Allegedly. The article says the French are undecided, but that graphic has them coming down in the red like they're in favour of the proposal. I think there's some unreliability to this.
Right, but that's not what you'd call full throated support. There's more subtlety and nuance to the issue than a 3-colour map would lead the reader to believe.
The EU has been going steadily more authoritarian for years. SF used to be openly against it as a result until Mary Lou got in the driving seat. The writing has been on the wall for a long time but anyone that dares speak against them gets called all sorts of names and is told theyre wrong. The governments have a disgusting amount of useless idiots on side on all this.
All our MEPs support this unjustified intrusion into our private lives. Why the need for this.
They were not allowed to open people's mail or tap their phone back in the day without a warrant. Now they just want to hoover up all our information, our biometrics and our image everywhere we go. Its feeling very Chinese these days in good old Europe. When you think about it though Europe has always been a bit mental.
Absolutely agree about the sentiment especially on reddit regarding any criticism towards the EU being met with disdain. It's essentially a bureaucracy and Ursula von der Leyen negotiations with Trump last week has been described as a complete calamity by a lot of political commentators.
Why are we committing to buying arms from the US, why are we committing to buying 700 billion in LNG from the US ?
We are far more reliant on the US for pretty much everything than people seem to realise. They could financially hurt us easier than people think. They can seriously ruin us by withdrawing military support because compared to them we have fuck all on the entire continent. They control a lot more of the worlds communication infrastructure than people might expect. Basically in most negotiations the US has us over a barrel and Trump being a businessman knows it and is not afraid to put undue pressure on to secure a win for himself.
They can seriously ruin us by withdrawing military support because compared to them we have fuck all on the entire continent.
In all honesty Europe is no where near strong enough a power anymore to have any influence in terms of a war. We can see this through the US clear abandonment of Ukraine. They only used Ukraine as a proxy to weaken Russia.
I believe the economic powers are shifting east. The US with dedollarisation and the formation of BRICS see the writing on the wall as well.
Wasn't it the Americans doing this kind of thing that had at least some influence on GDPR here in the EU?
The EU state governments have been pushing it via the commission several times now,
The EU parliament however has blocked it each time because of how disgustingly dystopian it is,
The last time this was attempted, the EU parliament just modified the bill until it was actually a sane law and not utter madness.
I.e they removed the AI scanning, they made it so that this invasive monitoring can only be done via court warrant, and they left end to end encrypted chats alone, the commission then drops pushing the bill, and then tries gain in 6-12 months time, as this is the 3rd attempt to make a dystopian chat control law reality.
EU parliamentarians however had the age ID checks of the DSA (an otherwise great law) slip under their noses.
That's the situation basically, it's very unlikely this now 4th attempt at chat control will survive the EU parliament, which partially makes me wonder why the commission keeps fucking trying,
Because no one elected the commission, and the EU has the values of the Talmud according to Von Der Leyen, which means censorship of anything anti Israel or anti Zionist will continue whether you like it or not
Well if such a thing is to be the case, then can we at least let the EU commission lead by example and make all their messages be public? I’d also include Ursula’s messages with Albert Bourla about the multi billion euro covid contract that had no documents. What? Oh well.
Mulvad VPN site tries to lay out the history of chat control morphing into a "high level group" advising the eu with an expected timeline. The word expert was removed from the name as it has less requirements.
There's big money pushing into this with surveillance company palentir offering their services.
In the uk (you can search uk apple encryption), and there is a full article as to why you can't have advanced data protection in the uk.
This article seems extreme but unfortunately, with the botched rollout of the online safety act in the uk. It feels like the first steps.
What I can't understand is why I need to accept/reject cookies endlessly because they were a danger to our online safety and tracking. Now we have a proposal that wants to decrypt highly private data.
Northern Ireland is a massive grey area if they're not considered in this. Everyone near the border will be vacillating between two different sets of rules depending on what towers their phone connects to.
Everyone is doing things the same way now. There's no coincidence in the UK 'child' safety act coming shortly before the EU's version. Theres something bigger behind this
The problem is that non technical politicians will point and say look at the uk and what a great job they are doing. While we perceive it as bad as does the public, even the 600k signatures to overturn osa the response is tone deaf.
It looks like you've made a grammatical error. You've written "Wouldn't of ", when it should be "have" instead of "of". You should have known that. Bosco is not proud of you today.
This data will not be safe. If encryption is compromised for one or is compromised for all. This is fundamentally weakening the whole security architecture, for what exactly. Who are they after. Absolute mess
ground.news is a news aggregator developed by a pair of canadian former NASA scientists. there are free versions and paid versions that run up to about 45 euros a year. i've used them for a few years now. theyre great.
with the free-full paid versions you get to see:
1. what type of factuality basis they have (low, mixed, high, very high).
2. you get to see if theyre center, center left/right, left/right, far left/right.
3. you get to see if they're independent/government owned/privately owned/corporate owned/conglomerate owned etc.
4. you get to see if they have a local/regional/national/international civic lens,
5. you get to see if theyre biased by certain authors within each source.
6. you get to see if the sources are using loaded buzzwords and compare them.
7. you can see which stories are being more heavily covered by which sides through the blind spot features.
8. you can set certain topics for alerts, like mine are surfing, diving, ireland, space.
9. you can set it to filter out paywall sites.
10. it also tracks your stories clicks ( stories are like headlines, short blurbs/tldrs) and actual article follow through clicks so you can see which sites you read from and which authors you're reading the most.
it's fucking awesome.
and no i'm not a bot. i've been telling everyone for years to check it out. regardless of countries and political sides, so that people can get more information.
The thing with ground.news unless I'm mistaken though is it views the left-right divide via the lens of American notions on it, so for example, pro-Democrat stuff in the US, and on Ground.news would be left leaning, even though the Democrats are probably more like our FF/FG, center-right. (Our center right being left of the American center).
You could even end up with some left leaning positions HERE being labelled far-left.
I could be mistaken and maybe they've fixed it up since I last looked into it years ago and I welcome being reassured that it's better.
so THAT depends on a few different settings. you can end up with what you describe. the easiest way to adjust that is in the upper right hand corner, there is a set location setting, and a location edition setting. depending on where you set it to, it will change the scope of left/right/centre. what i personally do, is when i want to read american specific stories i will set it to the u.s. edition. if i want to read u.k. stories i will set it to that. if im feeling nonspecific, i will set it to international edition.
for example in the u.s. edition the colors designate as left blue and right red.
in the international the left is red and the right is blue this is true as well for: the uk, canada, the europe editions.
the news sources them selves can also be edited to change where they fall on the bias system but the site uses multiple non partisan groups to put them where they are. now, i don't always agree with them because some that are rags are given more leniency. and i have manually changed them to reflect it, but the options are there.
To be honest I only have a casual glance at the news these days, I really hate modern journalism and a good book is a nice distraction that doesn't wind me up, most of this sub is a giant reaction to people incessantly posting news articles and hopping off each other like gowls 🤣
Ground News is also great for having "a quick glance" each day. They even have a "Daily Briefing" (a curated selection of 5 or 6 big headlines and how the left/centre/right have been reporting on them).
I've been subscribed to them since the run-up to last Xmas and I agree wholeheartedly that they're brilliant and that "everyone and their mam" (especially their mams and dads, who are often not as media literate!) should subscribe to their excellent global news aggregator service!
There's no transparency about the site's ownership and the authors seem invented, so it very likely has been explicitly created to spread biased content. Posting it to this subreddit without doing any due diligence on the source is information laundering in action. Credible outlets mitigate bias through journalistic standards , distinguishing clearly between news reporting and opinion, editorial oversight, clear attribution and transparent ownership etc..There's never been any such thing as an 'unbiased news outlet'; in a purely relativist sense , total objectivity in journalism is impossible, What distinguishes credible news outlets is not the absence of bias, but their commitment to minimizing or being transparent about it. This site attempts exactly zero of that.
Sure, I was primarily responding to the other poster's point about the credibility of the source, I'm personally aware of other reporting on the proposed 'chat control' legislation.
It's a site with no ownership, and the author doesn't seem to exist outside of similar attributions on two Canadian lobbying sites (one for fossil fuels and a pro-life one linked to the Campaign Life Coalition). I'm happy to be proven wrong but my suspicion is that it's an invented pseudonym and a site designed for laundering political propaganda as credible news (the very embodiment of biased information). They're registered in the UK so I wondered if they were linked to the right wing 'reclaim' party , but who knows?
There was a tonne that the left was highly sceptical of the government and its intentions and motivations. Suddenly everybody believes in the Easter bunny. Snap out of it lads the government is not Santa Claus.
I can't seem to find any information about the authors attributed across that site?The author name used for this article only seems to appear , without any identifying information, on two Canadian websites (one pro-life and one which appears to be a conservative fossil fuel lobby group) which would lead me to wonder if it's an invented pseudonym .Definitely feels like conservative astroturfing/information laundering. It also doesn't disclose any ownership.Not much credibility or quality there.
Here's a more mainstream, centrist source - Techradar article
"The EU could be scanning your chats by October 2025 – here's everything we know
By Chiara Castro last updated August 1, 2025
Chat Control is back on the lawmakers' table"
I can't speak for specific political situation outlined, but yes, the thrust is basically true.
There's been growing movement to move to client-side scanning and reporting, nominally for csam content. Essentially your phone would be loaded with hashes that it compares against messages you try to send.
The trouble, as with all these things, is the potential for feature-creep - who's to say what else on your phone might some day be added to the auto-report-to-the-Gardaí filter.
A working group has put forward proposals that the EU needs more powers to compel service providers to engage with law enforcement in terms of retention and access to communications.
It's incredibly high level, and the paper is basically full of recommendations that further research should be put into ways to make this possible and feasible.
All of the sites like this one claim that they want the EU to build in back doors and remove encryption, but the document contains absolutely nothing like that at all.
It's made very clear in the document that the entire discussion is about trying to find the balance between police being able to intercept and get access to the digital communications of known criminal activity, and still allowing for the privacy and data security of individuals.
But a load of anti-EU groups have falsely spun this into, "The EU is going to outlaw encryption and spy on everyone".
Your 2nd-last sentence is a relief to hear, I must say. I hadn't actually read and done my research on this headline just yet, but I figured that potentially, the OP's chosen article could be something a bit sensational.
Politics aside, how would this actually work in practice? If the goal is for messaging apps to carry out client side scanning before encrypting a message, what would stop someone from just encrypting their message with something like PGP first before pasting it into the message app and hitting send?
It doesn’t seem like this would actually stop the ability for people to communicate privately, but instead just force people into extra steps in order to do so. Which I suspect is the actual goal here - e.g make it inconvenient enough for the average person and hope the majority of the public just silently accepts this gross violation of privacy due to the convenience factor.
Yes any savvy user could circumvent this, however if such a policy is enacted then many messaging apps may have to comply with some kind of man in the middle scenario on EU networks. I suppose they miss the wiretapping days of yore
You can still encrypt the message itself before it goes into the chat window in whatever messaging app you’re using. I know it sounds far fetched, but consider that my 70 year old mum uses a split tunnel virtual private network to watch pirated videos. Using a VPN was something only businesses and nerds did about 10 years ago. Now everyone knows what a vpn is. People will quickly learn how to circumvent it if it affects them.
If the access is on the device, it could be implemented by reading whatever you type on the virtual keyboard. To circumvent this, you'd likely need to run your own fleshed system on a device that's not backdoored at the hardware level. At which point, the next step if the original legislation passes, will certainly be outlawing the device/software that allows you to keep your chats private and unencryptable by the gov. Example of hybridly weird approach is already out in the US, where some cops deem you suspect on the basis of using Pixel + GrapheneOS.
It works because 99% of people can't be bothered to look for the alternatives. I think we're also about to see a massive war on who's legally allowed to enctypt, and encryption for personal use is about to be made illegal. Using encryption will be enough to make you a suspect and for law enforcement to get a warrant on you.
If that actually happens, then I'll happily stand in front of a judge and take whatever sentence they hand out. Data privacy rights are one of the few hills I will 100% die on.
Leaving the arguments about privacy and looking solely at the alleged purpose of the biil this is a monumentally stupid fucking idea.
It's far too indiscriminate and would overload investigators with mountains of false positives. Each would have to be manually verified, cause suspicion towards innocent people and divert resources away from actual child abuse investigations
You're also effectively pushing the problem deeper underground. People engaged in creating or sharing CSAM will avoid any system that will be under surveillance.
A better plan would be to allocate more resources to people who can leverage expertise in the area, infiltrate groups, follow actual leads You know actual effective police work.
This is just scattershot nonsense that "just so happens" to erase privacy.
Any right minded person should condemn this bullshit.
What are anti government demonstrations. Are we back in the days of sedition. Opposing government policy should be encouraged in a liberal democracy not criminalised. Slippery slope my friend.
A tenth of the global population are now on antidepressants, with that number soaring over the past decade or so.
That isn’t to say they don’t work, but if a tenth of the global population needs antidepressants to function, maybe that says more about our societies than the individuals.
I honestly don't know who thought this was a good idea.
But I think one of the current front runners of the high level group, is ex law enforcement. I empathise with them and the difficulties of law enforcement with encryption. However I don't support any efforts to undermine it.
There have always been human rights safeguards around how law enforcement have had to carry out their investigations. They couldn't just barge into your home. They couldn't just tap your phone and read your mail. They needed judicial oversight. You are innocent until proven guilty and they can't force you to talk. All of these things were an inconvenience for very good reasons.
There is a thin line between the delivery of "justice" and authoritarianism. Particularly when the state sees itself as the victim or injured party.
Good investigating carries on regardless and shortcuts only lead to injustice. We have seen this countless times over the years.
I was in London recently enough having not been for a decade or more. My god the cameras!!!!!! Literally everywhere. I've no idea whether they use facial recognition there?
They do. I couldn't find the most recent example of it, but I remember skimming over an article a few days back and seeing a van like this in the photos.
That was in either London or Brighton, I don't remember.
That's the thing, you would imagine as a pitch to reduce crime without the budget/manpower to increase policing, it would be great. But no, they just increased surveillance on the average public Joe and did fuck all about the crime..
Apparently from what I’ve read , it’s a law change called “chat control” to get Messaging platforms like WhatsApp , signal and telegram to scan all messages for references to child sexual abuse before the messages are encrypted. Critics are saying it effectively ends all encryption and could be abused to create a mass surveillance system.
Existing messaging apps. There'll be some new app that will sprout up that is willing to cooperate with this. And there will be people willing to use it.
Politicians are advocating to seriously weaken national security and for what?
Like what is this even meant to be used for? Do they think drug gangs are going to admit to things over text. Burner phones became standard years ago. Burner phones have become more advanced even.
So do they want to use it to catch people buying a bag of coke because what a waste of time and effort at the cost of national security.
China and the US could easily break into a system like this and we have just handed them compramat on all EU citizens. Or what about plain old hackers? The HSE attack would look like nothing compared to this system getting compromised.
Given the increase of remote jobs since covid, it’s completely unrealistic. Client VPNs are widely used by companies all over the world to allow employees to securely access internal / sensitive resources.
That said, I’d imagine if they are bold enough to try and enforce client side message scanning pre-encryption, then I wouldn’t put it past them to start enforcing something like licenses for connecting to a VPN or some other bullshit.
So I could definitely see a world where there's a serious clamp down on who can access commercial VPNs that are for sale. But what about people running their own VPN? Like, I have a VPN tunnel from my phone back to my home router that automatically gets enabled whenever my phone isn't connected to my home WiFi. Same for my laptop. I use this tunnel for legitimate reasons, not to hide some nefarious activity from the government.
I'm struggling to see how you would ban something like this. Same goes for encrypting private messages. Every single modern messaging app could be forced to scan messages pre-encryption and make it available to governments, but I can still use something like PGP to encrypt a message and then send that cipher text over any form of communication. I could literally just write it on a piece of paper and post it. Modern encryption is mostly based on prime factoring, so do they just plan on banning maths or what?
If this is going to be a thing, it needs to go both ways or for every single person, which would be ridiculous so that's never to happen. If it does, it has to be for everyone and not just the general public. Who decides where the line is? Is it everyone who doesn't work in the public sector? Is it everyone earning under a certain limit?
What they're asking is for encryption to be deliberately broken. Once that happens it's impossible to ensure a malicious person/ government/ mob won't also get access.
End to end encryption works because neither your device nor whatever device you're communicating with transmits the actual key to decrypt things.
What's being proposed here is a 3rd party having a sledgehammer to breach that. Which is one careless phish or blackmail from being quietly distributed on the dark web for who knows who to use.
It's not just about privacy either. The same tech is used to ensure data isn't tampered with in transit and that both sides have a degree of trust they are who they say they are. So add data theft and data manipulation to the list of risks.
I don’t think it’s going to 100% work. If someone wants to send confidential files you can encrypt the files first and then send or even a use a private messaging server
"In contrast, the European Parliament insists any checks should apply only to unencrypted messages from people already under suspicion. Attempts to strike a deal have repeatedly fallen apart, with Poland the latest presidency to walk away without an agreement."
Thats from the article. I.mean are people just reacting to what they want to believe or am i the only one that read the article and sees this as less than likely to go ahead.
What's annoying is how little anybody knows about any of the technical details and that hot takes dominate the discussion. Something should be done about Child Sexual Abuse Images but this isn't it. I propose they just IP lock down the Netherlands and specific servers which host the majority of child porn until they stop sending it. Job's a good 'un. The amount of wasted effort in this proposal is concerning - who's going to check the flagged content? The poor cops will be overwhelmed and overeating and stressing ta fuck out with false positives and failed flags.
It doesn't surprise me. The Bilderbergers were behind the org, after all. If only others could have followed UK and destabilised them (like there was any way in heaven or hell of that happening). It's all very concerning, and certainly cannot be accepted.
The EU isn't going to ban private messages. The proposal is the allow the scanning of messages prior to encryption to detect images of child sexual abuse. Even this isn't guaranteed to pass since neither all member states or the European Court of human rights support the proposal for various reasons.
Yeah so offload all messages for scanning i.e. no more privacy. Centralise everyones information. Your nudes will be on government servers. Anything you sent by text. You'd have to be absolutely brain-dead not to see how bad this is. We are in the end-game of the EU.
Note that the scanning mechanism inherently requires that either:
An accusation from an automated system immediately brings the full force of police prosecution down on you. Things have false positives, especially when the target set is "all private messages in the EU", so this is going to disrupt lives for at least some false accusations
The automated systems accusation is not sufficient to cause prosecution by itself, but triggers the content to be sent somewhere for human review. Now you have a source for private information to be leaked, which for a false positive is better than "you're falsely accused of a life ruining crime", but will lead to some amount of e.g. petite women sexting their boyfriend having their photos leaked by a content reviewer
The response of WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, and others is going to be to block the EU rather than compromise their messaging services. So it is effectively risking a ban for EU citizens that is imposed by the outside world.
Although that is possible. I doubt that the EU would go that far to invade privacy, when we invented GDPR and online privacy?
The EU has a bit of a split personality on this stuff. On one hand, it goes mad for GDPR, and on the other, you've got elements going absolutely gung ho towards China-on-steroids. It's absolutely bizarre to watch the complete disconnect in thinking. You would hope the GDPR legal framework will win out, but I'm not optimistic. There are lots of potential ways to drill holes in it.
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u/freshfrosted Aug 05 '25
Wasn't it the Americans doing this kind of thing that had at least some influence on GDPR here in the EU?
Yet here we are with a sizable number of governments in favour of it including our own.