it, they don't give a shit about their duties to the citizens they are representing. Speaking for Eastern Europe, especially Romania.
You know, I have some handwritten letters my grandfather sent to his sister back in the '43 (we had Swastiboys in my country), they all had stamps "Passed censure" which means thay they were opened, read, unacceptable words/sentences/informations blacked out and then forwarded. Chat control reminds me of that principle and like back then, politicians and other individuals in position will be exempt from it. I was under the impression similar system is present in North Korea, China, Russia, (I'm seeing a pattern here...) maybe some other freedom loving countries I'm missing. We aren't going in good direction as societies.
What shit are they smoking?
They have no idea whats going on and what their voting means. I think it’s time that politicians can hold accountable personally for that waste they are producing.
The shift from mandatory to 'voluntary' compliance for services like WhatsApp is exactly where the real danger lies. Privacy dies not with a bang, but with a checkbox update.
This is the only time i can think of where I've felt relief upon remembering the UK isn't a part of the eu anymore because that brexit happened. I mean we've still got some really really awful censorship stuff going on but at least this isn't a part of that.
local encryption for files b4 uploading, using open-source tools and algorithms. signal has said if chat control is really set in place fr fr(no idea what being passed means in Parliament) they'll stop serving EU altogether. lots of other apps exists but I'm not sure how they work server wise. as a last resort for communication, pgp for email.
it sure will be a shit show in sweden here cause I see almost no attention put to this. which I'm utterly convinced is 100% intentional by the powers that be. WEF or whoever else evil orgs. And the 100% certain leaks, ppl selling data illegally, hackers stealing data and just creating havoc for normal ppl will be crazy. its nuts these tech illiterate dumbfuck boomers are setting the laws about tech they dont understand in theory or in practice.
With Poland being split 50/50 politically, and Polexit being talked a bit about (even tho not really taken seriously) it might eventually happen.
We gained a lot thanks to EU, but recently their leash is getting tighter and tighter, and even while I was against leaving EU, now I'm having my doubts.
Privacy in the internet is already barely there, but this is too much.
Its aproved, but regulation stills needs to be made, so people shouting that as of today everything is gone, forget the aprove law in to regulation part.
All but four countries (Czech Republic, Italy, Netherlands, and Poland) endorsed the revised Danish Chat Control proposal. While the obligation for scanning has been removed, the agreed text nonetheless incentivises service providers to indiscriminately scan private communications. Read Patrick Breyer's analysis here and the official press release here.
On the basis of today's agreement, the Council can start negotiations with the European Parliament with a view to agreeing on the final regulation. The European Parliament reached its position in November 2023.
Okay, this is doom and gloom, but becides messaging local reps, what can we actually do to combat this? Buyimg tech from foreign countries? Sideloading bypasses? Whats the actual move to remedy this if it passes? (Apart from the obvious of not using services that will adhear to the law).
This refers to the agreement on the 26th november, it still needs to pass the parliament and each country will decide individually about it. The Council’s agreement serves as a common position, but it is not the final law. The text now has to go through trilogue negotiations with the European Parliament and the European Commission
Wasn't it also the limited voluntary version?
If it passes, pretty soon the "voluntary"part will vanish. Looking at other privacy-related shit that started like this, people won't even be notified it happened.
There is this splendid scene in the film Barry Lyndon by Stanley Kubrick. During the Seven Years’ War, an English spy in Prussia is exposed. Captain Potzdorf (sic!) arrests him with four men at bayonet point and, after unmasking him, asks:
"Shall I force you to join the Prussian army, or will you enlist voluntarily?"
A simar allusion is constantly referred to throughout Ninefox Gambit, a book by Noon Ha Lee. The "Kel" are the military, who through various sci-fi technologies physically can't disobey a superior, and the term "volunteers Kel-style" keeps coming up.
But yes. A lot of the time people get hung up on the consent part, and completely forget about the uncoerced half of the deal.
Voluntary in their context means : Agree, or don't use the service.
No, it's voluntary for the service provider to adopt this new security features-
For the end client, once the feature is in place, it's like you said (because it's going to be put in the terms and conditions)
It really not supposed to vanish, but it's not like given the right ISPs won't immediately start spying on people.
I mean I've just seen this happening. I'm a medical professional in the EU, and up till recently we had a new online system to organize patient files. This was supposed to let medic professionals access those files in an easier, faster way.
Besides the obvious privacy concern (a dermatologist shouldn't be able to see your gynecogy files; a random medical professional shouldn't be able to log into the apo and check a random person's file), the government just sent medical professionals a memo saying that - this will become mandatory - the patients will not be notified this is now mandatory - if a patient wants to erase certain parts of their files, they can't; same for a medical professional. Both of the. have to address a joint request to the concerned authority, who is supposed to erase the files. However, nobody will be notified that their request was granted; if the doc forgets, or if for some reason the request doesn't reach whoever it has to reach, you'll never know
It sounded like a questionable but fine idea at first. It's now a neat way to ensure nobody has any medical privacy. And tbh I don't see why the same wouldn't happen here.
Although to be sure this doesn't even need to happen for chat privacy to be effectively dead.
And I assume medical insurances will be able to have a doctor just for checking their clients medical history...
Probably. Pretty sure it won't be just medical insurances; car insurances or home insurances will probably be able to fabricate a reason why they need a doc on board too.
I mean, even using the "think of the children!" argument, bad actors will now be able to bribe any medical professional and get access to anyone's entire medical history.
They could use this filter out people from jobs, apartment/house rentals, all you need is a doctor who you can rely on to provide the details. It could be used to deny access to phone service/internet/business opportunities. Can't imagine why some of that might happen but if it can be abused it will be.
i can already see corpos screen "potential applicants" for "medical anomalies"
Would a GDPR delete request be honored?
Someone really needs to kick Denmark's arse for being the one that took enough Thielmoney to put it on the table in the first place!
As a Dane, I hate our politicians...
As a non-Dane, I hate your politicians too.
Not crazy about my own either.
i also hate this guys politicians
I also hate politicians in general
It absolutely baffles me how some people worship their politician(s). You don't have to hate every one of them but even ones that do align with your values I still look at with a skeptical eye.
i'm surprised anyone likes any politician, frankly
As a human, I hate all politicians...
I can't believe Germany voted for it after the ddr and stasi
It's Merz, Laschet and Weber. They are as corrupt as they come.
I wouldn't be surprised if all this is intended to find dissidents during the militarization of Europe.
Well not just that:
Climate change activists? Check
Pro Palestine activists? Check
And while some may agree with that? This will also harm those people. As freedom taken away is also freedom taken away from everybody.
It starts with the people you might not agree with it, and in the end it'll be for you.
And that's not even counting the false positives in the system!
You can't take rights away of only a certain group. But that's the point of it ofcourse.
That's exactly what I mean. Same reason I'm against taking rights away from extreme right wingers. This shit always escalates to a point where everybody pays the price.
Also after letting that dude drive into a christmas market in Magdeburg last year (6 dead more than 300 injured) while he posted on facebook how he was going to do something like this.
Some even told the police, but nobody seemed to care.
Now they want to tell me that they need chat control to do a better job? What a macabre farce.
how did that happen? I thought after the first car attack years ago on a Christmas market it became standard procedure to have all gatherings of that nature secured with roadblocks?
Apparently they couldn't lock it down completely because they also needed to have some room for an ambulance / fire trucks, just in case.
Exactly. If they can tap everyone's private messages, what comes next? Tap everyones private talks via phone microphones? After all, you could be talking about something illegal with your friends. Remember, this is to protect the children! If you disagree, you are evil! You can really justify anything with that argument.
They already do that I'm sure , palatir can scan everything for keywords.
Did you miss mass arrests? Of all who can oppose german gov.
Right now Germans wants to "repeat" and become a new leader of eu.
I did yeah. Can you link me an article. When I google mass arrests Germany I end up at the kristallnacht
It was sweden that originally proposed it I believe
It's Denmark that keeps putting it back on the table as they want it as a "win" for their "Presidency" .
Also with the usual "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" approach that Denmark is so good in (ab)using.
Ironic when Denmark was one of the last countries to ban child porn
It's never really about "the children".
I mean, they obviously want to see everything about your child! what do you mean??
I mean if "the children" means "us getting to see everything you do and know every time you fart", then yes, it is about the children.
Denmark is a traitor country anyway, helped a foreign nation spy on its european allies.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/31/denmark-helped-us-spy-on-angela-merkel-and-european-allies-report
They were the perfect tool to push that thing in EU. Did Australia do it yet?
LOL who didn't? It seems everyone forgot the US spied on its allies not so long ago.
They’re doing it all the time
That's the excuse the UK gov used for OSA. Also accusing anyone against it as being in favour of child abuse etc.
Yeah, it's disgusting, I believe Italy now has it too. You need a license to wank. Government overreach in it's extremes!
Danish politicians need to be subjected to traditional Danish torture: Being forced to walk barefoot on Lego bricks.
It won't be too long before a new service pops up that doesn't comply.
Apparently it’s there but not for us. All politicians are whitelisted from chat control
WE BITE THE BULLET FOR THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS
Aa always
Funny. Imo, the only people who should have chat control are politicians
Full transparancy for politicians, some very sensitive topics like defence and security sure, but still some kind of regulation.
These people work for their nation, they should be on top of their league of morality.
It is disheartening to see corruption. These People have no spine.
Nobody could’ve seen that coming…
Man fuck these people.
Rules for thee
Not for me
Let’s just start a party we can all be part of, so we’re automatically exempt
The elite pedos spying on everyone but themselves. I'm sure they have only good intentions at heart.
Easy loophole: let's all become politicians
To have it pass, they changed the law and removed the mandatory part out of it. So now, no service is forced to comply with this, but they are allowed to do it if they want to-
Which means that many services, like Whatsapp, will likely add AI-based checks to all messages.
What incentive would those services have to do it? More data for them to analyze?
No real incentive, if I read the law correctly-
Just a pass to do it if they want to.
From what I understood and mind you I may be wrong, but if certain companies don’t do it they could be considered high risk and penalized by the EU in some way.
Exactly. They'll be "investigated" till they give in.
Still, that's sooo much better. It means that stuff like Signal or Telegram will probably not comply. And anything under the Meta umbrella was already unsecure and doing shit like this, so no change there.
Still, fuck these people
If Meta wanted to do that, they already would have. It has never been illegal for any service to scan the messages their users exchange for anything, as long as the data was only used internally or it was stated in the legal documents nobody actually reads.
They have added E2E voluntarily after a lot of public pressure following the NSA-Snowden-Scandal.
Which also makes it weird to allow, but not actually force it now, because it has always been allowed.
They could probably do it with much less backlash tho. If they said they removed E2EE because of "EU regulation" I'd guess most people would just get mad at the EU (partially rightfully so) without even looking at the regulation itself and seeing Meta is just as much at fault.
I'm sure getting a law for it on the books in the first place is the biggest hurdle, after that I'm sure it will be easier to keep tweaking it closer to full-1984.
Matrix and federation. Maybe that's how i finally get my family to use it
I don't understand how the fuck this can have been passed. This completely goes against GDPR that we fought for here in Europe. Fuck everything
Money talks. More data to gather, more data to sell.
It hasn't been passed yet, this was just the council's decision for a common position that still needs to be voted upon by the parliament.
the keyword is "yet"
Cory Doctorow just posted on how regulatory capture has led to the GDPR being undermined, with Ireland the main culprit. https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/
Danemark feels like that annoying little guy trying to control everyone’s lives ..
It's not 'just the Danes'. Only 4 countries voted against this.
this is either misinformed, or just intentionally misleading, probably to generate more buzz for the topic. the countries marked "supports" are countries whose governments approved the changes made to the original proposal.
if you click through, you will find plenty of countries marked as "supports" where every single representative either opposes the proposal, or the opposing ones are in clear majority. for example, austria, the first on the list, has 10 representatives against the proposal, and 10 undeclared, yet is marked as "supports" because their government said "sure, you can change the proposal you already put forward".
That was utterly confusing to me as well when i checked the detailed breakdown of Germany.
Actually proud for czech politicians for fucking once. I just wonder whether I can contact representatives of other countries too if my country is already opposed
Can I start yelling on them through different phone numbers and writing aggressive emails or something?
And those 4 countries are based
FUCK!!!!!!!!
GOD FUCKING DAMMIT
What does that mean?
If you are in EU they now can read every single text you ever sent or will send.
Even past chats? Thought we had the right that data gets deleted after some time.
Your entire Facebook history can be downloaded any time you want. That's over 20 years of posts, pictures and comments. It's a listed option in your profile. Even if you closed your account years ago.
Why is this important? Because Facebook isn't the only social media company and it's not the only one to keep complete backups of everything you do. All the way from account creation.
Google automatically backs up your entire WhatsApp history to Google Drive too, even though it's a Facebook program run by Meta.
It's genuinely bewildering how much data these bastards have on us, whether we're aware of it or not, and whether they tell us who they're sharing it with. "Carefully selected partners" my ass.
For some time now you've been able to turn on End to End Encryption for your Google Drive backups with your own password. Whether you believe they are actually encrypting it or not, at least it's an option.
It's not just chats. It'll scan pictures and links, too. Absolutely insane how something like this can be supported while the politicians are exempt from it.
Its funny its like the rise of a new social caste of politicians that will quickly became nobles like in rome
Even when the chatting is happening on services that encrypt it end-to-end? Like Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp, etc etc?
Yes. They want a backdoor so that they can read the messages before they're encrypted.
It's not mandatory, but the various apps will have free reign to introduce checks.
So... Whatsapp is most likely going to have it, for example. I don't know about Telegram. Signal is probably not gonna do it.
Services that encrypt end to end will need to implement the scanning feature clientside to scan on the endpoint, or be banned in the eu. Seems like this bill didnt get anywhere before they changed scanning to be "voluntary" for vendors, but if the alternative to implementing it is to not be allowed into the eu market... its not really voluntary is it?
And of course EU officials, lawmakers and government bodies are excempt from the whole thing, just to sprinkle a little corruption on top of the surveillance state.
can't see signal complying with it tbh
Definitely not, and they really can't stop people from encrypting messages on any platform, by just manually putting it through something like openPGP and seemingly texting each other incoherent strings of text. What's insane is that this will hurt ordinary people, and anyone engaged in activities with any degree of criminal sophistication will just do these things manually through open source software.
The latest change that allowed chat control to go through is that it isn't mandatory for companies to comply. At least that's how i understood it, please correct me if Im wrong.
That would mean that the encryption apps like wire or whatever can still stay hidden. That renders this law completely useless against crime but that were never their goal with this.
Yes, meta has agreed with the law. So even whatsapp will be under control if the parliament approve it
That's monumentally fucked up. Why is it that every country in the world is simultaneously sprinting towards technofascism?
That's what happens when you give techno-fascists trillions of dollars.
They use it to increase their control over your life.
There's a genocide happening that certain countries don't want you to know about because they are always the victims.
Because the "user" sprinted towards it ("social media") a while ago. The "user" wanted to be the main character. Now countries want to be the audience.
OH SHIT
Past too? Oh hell no. What the fuck is happening anymore.
Not yet. It have only gotten to the next stage of the process.
Write to your MEP's to fight chat control: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
It has passed the Council vote but is not yet final law. Previously the EU Parliament opposed aspects of it, so we will see..
Thx for clarifying. Is There anything that we can do to push further against this?
Email, Twitter, and annoy your politicians. Find some email addresses and copy paste your disagreement. Thats our democracy lol
Edit: spelling - autocorrect is so useful intill it isnt.
Edit2: im leaving that in
Fightchatcontrol.eu has listed MEP's and their emails
Contact your local representatives here https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
For once my country is not between the bad guys, wow
Some of your reps likely are though. Contact them all.
Almeno stavolta
Amen Travolta to you too brother.
All the reps are undecided or against, but Belgium is listed as for? I don't understand. I emailed them and some of them confirmed that they were against.
It's about government stance. The Belgian government supports the proposal but not the parliament. It can be a bit confusing, but the parliament and the government are different branches. The parliament is more privacy friendly.
This should be a sticky in the sub! We need to get those bastards pointing the right way.. and away from lobbied interests!
We're doomed as a society...
Suprising nobody.
I emailed all my MEPs stating privacy concerns and overreach and got back some version of “won’t somebody think of the children” from all of them.
First time more than one even replied at all. Very telling.
EU scanning all messages.
ECB scanning all transactions.
KGB, Stasi and Gestapo's wet dream.
Yes! During all the worst parts of the 20th centiry, people had a modicum of privacy. What you did at home was your business.
Now even that's going away soon... and I was born and raised in an authoritarian eastern-european regime. I know what surveillance was like.
Chatcontrol is the gateway to get control over the internet. To access anything a child might access, EVERYBODY needs to identify to proof he or she is an adult and is allowed to access it. See what is happening in Australia already as an example of real world implementation.
In the future it will connect with the digital wallet containing your drivers license, digital Euro's and all that they will add to it in the future. Like your public transport access for example.
It will give them full control over your digital life and the digital life will impact your fysical life. How?
Finances once cash money is taken out of the picture will be digital only.
Call me a conspiracy theorist all you want. In my opinion you have to be stupid not to see their intentions. So, I don't mind at all.
"To access anything a child might access" -- so, literally everything from some Disney site to Pornhub.
"
PapersMobile Device, please!"F U C K
Why is everyone hurtling towards the most depressing future possible? What is wrong with people?
Greed, money and power.
I guess. I've been thinking about it and the lack of imagination and creativity are what appal me the most about this weird dystopia.
It takes literally no grain of imagination to be greedy and self-centered. It's our most primitive state.
As a species our strengths are empathy and creativity. I feel like I'm watching evolution collapsing in on itself.
wait I thought it didn't pass the other day and we were done with it?!
The law didn't pass, so they changed it and removed the "mandatory" part out of the text. They then reproposed the vote, and this is how it went.
so what's going to happen now concretely?
I'm oversimplificating but: The law will be discussed more, sent to parliament, and if it passes as is, the various messaging services will get an universal hallpass to add checks on incoming and sent messages to check for things.
They removed the mandatory part, so no service is actually being forced to do it, but can you really trust Meta not to say "Sure, let me add a good old AI check on all messages"? It's a slippery slope.
Luckily, it's not the end yet
well, I guess ditching Google and co for privacy focused alternatives was a good move still
IMO, that's always a good move
They changed the wording a little, and now scanning is now “voluntary” for individual EU states to decide upon. In other words, we're fucked.
Edit: sauce
The article is wrong on that: The decision is given to providers, not EU countries. It's said so even in the sources they cited, here, and here's the proposal
Yikes :/ 2025 has been a rough year for online privacy and safety for the entire world.
Putin this, Russia that and then they come up with such garbage.
The EU is such a bad joke.
Lmaoo. Gonna rethink if I wanna my country to be a part of the eu
Green being opposed really screwed with my head...
It's against polish constitution so it won't be passed... In Poland at least
Might as well move to China if this goes through
So europe will become China 2 but shittier
Why is it suddenly fucking trendy to be a fucking fascist. im so fucking exhausted man.
capitalism is its own uphill fucking treadmill. this nanny state, faux fascism is honestly gonna be the fucking death of me.
We're such a joke of a society.
I despise politicians with all my heart. Chat control should only apply to them, since they are supposed to represent the people.
Instead they keep taking bribes and passing unethical laws, feeling they are above everyone else.
While Italy is “opposed”, they will definitely implement this as the government is super corrupt.
How on earth can people vote for this? Don't they see what this is doing? Unreal that so many countries are supporting this.
"THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" like how a lot of privacy/freedom-destroying measures get passed.
"Think of my now much bigger bank account!!"
WTF. No we can destroy the EU right? right? They behave like nazis and now we get the total controll. George orwell is screaming in his coffin.
contacting the MEPs did nothing. out of 80 or so emails, i got only 1 reply from a dutch MEP that could be boiled down to "think of the children!", and a lot of notifications "email deleted without being opened".
European politicians for ya, they were never accessible by the public the way American reps are. it's frowned upon I feel like even to make a stink in Europe to your local lawmakers. do tell me im wrong though id love that.
you're not wrong, politicians are supposed to be voice of the people but they're just shills for corporations
Utter garbage! This shit violates the GDPR on so many levels and has nothing to do with actually protecting children. What a fucking sad timeline to live on. All this data hoarding on people by governments and massive corporations is doing nothing but making the rich even more wealthy while destroying our planet on the side. Not to even mention the mass surveillance aspect of this shit. I'm sick of it.
Trust me, Polish people won’t like it, if Pro-Eu liberal party who rules Poland rn opposed it, the rest of the parties will definetly oposse it.
Chat Control 2.0 is worse than the first draft. Everybody here (and criminals also) know how to trivially circumvent encryption ban with free uncensorable tools. But with Chat Control 2.0 they are proposing "age", identity verification for email services. Your existing email providers will hold your email addresses hostage until you deanonymize yourself, associating your real life identity with all previous data, emails they collected from you. You will be locked out of every service you ever registered with with email. Including services you paid for. They are trying to completely wipe out anonymity on the clearnet. Of course this won't affect criminals at all. But they will completely fuck up everyone else who wants to use the internet, in the name of "protecting the children".
They are also toying with the idea of "client side scanning", which is just mandatory spyware that reads your offline files on every device, smartphone, computer you own.
If this passes in the EU, it's coming to America too, don't worry.
So this is the day, European Values have died...
Died long ago
Died a long long time ago
Well, I guess, it's a message to the world's governments to start doing this shit too.
We are fighting a battle we already lost
Nuke denm*rk
Iirc it was client side right? Can someone tell me how they're planning on preventing revanced patches for common apps, and prevent people from using open source solutions (like Signal)?
And if they implement it client side, couldn't you just download a foreign APK without the chat control features implemented?
Most MEP's are there for a fat paycheck and that's it, they don't give a shit about their duties to the citizens they are representing. Speaking for Eastern Europe, especially Romania.
EU is such a joke.
On an unrelated note did you know thermite is surprisingly easy to make?
It's always under the guise of "Protecting children"....
I see nobody warming up guillotines for politicians, oligarchs and their psycho families.
This fact equals that people don't care. If they don't care then they don't deserve prosperity (in this case privacy). End of topic.
The only way for society to progress is 1789,1848,1917 style. Everything else is bullshit.
Welcome to the EUSSR.
They can go fuck themselves. See if they can stop Signal.
1984
Didn’t Signal say they’d withdraw from the EU if this gets passed?
Well good luck enforcing it, this breaks so many established internet communication protocols and functionality.
You do realize that the EU acts as a despote with a shiny veneer of democracy? It's just a paint job, they're there to screw us.
Glad I live in that white central island. 😉🇨🇭
You know, I have some handwritten letters my grandfather sent to his sister back in the '43 (we had Swastiboys in my country), they all had stamps "Passed censure" which means thay they were opened, read, unacceptable words/sentences/informations blacked out and then forwarded. Chat control reminds me of that principle and like back then, politicians and other individuals in position will be exempt from it. I was under the impression similar system is present in North Korea, China, Russia, (I'm seeing a pattern here...) maybe some other freedom loving countries I'm missing. We aren't going in good direction as societies.
im glad im dutch and we oposse it -but man this is scary .and inhumane
I was under the impression that Germany opposed it too, then according to this they suddenly flipped? WTF?!
Italy abstained, not opposed.
What shit are they smoking? They have no idea whats going on and what their voting means. I think it’s time that politicians can hold accountable personally for that waste they are producing.
The shift from mandatory to 'voluntary' compliance for services like WhatsApp is exactly where the real danger lies. Privacy dies not with a bang, but with a checkbox update.
Proud to be Polish. Fuck the EU ingerention in national laws.
This is the only time i can think of where I've felt relief upon remembering the UK isn't a part of the eu anymore because that brexit happened. I mean we've still got some really really awful censorship stuff going on but at least this isn't a part of that.
Voi vittu saatana
Czech republic goo brrrrr
Maybe this will finally wake up the clowns who seriously thought that the European Union was a boon for the privacy of the average citizen..
local encryption for files b4 uploading, using open-source tools and algorithms. signal has said if chat control is really set in place fr fr(no idea what being passed means in Parliament) they'll stop serving EU altogether. lots of other apps exists but I'm not sure how they work server wise. as a last resort for communication, pgp for email.
it sure will be a shit show in sweden here cause I see almost no attention put to this. which I'm utterly convinced is 100% intentional by the powers that be. WEF or whoever else evil orgs. And the 100% certain leaks, ppl selling data illegally, hackers stealing data and just creating havoc for normal ppl will be crazy. its nuts these tech illiterate dumbfuck boomers are setting the laws about tech they dont understand in theory or in practice.
FUCK
We are so fucking cooked
This is the first time I am actually grateful I do not live in an EU country.
With Poland being split 50/50 politically, and Polexit being talked a bit about (even tho not really taken seriously) it might eventually happen.
We gained a lot thanks to EU, but recently their leash is getting tighter and tighter, and even while I was against leaving EU, now I'm having my doubts.
Privacy in the internet is already barely there, but this is too much.
We need to have some protests happening
Its aproved, but regulation stills needs to be made, so people shouting that as of today everything is gone, forget the aprove law in to regulation part.
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ ->timeline
Council Endorses Chat Control
All but four countries (Czech Republic, Italy, Netherlands, and Poland) endorsed the revised Danish Chat Control proposal. While the obligation for scanning has been removed, the agreed text nonetheless incentivises service providers to indiscriminately scan private communications. Read Patrick Breyer's analysis here and the official press release here.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2025/11/26/child-sexual-abuse-council-reaches-position-on-law-protecting-children-from-online-abuse/
Next steps
On the basis of today's agreement, the Council can start negotiations with the European Parliament with a view to agreeing on the final regulation. The European Parliament reached its position in November 2023.
Man if a service EVER read my private communications I would close my account immediately.
Wouldn't take much of that for companies to think twice.
I'm just glad I have linux devices and peer services, the dumb really do boil like frogs.
V for Vendetta is English for a reason
Actually considering to ditch the phone altogether
Contact your local representatives
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin
Germany has 96 MEPs, I know what I'll be doing tonight... let's hope Gmail doesn't rate limit me
Telegram etc. will never implement it
Okay, this is doom and gloom, but becides messaging local reps, what can we actually do to combat this? Buyimg tech from foreign countries? Sideloading bypasses? Whats the actual move to remedy this if it passes? (Apart from the obvious of not using services that will adhear to the law).
Fuck Denmark.
YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO PROTECT OUR PRIVACY, NOT DESTROY IT!
Proud of being Italian!