No, this is not 1984 by George Orwell. But we’re getting close to that dystopian world.
The European Union law proposal “Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse”, more commonly known as “EU Chat Control Law” has put a threat on our personal privacy. Why is it important?
- Undermines your fundamental rights to privacy and data protection, as guaranteed by Articles 7 and Articles 8 of the EU Charter.
- Weakening or breaking end-to-end encryption exposes everyone’s communications, this including sensitive financial, medical and private data to hackers or threat actors.
- Insufficient for the target that this law aims to protect, as it weakening the security, children will be more exposed on the digital environment.
- If they decide to use AI (highly possible) for surveillance and control, I’m afraid that the future where human no longer has the freedom to make decision of their own is getting closer.
An ironic twist is that: The EC President Ursula von der Leyen uses disappearing messages in Signal. By doing so, she ensures that her messages are not only encrypted, but also automatically deleted “to prevent possible major data leaks”. Meanwhile, the Commission does not seems to share the same concerns for the citizen. Also wanted to exclude themselves from their own Chat Control Law.
01/10/2025: The head of the Signal app has criticized plans in the EU that would allow messengers to have backdoors to enable automatic searches for criminal content. “It’s unfortunate that politicians continue to fall prey to a kind of magical thinking that assumes you can create a backdoor that only the good guys can access.”1
11/10/2025: The German government has refused to back the Chat Control regulation after facing massive public pressure. A victory for digital freedom but we cannot know what can happen next.2
Resources:
- https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
- https://stopscanningme.eu/
- https://stopchatcontrol.eu/
- https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52022PC0209&from=EN