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Chat Control Must Be Stopped

privacyguides.org

11–20 of 272 posts

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#11
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you follow the link for "Chat Control" in the first sentence, and then scroll down for a while, you will find a subsection titled "What Is Chat Control". Probably they assume that if you do not know what it is, you should not care about it. From that section: > "In 2021, the EU approved a derogation to the ePrivacy Directive to allow communication service providers to scan all exchanged messages to detect child se…

right and if you read that subsection, it does not tell you what Chat Control is. which I find odd. it just goes on about how bad it is (after making an analogy earlier about police entering my home every morning). am I missing the explanation in the article of what Chat Control actually is? the article also explicitly says it affects non-Europeans. I’m interested! I just can’t figure out what it is

The other page I was referring to does have some more detail: https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/02/03/the-future...

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#12
Some thoughts if you have them, are illegal to express, even in private, for your own consumption. This is the law that means none of our devices or possessions are protected from snooping.

You have a tough challenge to convince me it’s anything other than a mundane device to give some groups an information advantage over others in their own society, for the unfair pursuit of political and economic advantage.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#13
post #3

it would be great if this article actually explained what Chat Control is somewhere at the top. it says it will, but I’m quite a few paragraphs in and have no idea what I’m supposed to be mad about yet

A bit of a scroll past the probably justified but still alarmism is the actually bad proposal. > The most recent proposal for Chat Control comes from the EU Council Danish presidency pushing for the regulation misleadingly called the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR). Despite its seemingly caring name, this regulation will not help fight child abuse, and will even likely worsen it, impacting negatively what is alr…

ah this is the relevant piece, which I did skim over given I was getting annoyed at paragraph after paragraph not telling me what it is:

> Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material."

thanks!

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#14
Looking at the long list of faces for my country, it boggles my mind how all these people are fine letting the police just scan their phone, photos, messages at will, as if they don't have significant others or medical pictures on their phones, including of their children.

Do they think they're above it? Are they stupid and don't know what they vote for?

I do not understand.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#15

> Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material." I wonder why there has been such silence on this, with the exception of a handful of well written blog posts. The scop…

Having the service provider handle the encryption is very convenient for the users. And, it turns out, the government.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#16
post #14

Looking at the long list of faces for my country, it boggles my mind how all these people are fine letting the police just scan their phone, photos, messages at will, as if they don't have significant others or medical pictures on their phones, including of their children. Do they think they're above it? Are they stupid and don't know what they vote for? I do not understand.

I do.

Are you going to the the "pedo" that is against protecting the children and catching predators?

I know it's diseingenuous but these laws are crafted with that in mind.

People that might take a real chance in challenging this are weeded out long before they get to these positions.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#17
post #14

Looking at the long list of faces for my country, it boggles my mind how all these people are fine letting the police just scan their phone, photos, messages at will, as if they don't have significant others or medical pictures on their phones, including of their children. Do they think they're above it? Are they stupid and don't know what they vote for? I do not understand.

From Patrick Brewer's analysis [0] it seems like written into the proposal is to enable members of the government to have access to excepted systems, if applied for things like law enforcement or "national security." If I had to guess, at least a few MEPs expect they will be able to use such an exemption for their personal communications.

[0] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#18

> Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material." I wonder why there has been such silence on this, with the exception of a handful of well written blog posts. The scop…

Big tech would be for this -- it would create a huge moat in terms of costly and complicated compliance overhead that would keep small challengers and startups out.

Complicated or costly regulation is a regressive tax -- it affects smaller companies a lot more than larger ones and tends to prevent new entrants to a market.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#19

> Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material." I wonder why there has been such silence on this, with the exception of a handful of well written blog posts. The scop…

We've been mostly deplatformed for any kind of organized action against it, there's just writing an email to your MEP or... a change.org petition. Yes really. Nothing official one could sign their name under.

But even so, the commission does whatever it wants anyway, they are complete autocrats when it comes to law proposal, it's up to the parliament and the courts to something about it afterwards. And they should given that it's unconstitutional in many EU countries and incompatible with GDPR as it currently exists.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#20
Questions for people who have used phones in China:

How hard is it to disable the state spyware on a phone you buy there?

Can you buy a phone from outside China, put in a Chinese SIM card, and do everything over a VPN? Or will they shut down your connection?

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