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EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

patrick-breyer.de

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Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#341

Post by mort96 »

megous wrote: post #284
topranks wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but messaging apps are really only useful if there are lots of people on them to message. So in the real world a relatively small number of providers, WhatsApp, Signal etc, are in a position where all your friends are going to be on them. And those are the ones likely to be named and told they need to implement image scanning/review.

Messaging protocols are useful even if everyone is not on the same app. In the past I was chatting with my google using friend via some third party jabber server where I had an account. It was useful and didn't require us to be "in the same app". We both were using both different apps and different server providers.

> In the past

Exactly. That time is mostly over.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#342

Post by Ekaros »

Krssst wrote: post #167
logicchains wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>While the EU is not perfect and surely needs improvement in many areas, it is still better than not having it. Would you still believe this if Chat Control got though? What good did the EU bring that's good enough to make up for the badness of everyone in Europe having all their private digital communications constantly scanned?

If Chat Control gets through, it means the Parliament approved it, which means the EU people voted for politicians that supported the idea. If the EU got dismantled, the same politicians would be elected (they won once why not twice) and do it again at the local level. (though, maybe not in every country)

Well I have gotten the feeling that MEPs are those that do not make it on country level... Still, doesn't mean that they don't in general follow what their own political parties want.

Which is why the whole idea of political parties is the main travesty of the fake democracy they promote to enforce their own goals over population.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#343

Post by thrance »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #120
gib444 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does any country or bloc need to learn lessons about "falling behind" the US? Why is that the yard stick? I certainly don't spend all day dreaming of F150s, McMansions, the psychopaths leading silicon valley, 9 lane highways, US style PE, and world-class fascist politicians such as Trump Dear lord

A couple of decades ago both France and Britain had higher per capita GDP than the US. Now they are significantly behind. Similarly top European companies used to rival American companies in profitability, power and valuation. There’s not really an equivalent of FAANG/ NVIDIA in Europe, just ASML and LVMH.

We French still get higher life expectancy, more free time, free education and healthcare... GDP per Capita is a terrible metric.

Not claiming that everything's sunshine and rainbows over here, but at least we aren't ruled by a proto fascist pedo actively ridding the country of its democratic institutions and destroying public service after public service to give more wealth to his pedo friends.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#344

Post by palata »

moniosi wrote: post #189

The common fallacy people have regarding chat control (and should be clarified) is that it's not like internet is made of a few select providers, anyone can open an encrypted tcp connection from an ip to another, and the global traffic is too massive to be scrutinized, also the most widely available apps already comply to the single police request to access conversations from suspects. This means that this will creat…

> it's not like internet is made of a few select providers

In practice it is. Almost all messaging happens on a few apps.

> also the most widely available apps already comply to the single police request to access conversations from suspects

That is not true: Signal is widely available and doesn't do that. WhatsApp probably doesn't do it either.

Don't get me wrong: I am against ChatControl as well. I believe that security comes at the cost of freedom, and it is a choice to be made on a case-per-case basis. Removing E2EE for everybody is not worth it, because criminals will always be able to use encryption one way or another. The problem is that politicians don't seem to understand it.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#345

Post by drnick1 »

basisword wrote: post #5
blfr wrote: post #2

First, why does the EU leadership refuse to learn from falling behind the US economically and technologically, most starkly with AI recently, and their failures in regulating the Internet, most annoyingly the cookie law? And why aren't you, the EU citizen, more annoyed by it? I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship. Second, what's up with Denmmark pushing for…

European here. I like the cookie law. It's made it clear to people how much we're being tracked and I can choose to opt out. The implementation could of course be better but the real issue is the scummy web devs choosing to make it as annoying as possible instead of taking the more sensible decision to not have 150 trackers on every page. >> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tec…

> European here. I like the cookie law. It's made it clear to people how much we're being tracked and I can choose to opt out.

Opting out of cookies does not mean no tracking. Tracking companies moved away from cookies a decade ago and now fingerprint the browser through JS in very subtle ways.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#346

Post by palata »

logicchains wrote: post #109
GTP wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the EU is not perfect and surely needs improvement in many areas, it is still better than not having it. This is why you see a lot of pro-EU content: many people here (myself included) are of the opinion that the EU needs to be improved, not dismantled.

>While the EU is not perfect and surely needs improvement in many areas, it is still better than not having it. Would you still believe this if Chat Control got though? What good did the EU bring that's good enough to make up for the badness of everyone in Europe having all their private digital communications constantly scanned?

> What good did the EU bring

The EU is pushing the member countries e.g. regarding climate change. Not that it is enough, but it is something.

Also the EU tries to do some privacy stuff, antitrust (when it doesn't get bullied by the US), etc.

I feel like ChatControl is really about some lobbyists making a lot of noise and politicians not competent to understand how cryptography works. People say "that's because the ruling class wants surveillance over the citizens", but I believe it's incompetence. Just like the "ruling class" doesn't want to screw humanity by not addressing climate change and the current mass extinction: they are just not competent enough to understand the problem.

And that's the reflection of the people who elect them. Go in the street and ask random people what they understand about E2EE. In good approximation, they have no idea how it works. Worse: they don't give a damn. How would they elect people who are competent about it?

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#347

Post by wolvoleo »

palata wrote: post #344
moniosi wrote: post #189

The common fallacy people have regarding chat control (and should be clarified) is that it's not like internet is made of a few select providers, anyone can open an encrypted tcp connection from an ip to another, and the global traffic is too massive to be scrutinized, also the most widely available apps already comply to the single police request to access conversations from suspects. This means that this will creat…

> it's not like internet is made of a few select providers In practice it is. Almost all messaging happens on a few apps. > also the most widely available apps already comply to the single police request to access conversations from suspects That is not true: Signal is widely available and doesn't do that. WhatsApp probably doesn't do it either. Don't get me wrong: I am against ChatControl as well. I believe that sec…

They do understand it but what they want is not just criminals' data but all of us.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#348

Post by cosmic_cheese »

consensus1 wrote: post #338
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that bot mitigation is nearly the ordeal that the social media giants pose it to be, so long as the desired result is keeping such activity minimized (practical) and not entirely eliminated (impossible), especially in this era of increasingly capable lightweight language models. Taking Xitter as an example, there are many tells that are visible even to readers with limited info that should be as plain a…

Bot detection in the case where the activity is not human like e.g. spam, is quite easy to detect. But the problem here is that a foreign influence bot is not like that at all. It is designed to act like a human. And the areas that foreign bots attack are also political issues that the domestic population cares about, so you can't really filter by content either. You could still mitigate this by blocking accounts tha…

Following the earlier example of Xitter, there are loads of accounts that are obvious bots or foreign propaganda outfits to anybody who's been using the site for a while, complete with a reasonably good litmus test: whenever you suspect a post is from one of these, check the posting account's location. For me the accounts that raise internal red flags are almost always posting from SE Asia, somewhere in Africa, Russia, etc.

That means their content and profile quirks follow clear patterns that are not that difficult to distinguish. Xitter just has no financial or legal incentive to do so.

> I don't really get you point about removing surveillance style ad tech. Wouldn't that just make it even harder to detect foreign influence accounts?

The difference is the invasiveness of the data gathered and who it's given to. For bot/troll/propaganda mitigation, invasiveness is comparably minimal (survelliance advertising isolates marketable qualities such as race, orientation, religion, marital status, purchasing habits, etc; none of these are necessary for mitigation) and gathered data never needs to leave the possession of the social network.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#349

Post by wolvoleo »

tokai wrote: post #46
iamnothere wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Denmark’s recent reasonableness is somewhat of a historical aberration if you look at their history. The migrant crisis (and the failure of governments to address it) has stirred up some ugly things there.

What do you mean the migrant crisis stirred up things? The anti immigration position in danish politics has been a winning position since the mid 00's.

Yeah they are really racist, sorry but I have no other way of putting it. They even have a law where they can evict and destroy a building when there's "too many" non-western immigrants living there. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/18/denmark-ghetto...

Hungary is often called out as a black sheep but Denmark is a wolf in sheep's clothes.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#350

Post by wolvoleo »

miohtama wrote: post #269
kachurovskiy wrote: post #63

Instead of the usual knee-jerk it would be nice to see some level-header analysis on mechanics of these things - who pays for the time of the people that decide to push this particular piece of legislation, how they manage to get into the door, who personally makes the proposal, how they gather support for it.

Robert Metsola met Ashton Kutcher (co-founder of Thorn, which develops message scanning tech) in March 2023 and posted a photo on Instagram. Kutcher lobbied MEPs hard in favour of strong detection measures.

The same Kutcher who had to step down because he supported a rapist who happened to be his friend.
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