In 2022, Chat Control made its first appearance as a proposal. This proposal did not enforce every single communication platform, and it let communication platforms voluntarily participate in the content scanning to combat CSAM. This proposal did not break end-to-end encryption.
In this year (2025), Chat Control was back. It has been proposed again, but this time it was a lot more privacy invasive. The second proposal did not care if platforms consented to implement the content check. It was either start scanning every single message, or get out of the EU. The new proposal also breaks end-to-end encryption, by aiming to implement client-side scanning even before the content is encrypted. And arguably the most ironic part about all of this is that this proposal does not affect politicians and government officials. So the people who are voting for this law would not get affected by it, while they get to make the decision to scan all of your private communications.
The way the supporting countries show this proposal, you’d think they’re doing this out of the goodness of their hearts and to protect the children. By using such extremely sensitive topics as an excuse, they want people to be afraid of publicly opposing it. It is utterly disgusting. They are using them to hide the real intention, which is mass surveillance. As if there isn’t enough of it already. By NO MEANS am I NOT against the sharing and creation of such disgutful material, and I am against this proposal. Such proposals do little to nothing to actually combat against CSAM. Even organisations such as the UN admit that using technology like this is inefficient against this problem. Seeing everyone as a suspect and scanning everyone’s private communication is not the solution, and it will never be. Sending unencrypted content can lead to vulnerabilites, and the possibilities of false-positive detections are huge, which did happen before with someone’s Google account. Google falsely flagged a completely appropriate image a parent has uploaded of their children as CSAM, shutting their account down and reporting them to the police. Even though the police confirmed there was nothing wrong with the image, Google never gave back access to the account.
Thankfully a few days ago, Germany has stood against the proposal, cancelling the upcoming vote that would take place on October 14th. And with that Chat Control is off the table, right? Well, yes and no. This current proposal is surely gone now, but there is nothing stopping them from proposing a different law under a different name, using different excuses with the same goal in mind, to ruin everyone’s privacy, therefore also invading their human rights. This is exactly why it is important to stay vigilant. They have done this many times now, with many different excuses. And now they chose this excuse, and it seems to spread globally. It isn’t just the EU that is doing this, the UK and some US states are doing similar stuff. We can never know when this wave of privacy invasions will end, if it even will that is.
I just want to thank everyone who fought against mass surveillance once again, and will fight against it in the future. The world has gone through a lot of development to achieve the ability for you to preserve your fundamental human rights. Let’s not give them away that easily.