EU officials are, incidentally, exempt from chat monitoring – which is quite convenient for someone like von der Leyen. Their communication is explicitly NOT to be monitored. The mere fact that those who drafted this law don't want it to apply to them tells you everything you need to know about it.
These pathetic morons think they'll be safe through this exemption. In reality these deliberate security holes will affect everyone. How will these morons be safe when every person they have contact with IRL is a walking microphone for every foreign intelligence agency?
So you're telling me the one person who's been making deals behind closed doors (illegal), and then 'accidentally' deleting all messages regarding said deals (also illegal) will be exempt from having all their communication scanned?
people miss the most important problem with this. chat control is a fascist tool that can and will be used against us minorities. this is especially dangerous when more and more countries are starting to lean right.
hitler would have had a field day with this kind of tech.
misleading headline, this isn't a list of countries in which the law will (if it passes) be different (it won't be, it's an EU law, so will be the same in all EU countries), it's a list of countries that currently support/oppose the law
And here I was thinking the EU was winning its fight against authoritarianism. Guess nowhere is safe, everyone's gotta push back no matter where you are. Fucking exhausting that they can't just leave us the fuck alone.
We are embracing authoritarianism everywhere. Democracies are dying.
Politicians are not ignorant of the risks; as the article mentions, they had several advisors, including scientists, who warned of the danger. If our leaders didn't know it, they wouldn't exclude themselves from the proposal.
Sociopaths will be sociopaths. They'll continue saying that protesting and violece are never the answer, while eroding our basic rights and ignoring all pushback.
I'm missing a bit the fact that this is not a law yet. This is the position of the commission, which the parliament will then need to approve and has to get past the ECHR as well most likely.
Everyone who originally proposed this or otherwise helped in drafting this should be thoroughly investigated under suspicion of foreign affiliation. Chat Control doesn't just start the EU's transformation into a surveillance state. It also weakens its digital defenses. No matter how you look at it, this is treason both towards the European people, as well as towards the individual countries and the Union as a whole.
Dear mods, watch what you remove from these chats, our freedoms are getting fucked, people should be allowed to be indignant.
That being said i hope the legislators sit on cacti all day every day, those fucking assholes are exempt from this bullshit.
They will take my data out of my cold dead hands. It was a matter of time, sure, but I was actually holding on to hope for this one. I am pissed, dismayed even.
Session, signal, simplex are your friends. If those give up the ghost and bend the knee then we are going back to irc and aliases. Fucking shit!
The act also requires platforms – including end-to-end encrypted message providers – to scan for child pornography and terrorism content, which experts say is not possible to implement without undermining users' privacy.
I thought making calls and sending SMS was one of the least secure things you could do regarding communication? That secure and encrypted communication with messaging apps was the only way.
For years the plan was to make this scanning mandatory. In early November 2025, however, the Danish government amended the text: scanning is now “voluntary” for individual EU states to decide upon. That small word change was enough for the 27 EU countries to agree on November 26.
If chat control would have been made mandatory, you can bet (and i'd be willing to bet a lot of money on it) that you're going to have AfD in germany and FPÖ in austria (since they're already pretty anti-EU) making a lot of noise about how evil the EU is for infringing on people's privacy. (And they would be right about this, as much as i don't like to agree with them.) This would give them more votes, than they already have.
Making it voluntary is a clever trick of the EU to not make yourself extremely unpopular among the population. Well done, i'd say.
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