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 create further privacy for criminals such as pedophiles and mass espionage for the common man.
It's also curious to notice that at every proposal stage, politicians are always conveniently exempt from the regulation, which is hilarious coming after the Files.
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.
> 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.
WhatsApp already does it for unencrypted messages for about half of the EU under the purview of the rules of lawful interception obligations for NI-ICS, as well as Norway, Switzerland and the UK.
When they want to read encrypted messages they seize the phone and use Cellebrite or similar 3rd Party tooling to gain physical user-level access. No need for cert-pinning or esoteric MITM attacks.
N.B. China does not allow WeChat to have e2e encryption.
The whole point of end to end encryption is that providers cannot comply with police request to access conversations. A properly secured system would make it impossible without compromise of your device. Now i don't know what signal does, but I am almost certain WhatsApp can just lie about your contacts keys and man in the middle the connection.
That is misleading, it's a eu parliament thing, it hinges on MEPs votes not countries. At the council level i.e intergovernmental, every one has veto powers, 4 would be enough to stop this for practically ever.
Does governments have any say in this? If not then most MEPs of mentioned countries are too in favor of Chat Control. This is what it says when you click on one of the 4 countries.
EU law 101: (1) EU Commission (i.e. the executive) proposes a law; (2) EU Parliament signs off on it; (3) EU Council (i.e. the equivalent of a senate, comprising national governments) puts the final stamp on it.
The complicating factor being that a given law may or may not require unanimity at the final EU Council stage.
The EU is predicated on the pooled sovereignty of its constituent countries, as exercised thought the EU Council. Apart from a limited number of certain matters, any EU country can veto any decision made by the EU Commission, or indeed the EU Parliament.
This "keep asking until they say yes" strategy is by design and has been a common tactic used by the EU power centers in the past. See the way the Treaty of Lisbon was rejected in referendums, and then people were just made to vote again. Or the way the British pro-EU faction proclaimed in 2016 that Leave/Remain was a once in a generation vote to settle the issue for all time, then immediately started agitating for an aptly named People's Vote that would rerun the referendum again.
The EU is not a democratic system. It's specifically designed to undermine and eventually end the post-WW2 democracies through a mix of deception and bureaucratic manipulation. The never ending Chat Control story is a totally standard example. That's not a conspiracy theory either, there are lots of quotes from senior EU figures where they say all this stuff directly:
> If it's a 'Yes,' we will say "On we go!" and if it's a 'No' we will say "We continue!" (Junker, talking about the votes on the Lisbon Treaty)
> We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided we continue step by step until there is no turning back. (Junker again, on the general EU methodology)
> When people ask politicians today “What will become of Europe?” or “Where is European integration heading?”, we usually give an evasive answer. “We don’t want a super state” that is generally the first thing we say. I must admit that I have in the past often resorted to this kind of thing myself. (Viviane Reading, former vice president)
> We know that nine out of 10 people will not have read the Constitution and will vote on the basis of what politicians and journalists say. More than that, if the answer is No, the vote will probably have to be done again, because it absolutely has to be Yes. (Jean-Luc Dehaene, Former Belgian Prime Minister and Vice-President of the EU Convention)
> I have never understood why public opinion about European ideas should be taken into account. (Raymond Barre, former French Prime Minister)
There are endless quotes like these. You get a sense of the ideology found in the EU institutions by reading them. It's an ideology that never takes no for an answer, believes in its own manifest destiny and views the act of centralizing power as the central moral mission of their generation. So of course Chat Control is an unkillable zombie.
All the quotes are clearly talking about closer integration which no one is hiding is a stated goal of the European Union. It's right there in the original treaties `an ever closer union`. If you don't like it leave, but the rest have all committed to that a long time ago.
The chat control thing has nothing to do with all of the above, it's just a bit of legislation. The whole "we will vote on it again and again until we can finally push it through on the 12th of August at 03:00 o'clock with a total of 20 votes" is a typical strategy seen in many democracies pushed by vested interests on unpopular legislation.
It's not the "EU" that wants this to pass, there are specific people and groups pushing for this surveillance state apparatchiks, all sort of compliance industry vultures, and all the censorship technology industry that is dying to enter the chat market.
I really doubt von der Leyen or anyone in a position of actual power actually cares about this, I am certain they really think this is small time inconsequential bullshit. They have much larger problems to deal with, like the looming jet and diesel shortage, the upcoming crop shortfall we are going to see come harvest season, getting Mercosur through, planning for when Trump inevitably invades Cuba or puts Greenland back on the menu.
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.
You won't get such analysis because the EU law making process is (a) mostly secret and (b) doesn't necessarily follow the process laid out in the treaties, making a lot of discussion purely theoretical. This has been a problem for years. The British pushed back when they were members but no longer.
The EU is increasingly hiding things from journalists, researchers and members of civil society.
Secrecy has a long tradition in the EU, but the European Commission has clearly limited the publicity of its activities during Ursula von der Leyen’s second presidency.
The commission’s new Rules of Procedure significantly limit what counts as an official document. They authorise withholding and destroying information even after a request for access has been made. The commission has, on flimsy grounds, concealed legal documents and files related to the regulation of technology giants, among other things.
It is now almost impossible to monitor how the EU uses its power, for example, in relation to large platform companies.
The EU never improves. A decade ago the same complaints were being made:
Secret EU law making reached a high in 2016 that has only been matched once before, according to figures obtained by EUobserver.
The normal process starts with a bill from the European Commission. The bill is then channelled through the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, representing member states.
If no agreement is reached at first reading, a second reading is launched. But according to figures provided by the parliament, not a single bill ended up in a second reading agreement in 2016, only the second time this has happened since EU parliament record keeping began in 2004.
“That is quite astonishing, but it is just a continuation of a trend that we have been seeing for quite a while now,” said Vicky Marissen of Pact European Affairs, a Brussels-based consultancy specialising in EU decision-making procedures.
Second readings are important because they open up the debate to the public at large. Removing this phase means the details are being agreed behind closed doors and people have to rely on insider information to understand what is happening.
- First you get the idea, framework and influence from academic "centers", foundations and Think Tanks in the US.
- Then you have the lobbying from Big Tech and specialized firms (content scan, censorship, moderation and everything "compliance") from the US, France, Israel, etc.
- Last most of your politicians are largely interested in the system to be kept in place at any cost. So mass surveillance might be the difference between a comfy life and the pitchfork in medium or long term.
Law enforcement at all levels traditionally has a strong lobbying presence. Their public affairs departments are well-funded and do not cease operations just because some initiatives are delayed due to temporary push back. Transparency legislation often does not apply to their efforts either.
For Americans, this process is called a trilogue. It is analogous to the White House a group of House and Senate members meeting in private to negotiate a bill, with most related documents being heavily redacted.
MEPs can pass the resulting deal or try to amend it. But amendments often mean the bill is pulled back into another trilogue rather than properly debated and rewritten in public.
The bill never gets debated, and the bill never gets rejected, so the commission can keep trying until it gets passed
I am getting somewhat confused about this. That website seems to be equating (semi-?)-reasonable measures with monstrosities such as banning or effectively banning e2ee.
It’s important to understand this is not just a rando on the internet. This is a former Member of the European Parliament who has been criticising and sharing developments on Chat Control for years. The post isn’t made in a vacuum, but made with the knowledge of everything which has happened up to now, including the “Chat Control 2.0”, which is different from what’s happening now. Every concern you see there has been discussed at length on other posts on the same website.
People are getting real EU fatigue from both sides of the spectrum. The attacks on privacy are the most concerning, the members of the high level group pushing for ChatControl and other surveillance state measures are still anonymous, while the Commissioner's Pfizer chats are still nowhere to be found--not that they would be subjected to the same surveillance as the little people. The needs of those bureaucrats sitting in their glass windowed buildings--with AC still running on their tallest floors where the commission staff works, while shut down on the lower ones--clearly do not match what the average person wants or expects. How much can they push it further? They're only adding fuel to the fire that will replace them with something just as bad, if not worse. It's hard not to be skeptical considering the exceptional level of lobbying steering regulations. The latest is the utterly idiotic, anti-consumer de minimis threshold changes, with an incomprehensible "per category" fee on every purchase outside the EU, lobbied for by EuroCommerce, killing entire hobbyist fields (e.g. anything to do with electronics) in the continent.
I grew up when everyone was saying "don't post your face, name or address on the internet" - and that's what I've done. There are a total of maybe 3-6 pictures of me on the internet and my real name isn't attached to most of my brainfarts online.
It's not that I hide it like a secret agent, I just don't shove my face and name next to every opinion I have.
But the younger generations... They grew up with Snapchat which means Snap Streaks, which again means posting your face with every message. Next was Facebook, real names everywhere. Then came "personal branding", again face and name plastered everywhere.
And now governments want to lock in the real name + face + identity combo for everyone with laws. Fuck that.
I still remember conversations here on HN, around the time Facebook was launched. It was considered insanity that you would give up your privacy to a firm.
I remember how that what seemed absurdly risky, meant absolutely nothing to the average person, and the astronomic value Facebook began to accumulate.
I wonder if it wasn't social media that set up the death spiral of the internet. The walled gardens on content and then the ad revenue created incentives to increase engagement, while capturing the value which would have gone to the open internet.
In that light, it seems AI firms are going to complete what Social Media started. Sequestering the remaining value of information and content, and then earning rents on it.
> There are a total of maybe 3-6 pictures of me on the internet
Incorrect, you are probably in the background of random photos on the internet, and by virtue of not having any profiles and social media sites can tag you and form a shadow profile around you.
It was always to be, as sure as the exponential meets the linear. I worry though, about all the unborn ideas, innovations and technologies, which could stabilize the current unstable situation, getting aborted by the surveilance which is introducedto "stabilize" things.
Maybe a hot take, but I don't know that "privacy" and "anonymity" are the same thing, or that the latter is worth preserving. I would very much like to live in a world where everyone stood by everything they said online with their real identity, just as they already do in the real world.
This was already the case for all of human history until the information age. If you wanted to say something, you had to physically say/print/shout it. And your reputation would be affected as a consequence. This more aligned with how humans are wired - that social actions have social consequences.
If every potential mate and employer was able to review everything you've ever posted online, we'd all be much more careful with what we say, much better able to screen out bad actors, and the wold would be a better place for it.
That works better in a less-connected, more local-bubble-centric world. Back then unless you were expressing something really inflammatory or contrary to a narrow slice of government-opposed ideology (e.g. red scare in the US), you could be spread your opinion mostly freely without too much fear of blowback.
In the modern world, we have governments (and politically aligned lackey-citizens) increasingly actively hunting down anything vaguely dissent-shaped and making those who spoke it suffer in some form, whether than be mass harassment and jawboning or outright muzzling or prosecution.
There’s a chilling effect with growing intensity that pressures people to either obediently nod along or shut up, which makes anonymity (even if only the plausibly deniable sort) important.
I'm not sure I agree, people say unhinged things on TikTok/Facebook using accounts that have their full government name and/or showing face. I doubt deanonymisation would help.
To me "people will be on their best behaviour if they can't be anonymous" sounds eerily similar to Larry Ellison's "people will be on their best behaviour if they're constantly surveilled".
>everyone stood by everything they said online with their real identity
And get Charlie Kirk'ed? No thanks. There are a lot of deranged and demented people out there, and publishing on the internet is rolling that dice billions of times, compared to shouting in the town square.
> If every potential mate and employer was able to review everything you've ever posted online, we'd all be much more careful with what we say, much better able to screen out bad actors, and the wold would be a better place for it.
This is stalking and is illegal. Are there any other crimes you want to claim as righteous?
Presuming you want stalking to be repealed and permissible, you have quite a few bars to pass through.
And in that society, are you willing to have me as your enemy who is very willing to push society to its utter limits? I know I'd be good at it, and I know thousands if not millions of people who share this interest. Because, as you say, its any potential mate/employer.
We can't even enforce basic protections of human rights in the United States, privacy does not matter when there are rampant black operations being conducted which violates human dignity in every sense of the term.
The illusion of digital privacy was always, propaganda. There's a pretty good chance your organism is literally compromised.
>privacy does not matter when there are rampant black operations being conducted which violates human dignity in every sense of the term.
You have this completely backwards. The threat and existence of such operations is one of the fundamental reasons privacy does matter so much. Privacy is to be protected heavily not just for the now but for what could happen in the future, and it's self-reinforcing. A more privacy preserving society is a harder one to oppress.
Only sad? Like, we already lost and we might as well give up?
I’m not sad. I’m scared, and I’m angry. And I’m beginning to think maybe everyone should be too. I mean, in normal circumstances, you don’t want an angry and scared population, that’s generally a recipe for disaster. At this point though, given the various decisions at the top that so clearly disfavour the bottom 99%, angry and scared is probably exactly what we need. Well, angry, mostly. Furious. Mad.
The hard part is determining who the enemy actually is. Hint: the more wealth and power, the more likely this is one of them. Strip them of their ungodly wealth and influence, you may get a human being back.
alright, but the important query is: this isn't happening in a vacuum, there's a lot of various forces.
Lets say the primary force we need to prevent is russian influence campaigns that back and push far right nationalists who will destabilize democracy. Is that a sufficient reason for controls?
It's always curious what people think about the actual content that's typically pushing these things.
>Lets say the primary force we need to prevent is russian influence campaigns that back and push far right nationalists who will destabilize democracy. Is that a sufficient reason for controls?
No. Because if you solve underlying tensions in society the so called russian propaganda has nothing to take hold on.
Also who and under what rules will decide which propaganda is allowed? is American propaganda fine? Chinese? Japanese? UAE?
Not only this creates dissident, and suppresses voices critical of current government. but also gives extraordinary power on level of soviet union to current government.
You might trust current EU to not abuse it, but it might take a single elections, or single term for un-elected(!) officials in EC for attidute to change.
Just like in US - a lot of powers were granted but suddenly there's a person willing to abuse them.
For that to be even considered in EU we would need a lot more check and balances - especially for European Comission and Council.
Another issue is - is EU a trade union or federation? if former - this is outside of EU's responsiblities and powers. if later - look at point above.
If you really wanted to solve this problem you would go after advertisers and data collection companies, and regulate them.
The answer to lies is generally sunshine, not censorship. There are just too many examples of censorship eventually being misused by those in power. The power to censor Russia right now might appear appealing to those in charge, but they need to remember, pro-Russian factions may be voted into power in the future, and they will use this power to suppress information they don't like. Once the precedent is created, it's too late to cry about censorship when it's your "side" which gets censored. No one will care.
To point: I don't accept the premise that the governments gets to decide which information I should be allowed to consume.
Is it a sufficient reason to build a cage for yourself that only needs a single regime flip to turn against you? Is it a sufficient reason to become what you're trying to avoid? Is destabilizing democracy necessary to stop the democracy from being destabilized? No, no, and no.
>russian influence campaigns
Just FYI, your rhetoric precisely mirrors Russian internal rhetoric used to boil the frog 10-15 years ago. If this doesn't make you pause and think, nothing will. In Russia people who fall for it are called "unteachable". Which makes sense, you don't seem to learn anything from their mistakes even though you have a live example of your future that you will reach with 99% certainty, without any help from your boogeymen, because your politicians mirror each step.
Why would Russia be responsible for what corrupt EU officials do?
There is a high chance that corrupt money spreads, which explains
100% of why such laws get in, but I fail to see why Russia should
the only or primary actor be here. There is no real benefit for
Russia here, but there is a LOT of benefit for those who want to
reduce privacy and force transparency onto everyone at all times.
Several US companies come to mind and there is cross-state kick
back going on here even aside from the USA too.
to argue that the success of the far right nationalists is solely off the back of Russian disinformation campaigns ignores the material reality experienced by far right party voters
seems like a lot of people either know way to much about the paradox of tolerance and how to wield it against people's best interest; or know nothing about it.
This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment. This is unacceptable behaviour, but no politician is ever going to experience any negative consequences over this because they're so very far removed from the democratic process.
Most of the time, when "the EU" is doing something bad, it's actually the national governments wearing a different hat. The Parliament is pretty reasonable on the average, while the national policicians in the Council take advantage of the ignorance of the public. They can pursue their favorite policies without consequences, as the EU gets all the blame.
Doesn't matter because Apple will happily implement messages scanning immediately and eagerly. And despite let's say Poland not implementing the bill, all iPhones in Poland will snitch on their owners. Tim Cook's Apple is not Steve Jobs' Apple.
Case in point: my new Mac purchased in Switzerland and activated in Poland on my US Apple account required me to provide my age in the setup assistant. Neither Poland nor Switzerland or the US have this stupid law. Yet Apple is already doing it's part to eliminate my privacy.
The issue is that the outcome is the same: whether the Parliament is made up of angels or not, the dealings of the Commission and Council affect the Member States anyway.
As an extension of this, look at the European Commission's response to the Stop Destroying Videogames[0] petition. It's utter dogshit. The petition is a pure consumer protection issue and the Commission's response is "but we can't touch IP rights". Bullshit, you guys made IP rights, you wrote all the rules surrounding them, and Donald Trump is about to drown you with them because America's tech oligarchs figured out your rulebook better than you knew it.
Or, if you think that issue's too niche, look at all the talk of "sovereign clouds". It's almost all "how can we build our own giant polluting AI datacenters" and not "how do we take our data back from the Americans". Because, ultimately, the European Commission is built out of an urge to submit to capital interests. The Epstein class are puppeting the EC in exactly the same way they puppet Donald Trump.
If there is any future in the EU, it will start with abolishing the European Commission to take away the capital class's accountability sink.
[0] For legal reasons, unrelated to Stop Killing Games, but they work together
Still, this is mostly pushed by particular countries (e.g. Denmark), the commission and aggressively pursued by lobbyist. The most democratic body in the EU (the EP) has so far always rejected Chat Control.
Without the EU, this would have been introduced in some member countries much earlier (see also UK).
Let it not be forgotten that when Denmark was president of the Council of EU and tried to push this forward, one of the former colleagues/friends of the justice minister was charged with child abuse in 2025. Just search Henrik Sass Larssen and Peter Humeelgaard.
We should start digging into the lives of those pushing for mandated age verification, chat control, and other privacy killing measures to show the world their true face. The public deserves to know who exactly is pushing for the "privacy law for kids" agenda.
I can speak for the sentiment in Denmark: most people are unaware of this legislation. A vocal minority of us (who are a little too online) have been trying to educate people, but I think it feels too esoteric. We had a poll last year which asked, "the ability to detect child abuse is more important than the right to online privacy." 65% of people said yes, 33% said both are equally important, and only 2% said online privacy is more important. The discussion for normal people is often couched in the language of "think of the children." Unfortunately, that appears to be highly effective with the Danes.
To be honest, I'm beginning to suspect most people don't care all that much about privacy if you promise them safety.
>Without the EU, this would have been introduced in some member countries much earlier (see also UK).
And without the EU there'd be some states in which it would never be introduced. Decentralization is what made Europe so successful historically compared to large centralized empires like China and the Ottomans, and the EU is destroying that.
The EU has a lot of upsides, and it's often been a reason to be optimistic about it as a project, but everyobe has a red line beyond which the upsides don't outweigh the downsides, where the slope becomes too slippery to ignore.
If Chat Control passes, I think lobbying for the exit of your country is going to become a very justifiable position.
Corbyn was famously a Leaver, for the reasons we're observing right now, before aligning his position with his base: a Labour Left UK without the antidemocratic corruption of the EU would arguably have been a better country to live in.
Agree. A while ago I met many normies who just complied. Now there is so much legislation that even the normies are starting to ask what is going on. But I guess that of exactly why they now need chat control! To get the herd back to work...
> This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment.
Rightfully so.
Except for no-roaming-charges within EU, most people can't name one good regulation that came from EU and couldn't be handled individually by their own country in the last few decades. The latest example is 3eur customs tax per every item bought from china, even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs + 22% vat on both.... what's the added value of custom tax? who knows, but you pay it anyway). Add all the money wasting, horrible behaviour of politicians in charge, overpaid MEPs for what they do... it's no wonder people hate everything EU related.
There's the lack of customs charges for items from other European countries. The common market is a really big advantage. There's the Euro, and in the past, the EU did a fairly decent job at holding large corporations accountable, although that seems to have disappeared with Neelie Kroes' retirement.
And of course the lack of borders. Being able to go on vacation with no trouble is massive. Do we really want those border checks back?
Tell me you don't see the value in the tax as a way of discouraging people from ordering a pair of socks from the other side of the globe, while they can buy them locally?
> even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs +
That's the fucking point for fuck's sake! Pardon my language, but the entire point of the tariff is to stop people from buying masses of trivial things from the other side of the world, with all the externalities that it entails. This tariff tries to cover at least some fraction of said externalities.
People on HN should not be this clueless about basic economy. This tariff is one of the good things that the EU has done lately, but unfortunately it won't be popular among the common folk who just want their cheap unsustainable stuff without having to think about the consequences.
Are you kidding me..? The freedom of movement across all member states, including the right to settle and start a business anywhere you like, that's not a "good regulation" to you? Being able to pay in all of those states without paying FX rates, bringing home your purchases across the border without tolls or even checkpoints no less? The funding of a massive amount of public benefit projects in poorer member states, including art and artists, public health and education, infrastructure - all of that isn't worth anything? The ability to trust everything you buy to be safe, from child toys to food to cars? This list goes on for a long time.
Many politicians have used the EU as a convenient scapegoat for inconvenient decisions, and people like you continue to spread completely uninformed FUD.
Let's even put aside all the benefits you have but apparently either don't know or don't care about. How well do you think your home country would fare against the USA or China or Russia on its own? The only weapon all of us have against the big power blocks of the world is being a power block on our own.
The EU isn't perfect, and I'm absolutely opposed to the Chat Control bullshit in its entirety, but don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
The EU is going to have to accept this increase in anti-EU sentiment, it will only ever increase as long as the EU has the democratic deficit that it has. It is what's both permitting this overreach, and the powerlessness to do something about it is what is breeding the anti-EU sentiment.
The problem begins and ends with the fact that there is just no realistic way to hold these people accountable. I don't know what it would take for people, across the EU, to consider punishing EU politicians to be more important than selecting their national government. A genocide, maybe? Something of that severity, no doubt. Certainly not something as pesky as instating a digital Stasi.
1. It seems that most of the evil here is concentrated among the liberal right and liberal left. Both far right AfD types and the left are against this.
2. A lot of positions, when clarified, just want to keep the (bad) status quo of CC1.0, while opposing 2.0, which was the much more totalitarian one. This also includes the crucial shadow rapporteurs.
This is still not good, but unless I've understood something very wrongly here, this isn't the same as just pushing the worst version of chat control 2.0 through.
Might make sense to message the MEP's that oppose chat control moreso the ones that support it. Maybe they can use some of their internal influence to sway some people.
I'm pessimistic about the amount of weight these representatives are giving to emails from citizens
So are they going to ban encrypted email? I am rather sure i could cobble together a chat UI whose backend was just email protocol. It would be needlessly complex, but all that ISPs would see is yet more encrypted email going back and forth.
Amazing how the EU commission does so unashamedly. It's
basically the copy/paste system of the USA here. Big
money wants laws. They have no shame in buying these laws.
A blanket control affecting privacy would be bad. However we need controls that can prevent criminals from hiding behind anonymity and being able to organize massive activities just with a few online posts. These days it is trivial to organize and radicalize the youth into wrong paths overnight using social channels. You just need to say something that aligns with their problems, and most people get consumed by the divisive speech easily.
The effect is already seen how the ability of rioters far exceeds that of the authorities during recent incidents in UK and other places. Something need to be done for this.
1. They are criminals. Criminals are not bound by laws.
2. Trying to reduce anonymity to go after criminals, simply means giving up anonymity for all but the criminals. See point 1 ... Criminals do not care and will find ways to not get caught.
3. I find the idea of this blanked statement that protesters are criminals insane dangerous and smells of authoritarianism. Peaceful protesters are just that, peaceful. Those that do crimes during protests, are criminals who can be literally caught.
4. The issue of "ability of rioters far exceeds that of the authorities", is more that the authorities do not have their ducks in a row. Blanked mass surveillance is not the solution.
5. Where does it stop? A what point are we running Russia like Max surveillance software on our smartphones, tracking where we go, who we talk too, ... all in the name of catching maybe, some criminals.
> Something need to be done for this.
Its called a better and responsive police force.
> radicalize the youth into wrong paths overnight using social channels
Imaging, that those people who radicalize youth are, ... not using social channel to do so. Wait, ... how did most of the people who ended up going to Syria get radicalized? Most was not via social media, it was with direct contact. Do we ban social contact?
This is just the typical quick fix type of answer. Problem, must be X. No, lets not invest money into police, social councils, case workers, etc...
Thing is, we have seen police getting lazy because, hey, why do investigation work if we can just get free evidence from criminals phones. O, those criminals now encrypted / try to hide data. Ok, so we now need to make it illegal because screw society, we want easier jobs.
No, everybody needs to give up their privacy "for the greater good". You must have something to hide, if you do not let the government read what you wrote, today, yesterday, 10 years ago ...
Have you ever been to China or other countries where saying the wrong thing, can be unpleasant to life changing? Where people learn to not talk what they rally think outside their little family corner. Where corruption is rampant because nobody can protest. Remember, today its your criminal protesters, tomorrow if a government changed into one you do not like, you become the criminal protester.
The right answer is a better funded and accountable police / social structure / help systems. And accountability, to ensure proper policing.
> No, everybody needs to give up their privacy "for the greater good"
You can bargain (via voting) about how much of the stuff you need to forgo. But you can't have 100% privacy, if the nation has to function.
You don't need to give up any privacy at all, if you don't expect anything from government. But the concept of a nation is hinged upon it's citizens foregoing a bit of privacy, a bit of their income, a bit of their freedom. The nation imposes rules that you need to follow (loss of freedom), asks you to pay up taxes and makes your identity linked to the citizen services.
The nation comes into existences precisely from the things that you forego.
Respectfuly, that's an impressive load of bullshit.
Two cases in point:
- UK's Farage recently causing riots, destruction of property, arson and bringing harm to non-whites, intentionally, previously being openly supported and amplified by Musk.
- USA's lame duck president Trump causing January 6, 2021 riots ending up in destruction of property and killings of five people (including Capitol police officer)
The perpetrators causing the shit are very well known, their followers do not try to hide themselves, and no amount of mandatory ID when accessing the Internet would stop it.
Oh, and if you think being anonymous makes people nasty, you should stop by some Facebook or Nextdoor forum :)
This is just outright wrong. Europe in general has gotten less and less violent over the last decade. Despite evils like the internet, smartphones, and tiktok. I'd argue it has become more difficult to rile up people than it was 40 years ago
You are free to 'argue', but you need to read about how the modern riots are being organized on a massive scale, so that you can correct your argument.
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 it here? They're usually very reasonable.
The population doesn’t support chat control. The European Parliament rejected the chat control proposal earlier this year. Now it seems that the European Parliament president is trying to bypass that
I think Denmark is one of the most surveiled countries. And with the most compliant population. They call it trust... Denmark is not the fairytale they try to market them selves as. This is closer to their true color in my opinion. You could also try to look up the cases with former and current politicians in dk who actually have gotten caught perpetrating the very thing chat control is said to stop.
I'm to afraid of the f'ing EU to mention specific names here... But maybe some braver souls will
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.
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?
Yes, you are right, the only two possible choices are to either give the government an absolute mandate to spy on every citizen, or to abolish the EU altogether, no other option is possible.
Also, the least consequential even ignoring often stated fact that cookie banners are malicious compliance. I care much less about cookie banners than about the ads, and for both of I have uBlock origin filters. So, what to be angry about exactly?
And either 80% of banners are not respecting the law, or the law managed to omit mandating making it as easy to reject as accept... Rejecting usually require you to enter into settings and sometimes click "reject" for every individual partner(!)
"Cookie banners are malicious compliance" is starting to wear thin as an excuse. GDPR went into law in 2018, almost ten years ago and for almost as long websites have been "maliciously complying". If you don't don anything about it at some point it's not malicious anymore, it's just how the law is meant to be interpreted.
I have a different hypothesis for why the GDPR exists: it is to create a market for EU based compliance companies.
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 tech and entrepreneurship.
Life is bigger than tech or entrepreneurship. In the 00's I dreamed of moving to the US. That's changed, especially over the last decade. If I was offered a huge salary tomorrow to work in the US I would turn it down.
Website operators hate these cookies popups because they make their website more annoying and make me more likely to press the back button and click on a different website. As it should be. This incentivizes them to stop tracking me.
99% of the people just click accept and go through.
This could be solved on the client side, by requiring all devices with browsers sold in EU to have separate cookie jars per domain and by default those cookies would be deleted on window/tab close. If you wanted to stay logged in to a site, you'd click a button next to the url bar that says "keep cookies for this domain", and be done.
> 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.
So you like the law, but don't like how it didn't actually solve the problem it was trying to solve?
I assume you're pretty well read up on matters of privacy, right? So you have a better awareness and understanding. But do you believe the average person does? Or would you assume that the average person has either been trained to ignore the banner, automatically consent to more invasive tracking, or is generally more confused about why the banner exists, or what it does?
The cookie consent law is the dumbest application of an attempt to improve privacy. It's made the internet worse, and is being used to train people into consenting to giving away their privacy without thinking... because: "clicking accept is what you have to do to use the page" -- every normal person casually browsing any site.
No implementation for cookie based consent can be done correctly.
Personally, I'd love to see a law that makes any/all dark patterns a crime, and empowers state prosecutors via grand jury to bring charges for them against both the company, and individual authors of the specific commits as jointly responsible. I don't want statutory laws, I want a trial jury to look at it, and decide if any technological measure, pattern, tactic, procedure, design, or measurement was used to encourage one decision over the other instead of a fair choice.
I don't want a set of rules that given enough funding any company is able to win as a negative sum game. I want a jury, not a trailing clause, to decide if the company is clearly acting in good faith or worthy of apocalyptic fines.
> And why aren't you, the EU citizen, more annoyed by it?
Because the USA tends to privilege corporations over people whereas in the EU it's more balanced (still pretty biased towards corps, though), and I am a people, not a corporations.
Take, for example, the 'cookie law': I much prefer being annoyed by the cookie pop-up over websites shoving a ton of unnecessary and unwanted cookies onto my computer without permission.
...speaking of which:
> and their failures in regulating the Internet
Which political entity would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet? Where are citizens most protected from being inundated with advertising, unwanted cookies, unnecessary JavaScript, false news, scams, and all the other garbage one is normally subjected to when not putting in some amount of effort in combating that shit?
And because you are grateful for the cookie policies you don’t mind rewarding them with unlimited access all your private communication? I don’t really follow this argument..
> would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet
So again.. how do these basic/superficial (or even if they are extremely effective and useful, that doesn’t really change anything) regulations justify mass surveillance?
> false news
For what its worth in no way has the EU been effective in doing anything about this (I’m not sure they even tried doing anything that directly addressed it?)
inundated with advertising, unwanted cookies, unnecessary JavaScript, false news, scams,
I’d rather have that instead of govt monitoring of all communications. Your govt can hurt you more than any of those things. Especially in the EU given what happened just a few decades ago.
> refuse to learn from falling behind the US economically
The EU economy has been slowing down since 2007, the peak production of conventional oil. The US is still producing oil, which is why the US economy is better.
People love to think that they are richer or more successful because they are smarter. The fact is that the economy goes up when there is an abundance of energy, period.
So there is nothing to learn from falling behind the US economically, other than "the EU needs to adapt to the reality of its economy measurably slowing down". And following the US and their lack of regulations and tendency towards a fascist economy (with BigTech working together with the ruling class) is not the right direction, IMO.
> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Tech and entrepreneurs usually want to become rich by producing more. The best places to do that are where the is money, which is where the economy grows, which is where there is an abundance of cheap fossil fuels.
Entrepreneurs usually say "remove the regulations and our economy will grow again", but what they mean, really, is "remove the regulations and I will get rich, because I am on the side of those who would benefit from it".
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
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.
> falling behind the US economically and technologically
Are you even human? Do you really believe what you say? Doesn't it come across as absurd, from everything that happened to the US since the Snowden revelations, the Patriot Act, spiraling into fascism, a first time attacking science and democracy, a second time to install oligarchs, traitors, corrupt and incompetents to run the state, with the result of tanking your real economy (on every metric that's not related to AI), burning down your soft power, burning bridges with every ally, losing the war against Iran, and causing a generational talent exodus out of the US?
Oh yeah, by no means am I blindly defending "the EU leadership", but some reality check is much needed.
It's not like we can do anything.
We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues and we (in most countries) can't even vote on people. We just vote on 2-3 non-fringe parties and they choose people and policies. You may formally put an X next to some name but it's just a chosen party official. They need to walk party line and be in good standings with the leadership to even get on the list.
There is just nothing you can do really in that system other than pursue career in politics which is a no-go for most people for obvious reasons.
Yeah, we can: I am from Poland and precisely through this mechanism our MEPs/delegates/nominates know that supporting this would be a disaster for their political group right here back home regardless of direct voting.
The education system has failed in the EU, but in a different way than it has in the US.
I realised this when people thought mandating the USB-C connections was a good idea because "it is the best standard". I didn't think the mandated connector was a huge deal per se, but it made it clear to me that there is a flawed thought process behind EU regulations. And this is a big deal.
Many things are not really understood in the EU. The majority don't seem to understand free speech.
The EU has an article about free speech that clearly states there is no free speech, but people point to it when they claim there is.
Of all things to criticise, you pick out the one ruling that eventually lead to a consolidation of chargers? Really? I haven't ever met a single person who wasn't grateful of being able to have one cable for all their devices.
Chat control is about controlling peoples life's and minds. The really scary part is how many actually wants this and mindlessly buy into the narrative the EU put forth about why it is needed.
Also worth noting is that this was voted down earlier this year and if im not mistaken also a couple of years ago. But the legislators then just started a new slightly different bill and started nodging their population even harder, and tried again. And again.
The people said no to this.. But apparently that does not matter?! Is this still a democracy?
And are we criticizing totalitarian regimes for surveiling their people and not allowing free speech... And doing this to our own population? It seems so
Bizar to me.
Personally I don't know what to do. I have come to the conclusion that fighting again this is impossible because, in my opinion, no one listens even after a democratic vote as I said already... I'm disgusted by what we have become...
This is so wrong, but here’s another reason: a centralized totalitarian approach could look like a very pragmatic way to exercise control and governance on the population. This is true though only if your technical capabilities are at a similar or higher level of your competitors.
In the European case we have neither the technology advancement of the US, or the supply chain control of China.
This means that a centralized approach is only going to create a larger vulnerability surface for an external attacker.
A decentralized, privacy and security first approach isn’t only right for moral/ethical reasons. It’s the only way we have to defend ourselves, even if we had a fascist government.
You could also view it from the perspective of that if every other major superpower has their mass surveillance and you don't, it becomes an assymetrical informational situation where foreign governments can influence your citizens, but you cannot influence the foreign citizens since they are surveilled and their informational diet is restricted.
In some sense Chat Control is a geopolitical necessity for the EU, there is no choice to not do it.
What's to point of all this? Everyone will use Signal or some other E2E encrypted messenger, this is just bone tossing.
Useless politicans spending time on useless things.
In every authoritarian regime people spent considerable amount of time on workarounds. Underground press, parallel education etc. this is just another iteration of Stasi like regime, just with a nicer suit and better PR.
In reality this should have been rejected wholesale and people proposing this barred from any public sector jobs, or even arrested for terrorist attack attempt (Chat Control fulfils definition of terrorism).
This is bullshit. The EU parliament is the organ that shot it down so far.
Read the article. It is the national governments pushing this shit. They try to launder if through the EU because passing those legislations locally would likely be very unpopular.
plenty of people desire something like this, and 'saving the children' is their genuine intent and desire. Humanity is willing to shoot itself in the foot again and again, there's no need for it to be some shadowy cabal.
Yes the EU was setup as an organization more like the IMF or the World Bank.
Its mandate creeped out over decades and now we are waking up to the authoritarian monster it became.
They setup a fake parliament which is indeed elected through universal suffrage but is only here to adopt legislations proposed by the Commission.
Since citizen do not elect the Comission this has nothing to do with a democracy.
Here on HN, people fully understand how bad and unfit Chat Control is. But keep in mind the EU has been passing legislations like this for decades and in every domains.
For every good one (like mandating USB-C) you get 9 bad ones.
By observation, the purpose governments is to run scams.
After all, it makes no sense to attribute their purpose to things they consistently fail to do.
I think the EU thinks that opposition to the EU must be from foreign actors. This is why citizens has to be surveiled so that the EU can catch the foreign actors or some goofy crap like that.
My point being that the opposition to the EU comes from EU citizens of the EU... Because the EU make stuff like chat control...
Or it could be we have fully crossed over into stasi territory already and they are having a great cozy party while they make life more and more unbearable for the population?!
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 create further privacy for criminals such as pedophiles and mass espionage for the common man. It's also curious to notice that at every proposal stage, politicians are always conveniently exempt from the regulation, which is hilarious coming after the Files.
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.
> So in the real world a relatively small number of providers.
Why do we even need providers? Locally store the convos on each device and there's not a need for the server.
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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.
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> 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.
They do understand it but what they want is not just criminals' data but all of us.
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WhatsApp already does it for unencrypted messages for about half of the EU under the purview of the rules of lawful interception obligations for NI-ICS, as well as Norway, Switzerland and the UK.
When they want to read encrypted messages they seize the phone and use Cellebrite or similar 3rd Party tooling to gain physical user-level access. No need for cert-pinning or esoteric MITM attacks.
N.B. China does not allow WeChat to have e2e encryption.
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The whole point of end to end encryption is that providers cannot comply with police request to access conversations. A properly secured system would make it impossible without compromise of your device. Now i don't know what signal does, but I am almost certain WhatsApp can just lie about your contacts keys and man in the middle the connection.
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> The problem is that politicians don't seem to understand it.
The problem is that politicians were corrupted by power.
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this is rational because pedophiles are not a threat to the state. if they were, the bill would look very different.
A modest proposal: have governments consist of underage girls.
> which is hilarious coming after the Files.
Files?
Epstein
Just 4 countries are against: Czech Republic, Italy, Netherlands, and Poland.
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
That is misleading, it's a eu parliament thing, it hinges on MEPs votes not countries. At the council level i.e intergovernmental, every one has veto powers, 4 would be enough to stop this for practically ever.
Does governments have any say in this? If not then most MEPs of mentioned countries are too in favor of Chat Control. This is what it says when you click on one of the 4 countries.
EU law 101: (1) EU Commission (i.e. the executive) proposes a law; (2) EU Parliament signs off on it; (3) EU Council (i.e. the equivalent of a senate, comprising national governments) puts the final stamp on it.
The complicating factor being that a given law may or may not require unanimity at the final EU Council stage.
In general, the governments have the final word.
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The EU is predicated on the pooled sovereignty of its constituent countries, as exercised thought the EU Council. Apart from a limited number of certain matters, any EU country can veto any decision made by the EU Commission, or indeed the EU Parliament.
There's a lot of flip-flopping. I'm surprised Italy changed their mind when they were very in favour until recently.
I guess that’s how it eventually goes through. When, at random, enough flippers flop or floppers flip that it tips the balance.
And once it’s done it’s done. The relentlessness does not continue into, “are you sure?”, it’ll be over.
For the record, I’m in the EU and do not want this to pass.
I have to admit that I don't understand how they can push for this so often! Wasn't this rejected not so long ago?
> Wasn't this rejected not so long ago?
And that's the issue with all bad laws. They have to approve it once. We have to fight against indefinitely…
What part of "you guys are irrelevant Internet weirdos and you're going to lose everything you thought you had" don't you people understand?
Last time was in march, now it is about every 3 months.
This "keep asking until they say yes" strategy is by design and has been a common tactic used by the EU power centers in the past. See the way the Treaty of Lisbon was rejected in referendums, and then people were just made to vote again. Or the way the British pro-EU faction proclaimed in 2016 that Leave/Remain was a once in a generation vote to settle the issue for all time, then immediately started agitating for an aptly named People's Vote that would rerun the referendum again.
The EU is not a democratic system. It's specifically designed to undermine and eventually end the post-WW2 democracies through a mix of deception and bureaucratic manipulation. The never ending Chat Control story is a totally standard example. That's not a conspiracy theory either, there are lots of quotes from senior EU figures where they say all this stuff directly:
> If it's a 'Yes,' we will say "On we go!" and if it's a 'No' we will say "We continue!" (Junker, talking about the votes on the Lisbon Treaty)
> We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided we continue step by step until there is no turning back. (Junker again, on the general EU methodology)
> When people ask politicians today “What will become of Europe?” or “Where is European integration heading?”, we usually give an evasive answer. “We don’t want a super state” that is generally the first thing we say. I must admit that I have in the past often resorted to this kind of thing myself. (Viviane Reading, former vice president)
> We know that nine out of 10 people will not have read the Constitution and will vote on the basis of what politicians and journalists say. More than that, if the answer is No, the vote will probably have to be done again, because it absolutely has to be Yes. (Jean-Luc Dehaene, Former Belgian Prime Minister and Vice-President of the EU Convention)
> I have never understood why public opinion about European ideas should be taken into account. (Raymond Barre, former French Prime Minister)
There are endless quotes like these. You get a sense of the ideology found in the EU institutions by reading them. It's an ideology that never takes no for an answer, believes in its own manifest destiny and views the act of centralizing power as the central moral mission of their generation. So of course Chat Control is an unkillable zombie.
> "In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the Remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it."
- Nigel Farage (16 May 2016)
All the quotes are clearly talking about closer integration which no one is hiding is a stated goal of the European Union. It's right there in the original treaties `an ever closer union`. If you don't like it leave, but the rest have all committed to that a long time ago.
The chat control thing has nothing to do with all of the above, it's just a bit of legislation. The whole "we will vote on it again and again until we can finally push it through on the 12th of August at 03:00 o'clock with a total of 20 votes" is a typical strategy seen in many democracies pushed by vested interests on unpopular legislation.
It's not the "EU" that wants this to pass, there are specific people and groups pushing for this surveillance state apparatchiks, all sort of compliance industry vultures, and all the censorship technology industry that is dying to enter the chat market.
I really doubt von der Leyen or anyone in a position of actual power actually cares about this, I am certain they really think this is small time inconsequential bullshit. They have much larger problems to deal with, like the looming jet and diesel shortage, the upcoming crop shortfall we are going to see come harvest season, getting Mercosur through, planning for when Trump inevitably invades Cuba or puts Greenland back on the menu.
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https://youtu.be/jxWlJ_muK0I
Related.
Isn't that how politics works? People keep pushing for what they want until they get it.
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[flagged]
America would be happy to bring you our brand of Democracy!
Related recent discussion:
>European Commission's Metsola Overrides MEPs to Force Through Chat Control
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48657675 (45 comments)
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.
Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore (no joke).
What's in there for these people to push for chat control of all things?
In other words, CIA.
You won't get such analysis because the EU law making process is (a) mostly secret and (b) doesn't necessarily follow the process laid out in the treaties, making a lot of discussion purely theoretical. This has been a problem for years. The British pushed back when they were members but no longer.
Five days ago:
https://euobserver.com/223533/the-european-unions-culture-of...
The EU is increasingly hiding things from journalists, researchers and members of civil society.
Secrecy has a long tradition in the EU, but the European Commission has clearly limited the publicity of its activities during Ursula von der Leyen’s second presidency.
The commission’s new Rules of Procedure significantly limit what counts as an official document. They authorise withholding and destroying information even after a request for access has been made. The commission has, on flimsy grounds, concealed legal documents and files related to the regulation of technology giants, among other things.
It is now almost impossible to monitor how the EU uses its power, for example, in relation to large platform companies.
The EU never improves. A decade ago the same complaints were being made:
https://euobserver.com/61985/secret-eu-law-making-takes-over...
Secret EU law making reached a high in 2016 that has only been matched once before, according to figures obtained by EUobserver.
The normal process starts with a bill from the European Commission. The bill is then channelled through the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, representing member states.
If no agreement is reached at first reading, a second reading is launched. But according to figures provided by the parliament, not a single bill ended up in a second reading agreement in 2016, only the second time this has happened since EU parliament record keeping began in 2004.
“That is quite astonishing, but it is just a continuation of a trend that we have been seeing for quite a while now,” said Vicky Marissen of Pact European Affairs, a Brussels-based consultancy specialising in EU decision-making procedures.
Second readings are important because they open up the debate to the public at large. Removing this phase means the details are being agreed behind closed doors and people have to rely on insider information to understand what is happening.
My current understanding is:
- First you get the idea, framework and influence from academic "centers", foundations and Think Tanks in the US.
- Then you have the lobbying from Big Tech and specialized firms (content scan, censorship, moderation and everything "compliance") from the US, France, Israel, etc.
- Last most of your politicians are largely interested in the system to be kept in place at any cost. So mass surveillance might be the difference between a comfy life and the pitchfork in medium or long term.
Law enforcement at all levels traditionally has a strong lobbying presence. Their public affairs departments are well-funded and do not cease operations just because some initiatives are delayed due to temporary push back. Transparency legislation often does not apply to their efforts either.
Wait, law enforcement is part of the government. Why is there not a push to zero out their funding for lobbying?
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For Americans, this process is called a trilogue. It is analogous to the White House a group of House and Senate members meeting in private to negotiate a bill, with most related documents being heavily redacted.
MEPs can pass the resulting deal or try to amend it. But amendments often mean the bill is pulled back into another trilogue rather than properly debated and rewritten in public.
The bill never gets debated, and the bill never gets rejected, so the commission can keep trying until it gets passed
I am getting somewhat confused about this. That website seems to be equating (semi-?)-reasonable measures with monstrosities such as banning or effectively banning e2ee.
It’s important to understand this is not just a rando on the internet. This is a former Member of the European Parliament who has been criticising and sharing developments on Chat Control for years. The post isn’t made in a vacuum, but made with the knowledge of everything which has happened up to now, including the “Chat Control 2.0”, which is different from what’s happening now. Every concern you see there has been discussed at length on other posts on the same website.
Welcome to discussions on privacy on the internet :)
People are getting real EU fatigue from both sides of the spectrum. The attacks on privacy are the most concerning, the members of the high level group pushing for ChatControl and other surveillance state measures are still anonymous, while the Commissioner's Pfizer chats are still nowhere to be found--not that they would be subjected to the same surveillance as the little people. The needs of those bureaucrats sitting in their glass windowed buildings--with AC still running on their tallest floors where the commission staff works, while shut down on the lower ones--clearly do not match what the average person wants or expects. How much can they push it further? They're only adding fuel to the fire that will replace them with something just as bad, if not worse. It's hard not to be skeptical considering the exceptional level of lobbying steering regulations. The latest is the utterly idiotic, anti-consumer de minimis threshold changes, with an incomprehensible "per category" fee on every purchase outside the EU, lobbied for by EuroCommerce, killing entire hobbyist fields (e.g. anything to do with electronics) in the continent.
And people are surprised of the rise of far right, especially anti EU one
The right is a massive supporter for all of these authoritarian pushes, so what exactly are you trying to say?
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The global push to kill privacy makes me sad.
Feels like I grew up in a golden age and subsequent generations won't care because they never knew a different world
I grew up when everyone was saying "don't post your face, name or address on the internet" - and that's what I've done. There are a total of maybe 3-6 pictures of me on the internet and my real name isn't attached to most of my brainfarts online.
It's not that I hide it like a secret agent, I just don't shove my face and name next to every opinion I have.
But the younger generations... They grew up with Snapchat which means Snap Streaks, which again means posting your face with every message. Next was Facebook, real names everywhere. Then came "personal branding", again face and name plastered everywhere.
And now governments want to lock in the real name + face + identity combo for everyone with laws. Fuck that.
I still remember conversations here on HN, around the time Facebook was launched. It was considered insanity that you would give up your privacy to a firm.
I remember how that what seemed absurdly risky, meant absolutely nothing to the average person, and the astronomic value Facebook began to accumulate.
I wonder if it wasn't social media that set up the death spiral of the internet. The walled gardens on content and then the ad revenue created incentives to increase engagement, while capturing the value which would have gone to the open internet.
In that light, it seems AI firms are going to complete what Social Media started. Sequestering the remaining value of information and content, and then earning rents on it.
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> There are a total of maybe 3-6 pictures of me on the internet
Incorrect, you are probably in the background of random photos on the internet, and by virtue of not having any profiles and social media sites can tag you and form a shadow profile around you.
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It was always to be, as sure as the exponential meets the linear. I worry though, about all the unborn ideas, innovations and technologies, which could stabilize the current unstable situation, getting aborted by the surveilance which is introducedto "stabilize" things.
Maybe a hot take, but I don't know that "privacy" and "anonymity" are the same thing, or that the latter is worth preserving. I would very much like to live in a world where everyone stood by everything they said online with their real identity, just as they already do in the real world.
This was already the case for all of human history until the information age. If you wanted to say something, you had to physically say/print/shout it. And your reputation would be affected as a consequence. This more aligned with how humans are wired - that social actions have social consequences.
If every potential mate and employer was able to review everything you've ever posted online, we'd all be much more careful with what we say, much better able to screen out bad actors, and the wold would be a better place for it.
That works better in a less-connected, more local-bubble-centric world. Back then unless you were expressing something really inflammatory or contrary to a narrow slice of government-opposed ideology (e.g. red scare in the US), you could be spread your opinion mostly freely without too much fear of blowback.
In the modern world, we have governments (and politically aligned lackey-citizens) increasingly actively hunting down anything vaguely dissent-shaped and making those who spoke it suffer in some form, whether than be mass harassment and jawboning or outright muzzling or prosecution.
There’s a chilling effect with growing intensity that pressures people to either obediently nod along or shut up, which makes anonymity (even if only the plausibly deniable sort) important.
Do you ever wonder why we vote anonymously?
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I'm not sure I agree, people say unhinged things on TikTok/Facebook using accounts that have their full government name and/or showing face. I doubt deanonymisation would help.
To me "people will be on their best behaviour if they can't be anonymous" sounds eerily similar to Larry Ellison's "people will be on their best behaviour if they're constantly surveilled".
Your world sure makes impersonation based cyber crime a lot simpler.
>everyone stood by everything they said online with their real identity
And get Charlie Kirk'ed? No thanks. There are a lot of deranged and demented people out there, and publishing on the internet is rolling that dice billions of times, compared to shouting in the town square.
> If every potential mate and employer was able to review everything you've ever posted online, we'd all be much more careful with what we say, much better able to screen out bad actors, and the wold would be a better place for it.
This is stalking and is illegal. Are there any other crimes you want to claim as righteous?
Presuming you want stalking to be repealed and permissible, you have quite a few bars to pass through.
And in that society, are you willing to have me as your enemy who is very willing to push society to its utter limits? I know I'd be good at it, and I know thousands if not millions of people who share this interest. Because, as you say, its any potential mate/employer.
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If only you knew how bad things really were.
We can't even enforce basic protections of human rights in the United States, privacy does not matter when there are rampant black operations being conducted which violates human dignity in every sense of the term.
The illusion of digital privacy was always, propaganda. There's a pretty good chance your organism is literally compromised.
>privacy does not matter when there are rampant black operations being conducted which violates human dignity in every sense of the term.
You have this completely backwards. The threat and existence of such operations is one of the fundamental reasons privacy does matter so much. Privacy is to be protected heavily not just for the now but for what could happen in the future, and it's self-reinforcing. A more privacy preserving society is a harder one to oppress.
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It's not just killing privacy though. Democracy is undermined here by big money.
Closely related, I think. Without privacy even demonstrating, a democratic right, becomes risky.
What 'big money' you have in mind in this very specific case?
We are living in a strange mixture of 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World
>Fahrenheit 451
We are quite far away from that. On the contrary knowledge is preserved better than ever.
Anna's Archive estimates they have preserved 16% of the world's books, all available to download with an internet connection.
https://annas-archive.gl/faq
On the other hand, I can see the side of Fahrenheit 451 where the people don't value books which is what allowed the book burning in the first place.
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> The global push to kill privacy makes me sad.
Only sad? Like, we already lost and we might as well give up?
I’m not sad. I’m scared, and I’m angry. And I’m beginning to think maybe everyone should be too. I mean, in normal circumstances, you don’t want an angry and scared population, that’s generally a recipe for disaster. At this point though, given the various decisions at the top that so clearly disfavour the bottom 99%, angry and scared is probably exactly what we need. Well, angry, mostly. Furious. Mad.
The hard part is determining who the enemy actually is. Hint: the more wealth and power, the more likely this is one of them. Strip them of their ungodly wealth and influence, you may get a human being back.
alright, but the important query is: this isn't happening in a vacuum, there's a lot of various forces.
Lets say the primary force we need to prevent is russian influence campaigns that back and push far right nationalists who will destabilize democracy. Is that a sufficient reason for controls?
It's always curious what people think about the actual content that's typically pushing these things.
>Lets say the primary force we need to prevent is russian influence campaigns that back and push far right nationalists who will destabilize democracy. Is that a sufficient reason for controls?
No. Because if you solve underlying tensions in society the so called russian propaganda has nothing to take hold on.
Also who and under what rules will decide which propaganda is allowed? is American propaganda fine? Chinese? Japanese? UAE?
Not only this creates dissident, and suppresses voices critical of current government. but also gives extraordinary power on level of soviet union to current government.
You might trust current EU to not abuse it, but it might take a single elections, or single term for un-elected(!) officials in EC for attidute to change.
Just like in US - a lot of powers were granted but suddenly there's a person willing to abuse them.
For that to be even considered in EU we would need a lot more check and balances - especially for European Comission and Council.
Another issue is - is EU a trade union or federation? if former - this is outside of EU's responsiblities and powers. if later - look at point above.
If you really wanted to solve this problem you would go after advertisers and data collection companies, and regulate them.
The answer to lies is generally sunshine, not censorship. There are just too many examples of censorship eventually being misused by those in power. The power to censor Russia right now might appear appealing to those in charge, but they need to remember, pro-Russian factions may be voted into power in the future, and they will use this power to suppress information they don't like. Once the precedent is created, it's too late to cry about censorship when it's your "side" which gets censored. No one will care.
To point: I don't accept the premise that the governments gets to decide which information I should be allowed to consume.
Is it a sufficient reason to build a cage for yourself that only needs a single regime flip to turn against you? Is it a sufficient reason to become what you're trying to avoid? Is destabilizing democracy necessary to stop the democracy from being destabilized? No, no, and no.
>russian influence campaigns
Just FYI, your rhetoric precisely mirrors Russian internal rhetoric used to boil the frog 10-15 years ago. If this doesn't make you pause and think, nothing will. In Russia people who fall for it are called "unteachable". Which makes sense, you don't seem to learn anything from their mistakes even though you have a live example of your future that you will reach with 99% certainty, without any help from your boogeymen, because your politicians mirror each step.
Why would Russia be responsible for what corrupt EU officials do?
There is a high chance that corrupt money spreads, which explains 100% of why such laws get in, but I fail to see why Russia should the only or primary actor be here. There is no real benefit for Russia here, but there is a LOT of benefit for those who want to reduce privacy and force transparency onto everyone at all times. Several US companies come to mind and there is cross-state kick back going on here even aside from the USA too.
>who will destabilize democracy
Let's just ban those politicians, ban and censor "bad" media and platforms, and surveil all citizens to protect us from those pesky authoritarians!
Is eroding privacy the only way to combat that?
> Is that a sufficient reason for controls?
no.
Rubbish. Fighting fascism by implementing totalitarian tools is a ludicrous idea.
Start with dismantling the means by which the information cancer spreads. No more targeted ads, no more data harvesting. Increase privacy.
Everybody knows about the influence of Russian bots on the net and yet precisely fuck all is being done about it.
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to argue that the success of the far right nationalists is solely off the back of Russian disinformation campaigns ignores the material reality experienced by far right party voters
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You know EU has mostly gone after and unpersoned leftoids (and accusing them of working for russia), despite the rightoid wringing of hands?
Look up e. g. Hüseyin Doğru.
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seems like a lot of people either know way to much about the paradox of tolerance and how to wield it against people's best interest; or know nothing about it.
There should be some mechanism to block these repeated attempts.
The machine is working exactly as intended.
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This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment. This is unacceptable behaviour, but no politician is ever going to experience any negative consequences over this because they're so very far removed from the democratic process.
Most of the time, when "the EU" is doing something bad, it's actually the national governments wearing a different hat. The Parliament is pretty reasonable on the average, while the national policicians in the Council take advantage of the ignorance of the public. They can pursue their favorite policies without consequences, as the EU gets all the blame.
Doesn't matter because Apple will happily implement messages scanning immediately and eagerly. And despite let's say Poland not implementing the bill, all iPhones in Poland will snitch on their owners. Tim Cook's Apple is not Steve Jobs' Apple.
Case in point: my new Mac purchased in Switzerland and activated in Poland on my US Apple account required me to provide my age in the setup assistant. Neither Poland nor Switzerland or the US have this stupid law. Yet Apple is already doing it's part to eliminate my privacy.
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I don't think you can nicely divide it like that.
It seems to be mostly bad individuals, or just individuals with some bad ideas they refuse to give up.
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The issue is that the outcome is the same: whether the Parliament is made up of angels or not, the dealings of the Commission and Council affect the Member States anyway.
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which speaks volumes about either EU overstepping it's bounds as an entity, or is severely lacking checks and balances.
True, this seems to be Denmarks project
As an extension of this, look at the European Commission's response to the Stop Destroying Videogames[0] petition. It's utter dogshit. The petition is a pure consumer protection issue and the Commission's response is "but we can't touch IP rights". Bullshit, you guys made IP rights, you wrote all the rules surrounding them, and Donald Trump is about to drown you with them because America's tech oligarchs figured out your rulebook better than you knew it.
Or, if you think that issue's too niche, look at all the talk of "sovereign clouds". It's almost all "how can we build our own giant polluting AI datacenters" and not "how do we take our data back from the Americans". Because, ultimately, the European Commission is built out of an urge to submit to capital interests. The Epstein class are puppeting the EC in exactly the same way they puppet Donald Trump.
If there is any future in the EU, it will start with abolishing the European Commission to take away the capital class's accountability sink.
[0] For legal reasons, unrelated to Stop Killing Games, but they work together
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Also, don't forget the foreign propagandists who absolutely hate democracy, and have toppled both Britain and America.
That seems to always be "forgotten" about how the internet is acting as a accelerationist far right platform.
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Still, this is mostly pushed by particular countries (e.g. Denmark), the commission and aggressively pursued by lobbyist. The most democratic body in the EU (the EP) has so far always rejected Chat Control.
Without the EU, this would have been introduced in some member countries much earlier (see also UK).
Let it not be forgotten that when Denmark was president of the Council of EU and tried to push this forward, one of the former colleagues/friends of the justice minister was charged with child abuse in 2025. Just search Henrik Sass Larssen and Peter Humeelgaard.
We should start digging into the lives of those pushing for mandated age verification, chat control, and other privacy killing measures to show the world their true face. The public deserves to know who exactly is pushing for the "privacy law for kids" agenda.
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Yes, EP has rejected it, and now the president of the EP is ignoring that outcome.
It only has to pass once, and we have to scream about it every goddamn time try try. And they'll try and try again and again.
I can speak for the sentiment in Denmark: most people are unaware of this legislation. A vocal minority of us (who are a little too online) have been trying to educate people, but I think it feels too esoteric. We had a poll last year which asked, "the ability to detect child abuse is more important than the right to online privacy." 65% of people said yes, 33% said both are equally important, and only 2% said online privacy is more important. The discussion for normal people is often couched in the language of "think of the children." Unfortunately, that appears to be highly effective with the Danes.
To be honest, I'm beginning to suspect most people don't care all that much about privacy if you promise them safety.
>Without the EU, this would have been introduced in some member countries much earlier (see also UK).
And without the EU there'd be some states in which it would never be introduced. Decentralization is what made Europe so successful historically compared to large centralized empires like China and the Ottomans, and the EU is destroying that.
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The EU has a lot of upsides, and it's often been a reason to be optimistic about it as a project, but everyobe has a red line beyond which the upsides don't outweigh the downsides, where the slope becomes too slippery to ignore.
If Chat Control passes, I think lobbying for the exit of your country is going to become a very justifiable position.
Corbyn was famously a Leaver, for the reasons we're observing right now, before aligning his position with his base: a Labour Left UK without the antidemocratic corruption of the EU would arguably have been a better country to live in.
Agree. A while ago I met many normies who just complied. Now there is so much legislation that even the normies are starting to ask what is going on. But I guess that of exactly why they now need chat control! To get the herd back to work...
> This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment.
Rightfully so.
Except for no-roaming-charges within EU, most people can't name one good regulation that came from EU and couldn't be handled individually by their own country in the last few decades. The latest example is 3eur customs tax per every item bought from china, even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs + 22% vat on both.... what's the added value of custom tax? who knows, but you pay it anyway). Add all the money wasting, horrible behaviour of politicians in charge, overpaid MEPs for what they do... it's no wonder people hate everything EU related.
All sticks, no carrots.
There's the lack of customs charges for items from other European countries. The common market is a really big advantage. There's the Euro, and in the past, the EU did a fairly decent job at holding large corporations accountable, although that seems to have disappeared with Neelie Kroes' retirement.
And of course the lack of borders. Being able to go on vacation with no trouble is massive. Do we really want those border checks back?
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Tell me you don't see the value in the tax as a way of discouraging people from ordering a pair of socks from the other side of the globe, while they can buy them locally?
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> even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs +
That's the fucking point for fuck's sake! Pardon my language, but the entire point of the tariff is to stop people from buying masses of trivial things from the other side of the world, with all the externalities that it entails. This tariff tries to cover at least some fraction of said externalities.
People on HN should not be this clueless about basic economy. This tariff is one of the good things that the EU has done lately, but unfortunately it won't be popular among the common folk who just want their cheap unsustainable stuff without having to think about the consequences.
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What have the Romans ever done for us?
Are you kidding me..? The freedom of movement across all member states, including the right to settle and start a business anywhere you like, that's not a "good regulation" to you? Being able to pay in all of those states without paying FX rates, bringing home your purchases across the border without tolls or even checkpoints no less? The funding of a massive amount of public benefit projects in poorer member states, including art and artists, public health and education, infrastructure - all of that isn't worth anything? The ability to trust everything you buy to be safe, from child toys to food to cars? This list goes on for a long time.
Many politicians have used the EU as a convenient scapegoat for inconvenient decisions, and people like you continue to spread completely uninformed FUD.
Let's even put aside all the benefits you have but apparently either don't know or don't care about. How well do you think your home country would fare against the USA or China or Russia on its own? The only weapon all of us have against the big power blocks of the world is being a power block on our own.
The EU isn't perfect, and I'm absolutely opposed to the Chat Control bullshit in its entirety, but don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
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If we agree that politicians are removed from democratic process then there is really no democratic process at all.
The EU is going to have to accept this increase in anti-EU sentiment, it will only ever increase as long as the EU has the democratic deficit that it has. It is what's both permitting this overreach, and the powerlessness to do something about it is what is breeding the anti-EU sentiment.
The problem begins and ends with the fact that there is just no realistic way to hold these people accountable. I don't know what it would take for people, across the EU, to consider punishing EU politicians to be more important than selecting their national government. A genocide, maybe? Something of that severity, no doubt. Certainly not something as pesky as instating a digital Stasi.
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Marie Antoinette didn't have mass surveillance. This is why they're trying to rectify the situation.
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I have two observations to make here.
1. It seems that most of the evil here is concentrated among the liberal right and liberal left. Both far right AfD types and the left are against this.
2. A lot of positions, when clarified, just want to keep the (bad) status quo of CC1.0, while opposing 2.0, which was the much more totalitarian one. This also includes the crucial shadow rapporteurs.
This is still not good, but unless I've understood something very wrongly here, this isn't the same as just pushing the worst version of chat control 2.0 through.
Might make sense to message the MEP's that oppose chat control moreso the ones that support it. Maybe they can use some of their internal influence to sway some people. I'm pessimistic about the amount of weight these representatives are giving to emails from citizens
So are they going to ban encrypted email? I am rather sure i could cobble together a chat UI whose backend was just email protocol. It would be needlessly complex, but all that ISPs would see is yet more encrypted email going back and forth.
https://delta.chat/en/
The recent times showed us that technical solutions are bananas.
Guardrails must be put at the constitution level, or any tech bypass can be just declared illegal.
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Delta Chat does that but it's a bit janky.
They’ll just criminalise private encryption for communication afterwards.
Yeah I agree they will put people to prison for trying to get around chat control
We see here how lobbyists undermine democracies.
Amazing how the EU commission does so unashamedly. It's basically the copy/paste system of the USA here. Big money wants laws. They have no shame in buying these laws.
I love the Freedom loving Free and democratic European Union!!!!!
Related:
European Commission's Metsola Overrides MEPs to Force Through Chat Control
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48657675
Most people in EU
Also those people
A blanket control affecting privacy would be bad. However we need controls that can prevent criminals from hiding behind anonymity and being able to organize massive activities just with a few online posts. These days it is trivial to organize and radicalize the youth into wrong paths overnight using social channels. You just need to say something that aligns with their problems, and most people get consumed by the divisive speech easily.
The effect is already seen how the ability of rioters far exceeds that of the authorities during recent incidents in UK and other places. Something need to be done for this.
Criminals will just side-step the law and use methods of communication that allow them carry on committing crimes.
If it was possible to outlaw crime we would have no crime already. We had riots in 70s, 80s and 90s too after all.
Meanwhile politicians get to strip the innocent of their privacy, which is very handy for them.
1. They are criminals. Criminals are not bound by laws. 2. Trying to reduce anonymity to go after criminals, simply means giving up anonymity for all but the criminals. See point 1 ... Criminals do not care and will find ways to not get caught. 3. I find the idea of this blanked statement that protesters are criminals insane dangerous and smells of authoritarianism. Peaceful protesters are just that, peaceful. Those that do crimes during protests, are criminals who can be literally caught. 4. The issue of "ability of rioters far exceeds that of the authorities", is more that the authorities do not have their ducks in a row. Blanked mass surveillance is not the solution. 5. Where does it stop? A what point are we running Russia like Max surveillance software on our smartphones, tracking where we go, who we talk too, ... all in the name of catching maybe, some criminals.
> Something need to be done for this.
Its called a better and responsive police force.
> radicalize the youth into wrong paths overnight using social channels
Imaging, that those people who radicalize youth are, ... not using social channel to do so. Wait, ... how did most of the people who ended up going to Syria get radicalized? Most was not via social media, it was with direct contact. Do we ban social contact?
This is just the typical quick fix type of answer. Problem, must be X. No, lets not invest money into police, social councils, case workers, etc...
Thing is, we have seen police getting lazy because, hey, why do investigation work if we can just get free evidence from criminals phones. O, those criminals now encrypted / try to hide data. Ok, so we now need to make it illegal because screw society, we want easier jobs.
No, everybody needs to give up their privacy "for the greater good". You must have something to hide, if you do not let the government read what you wrote, today, yesterday, 10 years ago ...
Have you ever been to China or other countries where saying the wrong thing, can be unpleasant to life changing? Where people learn to not talk what they rally think outside their little family corner. Where corruption is rampant because nobody can protest. Remember, today its your criminal protesters, tomorrow if a government changed into one you do not like, you become the criminal protester.
The right answer is a better funded and accountable police / social structure / help systems. And accountability, to ensure proper policing.
Not step by step removal of privacy.
> No, everybody needs to give up their privacy "for the greater good"
You can bargain (via voting) about how much of the stuff you need to forgo. But you can't have 100% privacy, if the nation has to function.
You don't need to give up any privacy at all, if you don't expect anything from government. But the concept of a nation is hinged upon it's citizens foregoing a bit of privacy, a bit of their income, a bit of their freedom. The nation imposes rules that you need to follow (loss of freedom), asks you to pay up taxes and makes your identity linked to the citizen services.
The nation comes into existences precisely from the things that you forego.
Respectfuly, that's an impressive load of bullshit.
Two cases in point:
- UK's Farage recently causing riots, destruction of property, arson and bringing harm to non-whites, intentionally, previously being openly supported and amplified by Musk.
- USA's lame duck president Trump causing January 6, 2021 riots ending up in destruction of property and killings of five people (including Capitol police officer)
The perpetrators causing the shit are very well known, their followers do not try to hide themselves, and no amount of mandatory ID when accessing the Internet would stop it.
Oh, and if you think being anonymous makes people nasty, you should stop by some Facebook or Nextdoor forum :)
Can you give an example of what happened in UK that points to this issue?
This is just outright wrong. Europe in general has gotten less and less violent over the last decade. Despite evils like the internet, smartphones, and tiktok. I'd argue it has become more difficult to rile up people than it was 40 years ago
You are free to 'argue', but you need to read about how the modern riots are being organized on a massive scale, so that you can correct your argument.
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I think the EU politicians who continue to push this agenda should be investigated as to where the lobbying money is coming from.
Looking across the Atlantic…
Yes everything stupid that the EU does to themselves is because of big bad USA...
They are perfectly capable of doing idiotic stuff like this entirely on their own.
Yes, however there is history with this:
- EU-US Passenger Name Record Agreement: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/eu-us-agr...
- EU PNR Directive 2016/681: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2016/681/oj/eng
- EU-US SWIFT / Terrorist Finance Tracking Program Agreement: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
- EU Data Retention Directive 2006/24/EC: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:62...
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 it here? They're usually very reasonable.
Denmark have been pushing for chat control for a long time.
The American view of the EU is very much a grass is greener one. They see the things that are better than in the US but not the things that are worse.
Yes, I know they've been pushing for this when they're pretty reasonable and independent on other issues. How come?
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The population doesn’t support chat control. The European Parliament rejected the chat control proposal earlier this year. Now it seems that the European Parliament president is trying to bypass that
Well put
Remember it's also coming for you:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/kids-act-would-require...
> The KIDS Act Regulates Private Messages, Too
I think Denmark is one of the most surveiled countries. And with the most compliant population. They call it trust... Denmark is not the fairytale they try to market them selves as. This is closer to their true color in my opinion. You could also try to look up the cases with former and current politicians in dk who actually have gotten caught perpetrating the very thing chat control is said to stop.
I'm to afraid of the f'ing EU to mention specific names here... But maybe some braver souls will
Denmark would also sterilize indigenous Greenland population and immigrants back in the 1950s-1960s. THey have a dark side few people know about.
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.
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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?
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Yes, you are right, the only two possible choices are to either give the government an absolute mandate to spy on every citizen, or to abolish the EU altogether, no other option is possible.
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> most annoying the cookie law
Also, the least consequential even ignoring often stated fact that cookie banners are malicious compliance. I care much less about cookie banners than about the ads, and for both of I have uBlock origin filters. So, what to be angry about exactly?
And either 80% of banners are not respecting the law, or the law managed to omit mandating making it as easy to reject as accept... Rejecting usually require you to enter into settings and sometimes click "reject" for every individual partner(!)
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"Cookie banners are malicious compliance" is starting to wear thin as an excuse. GDPR went into law in 2018, almost ten years ago and for almost as long websites have been "maliciously complying". If you don't don anything about it at some point it's not malicious anymore, it's just how the law is meant to be interpreted.
I have a different hypothesis for why the GDPR exists: it is to create a market for EU based compliance companies.
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 tech and entrepreneurship.
Life is bigger than tech or entrepreneurship. In the 00's I dreamed of moving to the US. That's changed, especially over the last decade. If I was offered a huge salary tomorrow to work in the US I would turn it down.
Website operators hate these cookies popups because they make their website more annoying and make me more likely to press the back button and click on a different website. As it should be. This incentivizes them to stop tracking me.
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99% of the people just click accept and go through.
This could be solved on the client side, by requiring all devices with browsers sold in EU to have separate cookie jars per domain and by default those cookies would be deleted on window/tab close. If you wanted to stay logged in to a site, you'd click a button next to the url bar that says "keep cookies for this domain", and be done.
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> 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.
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So you like the law, but don't like how it didn't actually solve the problem it was trying to solve?
I assume you're pretty well read up on matters of privacy, right? So you have a better awareness and understanding. But do you believe the average person does? Or would you assume that the average person has either been trained to ignore the banner, automatically consent to more invasive tracking, or is generally more confused about why the banner exists, or what it does?
The cookie consent law is the dumbest application of an attempt to improve privacy. It's made the internet worse, and is being used to train people into consenting to giving away their privacy without thinking... because: "clicking accept is what you have to do to use the page" -- every normal person casually browsing any site.
No implementation for cookie based consent can be done correctly.
Personally, I'd love to see a law that makes any/all dark patterns a crime, and empowers state prosecutors via grand jury to bring charges for them against both the company, and individual authors of the specific commits as jointly responsible. I don't want statutory laws, I want a trial jury to look at it, and decide if any technological measure, pattern, tactic, procedure, design, or measurement was used to encourage one decision over the other instead of a fair choice.
I don't want a set of rules that given enough funding any company is able to win as a negative sum game. I want a jury, not a trailing clause, to decide if the company is clearly acting in good faith or worthy of apocalyptic fines.
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> And why aren't you, the EU citizen, more annoyed by it?
Because the USA tends to privilege corporations over people whereas in the EU it's more balanced (still pretty biased towards corps, though), and I am a people, not a corporations.
Take, for example, the 'cookie law': I much prefer being annoyed by the cookie pop-up over websites shoving a ton of unnecessary and unwanted cookies onto my computer without permission.
...speaking of which:
> and their failures in regulating the Internet
Which political entity would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet? Where are citizens most protected from being inundated with advertising, unwanted cookies, unnecessary JavaScript, false news, scams, and all the other garbage one is normally subjected to when not putting in some amount of effort in combating that shit?
And because you are grateful for the cookie policies you don’t mind rewarding them with unlimited access all your private communication? I don’t really follow this argument..
> would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet
So again.. how do these basic/superficial (or even if they are extremely effective and useful, that doesn’t really change anything) regulations justify mass surveillance?
> false news
For what its worth in no way has the EU been effective in doing anything about this (I’m not sure they even tried doing anything that directly addressed it?)
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All of those are either illegal already (scams) or easily avoidable without regulation.
I’d rather have that instead of govt monitoring of all communications. Your govt can hurt you more than any of those things. Especially in the EU given what happened just a few decades ago.
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> refuse to learn from falling behind the US economically
The EU economy has been slowing down since 2007, the peak production of conventional oil. The US is still producing oil, which is why the US economy is better.
People love to think that they are richer or more successful because they are smarter. The fact is that the economy goes up when there is an abundance of energy, period.
So there is nothing to learn from falling behind the US economically, other than "the EU needs to adapt to the reality of its economy measurably slowing down". And following the US and their lack of regulations and tendency towards a fascist economy (with BigTech working together with the ruling class) is not the right direction, IMO.
> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Tech and entrepreneurs usually want to become rich by producing more. The best places to do that are where the is money, which is where the economy grows, which is where there is an abundance of cheap fossil fuels.
Entrepreneurs usually say "remove the regulations and our economy will grow again", but what they mean, really, is "remove the regulations and I will get rich, because I am on the side of those who would benefit from it".
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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.
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> falling behind the US economically and technologically
Are you even human? Do you really believe what you say? Doesn't it come across as absurd, from everything that happened to the US since the Snowden revelations, the Patriot Act, spiraling into fascism, a first time attacking science and democracy, a second time to install oligarchs, traitors, corrupt and incompetents to run the state, with the result of tanking your real economy (on every metric that's not related to AI), burning down your soft power, burning bridges with every ally, losing the war against Iran, and causing a generational talent exodus out of the US?
Oh yeah, by no means am I blindly defending "the EU leadership", but some reality check is much needed.
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It's not like we can do anything. We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues and we (in most countries) can't even vote on people. We just vote on 2-3 non-fringe parties and they choose people and policies. You may formally put an X next to some name but it's just a chosen party official. They need to walk party line and be in good standings with the leadership to even get on the list.
There is just nothing you can do really in that system other than pursue career in politics which is a no-go for most people for obvious reasons.
Yeah, we can: I am from Poland and precisely through this mechanism our MEPs/delegates/nominates know that supporting this would be a disaster for their political group right here back home regardless of direct voting.
Only Switzerland has a true democracy
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>> We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues
This is how democracy works pretty much everywhere. You vote for parties or people based on their policies.
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The education system has failed in the EU, but in a different way than it has in the US.
I realised this when people thought mandating the USB-C connections was a good idea because "it is the best standard". I didn't think the mandated connector was a huge deal per se, but it made it clear to me that there is a flawed thought process behind EU regulations. And this is a big deal.
Many things are not really understood in the EU. The majority don't seem to understand free speech. The EU has an article about free speech that clearly states there is no free speech, but people point to it when they claim there is.
Of all things to criticise, you pick out the one ruling that eventually lead to a consolidation of chargers? Really? I haven't ever met a single person who wasn't grateful of being able to have one cable for all their devices.
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Chat control is about controlling peoples life's and minds. The really scary part is how many actually wants this and mindlessly buy into the narrative the EU put forth about why it is needed.
Also worth noting is that this was voted down earlier this year and if im not mistaken also a couple of years ago. But the legislators then just started a new slightly different bill and started nodging their population even harder, and tried again. And again.
The people said no to this.. But apparently that does not matter?! Is this still a democracy?
And are we criticizing totalitarian regimes for surveiling their people and not allowing free speech... And doing this to our own population? It seems so Bizar to me.
Personally I don't know what to do. I have come to the conclusion that fighting again this is impossible because, in my opinion, no one listens even after a democratic vote as I said already... I'm disgusted by what we have become...
This is so wrong, but here’s another reason: a centralized totalitarian approach could look like a very pragmatic way to exercise control and governance on the population. This is true though only if your technical capabilities are at a similar or higher level of your competitors.
In the European case we have neither the technology advancement of the US, or the supply chain control of China.
This means that a centralized approach is only going to create a larger vulnerability surface for an external attacker.
A decentralized, privacy and security first approach isn’t only right for moral/ethical reasons. It’s the only way we have to defend ourselves, even if we had a fascist government.
You could also view it from the perspective of that if every other major superpower has their mass surveillance and you don't, it becomes an assymetrical informational situation where foreign governments can influence your citizens, but you cannot influence the foreign citizens since they are surveilled and their informational diet is restricted.
In some sense Chat Control is a geopolitical necessity for the EU, there is no choice to not do it.
why have we not heard more of a pushback from business and legal entities regarding privileged communication / protection of trade secrets?
What's to point of all this? Everyone will use Signal or some other E2E encrypted messenger, this is just bone tossing. Useless politicans spending time on useless things.
Chat control takes screenshots of your phone. E2EE is useless. It's government mandated spyware.
They are talking about mandatory on-device scanning. E2E doesn't solve this.
In every authoritarian regime people spent considerable amount of time on workarounds. Underground press, parallel education etc. this is just another iteration of Stasi like regime, just with a nicer suit and better PR.
In reality this should have been rejected wholesale and people proposing this barred from any public sector jobs, or even arrested for terrorist attack attempt (Chat Control fulfils definition of terrorism).
So the EU will just tell Apple and Google to remove Signal from their app stores and 95-99% of the population won’t bother figuring out it exists..
And as always, the only people who will bother will be the few% who are involved in some sort of illegal activity.
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Maybe the EU can work together with Russia on the Max messenger
China, Russia, and friends will provide digital escape hatches for Western cititizens and vice versa it seems
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They just can't let it go.
Is it democracy if they keep pushing agendas even if they are voted down?
It's an open secret the european union has nothing to do with the will of the people
This is bullshit. The EU parliament is the organ that shot it down so far.
Read the article. It is the national governments pushing this shit. They try to launder if through the EU because passing those legislations locally would likely be very unpopular.
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plenty of people desire something like this, and 'saving the children' is their genuine intent and desire. Humanity is willing to shoot itself in the foot again and again, there's no need for it to be some shadowy cabal.
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Yes the EU was setup as an organization more like the IMF or the World Bank. Its mandate creeped out over decades and now we are waking up to the authoritarian monster it became.
They setup a fake parliament which is indeed elected through universal suffrage but is only here to adopt legislations proposed by the Commission. Since citizen do not elect the Comission this has nothing to do with a democracy.
Here on HN, people fully understand how bad and unfit Chat Control is. But keep in mind the EU has been passing legislations like this for decades and in every domains.
For every good one (like mandating USB-C) you get 9 bad ones.
That is one gigant If indeed.
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RIP all of the open source European software initiatives.
There is nothing redeemable about this union anymore.
In cybernetics, there is a saying that;
"The purpose of a system is what it does".
By observation, the purpose governments is to run scams. After all, it makes no sense to attribute their purpose to things they consistently fail to do.
Relevant music vide featuring Stafford Beer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqBBNjkAlXM
I think the EU thinks that opposition to the EU must be from foreign actors. This is why citizens has to be surveiled so that the EU can catch the foreign actors or some goofy crap like that.
My point being that the opposition to the EU comes from EU citizens of the EU... Because the EU make stuff like chat control...
Or it could be we have fully crossed over into stasi territory already and they are having a great cozy party while they make life more and more unbearable for the population?!