Chat Control approved: Certain EU countries will see your private messages. Is yours on the list?
EU governments have finally agreed on a controversial new law that gives a backdoor to reading text messages and viewing photo messages
Countries which support the implementation of Chat Control:
Spain, Romania, Portugal, Malta Lithuania, Hungary, Ireland, France, Denmark, Croatia, Cyprus, and Bulgaria.
Countries that are undecided:
Belgium, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Slovakia, and Sweden.
Countries which oppose Chat Control:
Slovenia, the Netherlands, Poland, Luxembourg, Germany, Estonia, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Austria
"This list is outdated, see here fightchatcontrol.eu"
Can someone help me understand the likely outcome in countries that implement chat control? Will those governments force Google and Apple to remove apps that do not comply (e.g. Signal) from their official app stores? Will those governments somehow detect users who find workarounds and go after them? I figure most people in those countries will shrug their shoulders and move on with their lives, but how will this impact citizens who do not wish to comply?
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
It isn't misleading (that'd be a technically true headline, which this isn't). This is a downright lie, or as some might say, "fake news".
(it won't be, it's an EU law, so will be the same in all EU countries)
This is not true btw. It's not a mandatory law, and if you read the news about this the last 3 weeks, you would know that.
EU laws are not automatically mandatory. That's not how it works at all.
The law will be the same in all EU countries, including whichever parts you think will be "not mandatory" (I did read those news articles and am fully aware that mandatory scanning is no longer on the table).
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.
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.
Politicians and cops are THOSE who do this.
Fuck politicians on the right. ACAB, ACAB!
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.
When people rise up: "How dare you destroy property value!"
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.
It also makes what the Stasi in Socialist East Germany did to its citizens look harmless in comparison. It's literally Big Brother, but you carry him around with you.
Is there something we can do to effectively oppose that shit ?
Why? Why is the loss of such a significant amount of privacy necessary?
It isn't it's just an excuse to put people you don't like in some kind of hole where they rot to death.
It isn't necessary.
People will figure out that the war in Ukraine actually started before 2014.
Literally pedophiles.
Allegedly.
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.
The one good thing of brexit: UK isn't beholden to this.
The bad thing is that their own laws aren't much better. And of course all the other brexit bad stuff
From the Online Safety Act Wikipedia page:
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.
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!
It's kind of unclear what "voluntary" means. Is it voluntary for countries to enforce? Is it voluntary for companies to scan chats?
The later. However, they could still be fines for not doing what is needed to reduce "the risks of the of the chat app", whatever the fuck that can mean when talking about illegal.content
Illegal content: anything that they don't like.
Where is this explained? the article might be wrong then, because it does state the opposite:
scanning is now “voluntary” for individual EU states to decide upon
It makes it sound like it's each state/country the one deciding, and that the reason "companies can still be pressured to scan chats to avoid heavy fines or being blocked in the EU" was because of those countries forcing them.
Who's the one deciding what is needed to reduce “the risks of the of the chat app”? if it's each country the ones deciding this, then it's each country who can opt to enforce chat scanning.. so to me that means the former, not the latter.
In fact, isn't the latter already a thing? ...I believe companies can already scan chats voluntarily, as long as they include this in their terms, and many do. A clear example is AI chats.
Not even Signal saves
Matrix would be the best alternative
Wow, this is bad. I thought this was over when Germany chose not to support it. Apparently not!
I believe Germany is now in favor of this new proposal, according to https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
Only Italy, Netherlands, Czech Republic and Poland are against. This seems to be based on "leaked documents from the September 12 meeting of the EU Council's Law Enforcement Working Party".
Show is not over until the fat lady sings.
If this came to Canada, my sister and I will be using Briar.
Now let's hope Parliament will still vote against it.
Caling your MEP is more efficient.
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.
That's weird, our fascists in France are all against privacy, unless it's theirs.
AfD is already #1 party in Germany
It seems the article is misinterpreting things. It's not that it's "voluntary for individual EU states".. but rather "voluntary" for service providers. The service providers don't have to implement this chat detection if they don't want to.
The thing is that if they don't pass something like this, then by April 2026 a bunch of current services that are already doing CP detection would be breaking the law, since the temporary derogation of the e-Privacy Directive will expire. But I don't think this affects services like signal/simplex who voluntarily choose to not try to detect it.
OK I'm getting a flip phone
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.
Now we have nothing. 😐
At least if you just do phone calls the attack surface is reduced... They can scan your calls maybe, but not your entire chat history with all of your contacts and give it to an AI which could profile you based on that + you are not scanned on everything else you do on your phone / locked into proprietary ecosystems.
The ideal would just be using a Linux platform and using something like xmpp, but who are you gonna convince to use it? People use what they are used to use, if it's not popular messaging apps is phone calls.. And now it seems a more private alternative..
Welp guys, looks like I'm moving to [insert country without that sh*t] (TBD). Or atleast my router is.
The implementation is client-side, so this wouldn't work. It forces all apps to have a client-side backdoor.
The thing is.. that even if there are countries publicly rejecting this, once the infrastructure is in place and a backdoor exists due to it being enforced by some other country, how can you be sure it's not being used / exploited?
Even in the (hypothetical) case that the government is not using it (regardless of what they might say to the public), I wouldn't trust that this backdoor would be so secure that nobody else than a government could make use of it.
Every single person that voted in favour must be held on corruption charges. No running free.
just use signal
And when they pull out of Europe because they won't comply?
Or Molly (alternative and more secure FOSS Android app for Signal), or Session or SimpleX.
Ita not said they wont comply with eh standards
