Chat Control approved: Certain EU countries will see your private messages. Is yours on the list?
Chat Control: EU will see your private messages
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.
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
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..
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.
If they work anything like the far right in the U.S., they’ll raise hell about it til they get elected then implement it themselves.
That's weird, our fascists in France are all against privacy, unless it's theirs.
Is there something we can do to effectively oppose that shit ?
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
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?
"This list is outdated, see here fightchatcontrol.eu"
Fuck, only 4 are against
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.
Wow, this is bad. I thought this was over when Germany chose not to support it. Apparently not!
Show is not over until the fat lady sings.
If this came to Canada, my sister and I will be using Briar.
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.
I thought it was the latter.
In that case, is there any change? Companies could already do that if they wanted. Many of them already did.
just use signal
Ita not said they wont comply with eh standards
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.
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.
Not even Signal saves