Comment by inigyou

Western Europe is a place where the political structures, for better or worse (mainly worse) still trust people to follow the law. Much EU politics makes more sense with this in mind. They consider a law saying "you may only use this capability to scan for child porn" to be a barrier against other uses, the same way they consider a law saying "you must get the user's consent before setting a tracking cookie" to prevent anyone from setting a tracking cookie without consent. They don't feel a need for hard fences like "chat must be encrypted" or "browsers must disable cookies on every website by default" because they consider the soft law to be an adequate solution.