EU officials are, incidentally, exempt from chat monitoring – which is quite convenient for someone like von der Leyen. Their communication is explicitly NOT to be monitored. The mere fact that those who drafted this law don’t want it to apply to them tells you everything you need to know about it.
These pathetic morons think they’ll be safe through this exemption. In reality these deliberate security holes will affect everyone. How will these morons be safe when every person they have contact with IRL is a walking microphone for every foreign intelligence agency?
So you’re telling me the one person who’s been making deals behind closed doors (illegal), and then ‘accidentally’ deleting all messages regarding said deals (also illegal) will be exempt from having all their communication scanned?
Not even Signal saves
Matrix would be the best alternative
misleading headline, this isn’t a list of countries in which the law will (if it passes) be different (it won’t be, it’s an EU law, so will be the same in all EU countries), it’s a list of countries that currently support/oppose the law
It isn’t misleading (that’d be a technically true headline, which this isn’t). This is a downright lie, or as some might say, “fake news”.
(it won’t be, it’s an EU law, so will be the same in all EU countries)
This is not true btw. It’s not a mandatory law, and if you read the news about this the last 3 weeks, you would know that.
EU laws are not automatically mandatory. That’s not how it works at all.
The law will be the same in all EU countries, including whichever parts you think will be “not mandatory” (I did read those news articles and am fully aware that mandatory scanning is no longer on the table).
Now let’s hope Parliament will still vote against it.
Caling your MEP is more efficient.
Wow, this is bad. I thought this was over when Germany chose not to support it. Apparently not!
Show is not over until the fat lady sings.
I believe Germany is now in favor of this new proposal, according to https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
Only Italy, Netherlands, Czech Republic and Poland are against. This seems to be based on “leaked documents from the September 12 meeting of the EU Council’s Law Enforcement Working Party”.
people miss the most important problem with this. chat control is a fascist tool that can and will be used against us minorities. this is especially dangerous when more and more countries are starting to lean right.
hitler would have had a field day with this kind of tech.
All nations are following North Korea’s lead.
North Korea is a testing ground to see what rulers can get away with. It won’t be long until every country operates like it.
Isn’t North Korea already a dangerous dictatorship with its citizens in a vice? I don’t think their benevolent leader needs to “get away” with any of the shit he does at this point, or what do you say? Is there any chance of overthrowing him?
It also makes what the Stasi in Socialist East Germany did to its citizens look harmless in comparison. It’s literally Big Brother, but you carry him around with you.
Danes are fascist, they pushed it through.
danes are sucking thiels cock for their own wicked reasons.
as we’ve always said; never trust a dane!
Danes have been quite xenophobic lately.
Welp guys, looks like I’m moving to [insert country without that sh*t] (TBD). Or atleast my router is.
The implementation is client-side, so this wouldn’t work. It forces all apps to have a client-side backdoor.
The thing is… that even if there are countries publicly rejecting this, once the infrastructure is in place and a backdoor exists due to it being enforced by some other country, how can you be sure it’s not being used / exploited?
Even in the (hypothetical) case that the government is not using it (regardless of what they might say to the public), I wouldn’t trust that this backdoor would be so secure that nobody else than a government could make use of it.
Why? Why is the loss of such a significant amount of privacy necessary?
It isn’t it’s just an excuse to put people you don’t like in some kind of hole where they rot to death.
Literally pedophiles.
Allegedly.
It isn’t necessary.
Everyone who originally proposed this or otherwise helped in drafting this should be thoroughly investigated under suspicion of foreign affiliation. Chat Control doesn’t just start the EU’s transformation into a surveillance state. It also weakens its digital defenses. No matter how you look at it, this is treason both towards the European people, as well as towards the individual countries and the Union as a whole.
And here I was thinking the EU was winning its fight against authoritarianism. Guess nowhere is safe, everyone’s gotta push back no matter where you are. Fucking exhausting that they can’t just leave us the fuck alone.
Sociopaths will be sociopaths. They’ll continue saying that protesting and violece are never the answer, while eroding our basic rights and ignoring all pushback.
When people rise up: “How dare you destroy property value!”
We are embracing authoritarianism everywhere. Democracies are dying.
Politicians are not ignorant of the risks; as the article mentions, they had several advisors, including scientists, who warned of the danger. If our leaders didn’t know it, they wouldn’t exclude themselves from the proposal.
If this came to Canada, my sister and I will be using Briar.
Is there something we can do to effectively oppose that shit ?
Maybe start here? https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
OK I’m getting a flip phone
I thought making calls and sending SMS was one of the least secure things you could do regarding communication? That secure and encrypted communication with messaging apps was the only way.
Now we have nothing. 😐
At least if you just do phone calls the attack surface is reduced… They can scan your calls maybe, but not your entire chat history with all of your contacts and give it to an AI which could profile you based on that + you are not scanned on everything else you do on your phone / locked into proprietary ecosystems.
The ideal would just be using a Linux platform and using something like xmpp, but who are you gonna convince to use it? People use what they are used to use, if it’s not popular messaging apps is phone calls… And now it seems a more private alternative…
Just get an Pixel 9a from a local shop, install GrapheneOS on it and use it as your primary.
Can confirm, the 9s are the best phones. Love my Pro.
It’s kind of unclear what “voluntary” means. Is it voluntary for countries to enforce? Is it voluntary for companies to scan chats?
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I thought it was the latter.
In that case, is there any change? Companies could already do that if they wanted. Many of them already did.
It seems the reason companies are currently allowed to do this in the EU is because there was in 2020 a temporary derogation from certain provisions of the e-Privacy Directive.
But it was temporary, so it will expire in April 2026. With this new law the intention is to make that “voluntary detection” a permanent thing they allow service providers to do, as a norm. The providers still have the choice to not do it, so I don’t think this affects services like signal, as far as I understand.
The later. However, they could still be fines for not doing what is needed to reduce “the risks of the of the chat app”, whatever the fuck that can mean when talking about illegal.content
Illegal content: anything that they don’t like.
Where is this explained? the article might be wrong then, because it does state the opposite:
scanning is now “voluntary” for individual EU states to decide upon
It makes it sound like it’s each state/country the one deciding, and that the reason “companies can still be pressured to scan chats to avoid heavy fines or being blocked in the EU” was because of those countries forcing them.
Who’s the one deciding what is needed to reduce “the risks of the of the chat app”? if it’s each country the ones deciding this, then it’s each country who can opt to enforce chat scanning… so to me that means the former, not the latter.
In fact, isn’t the latter already a thing? …I believe companies can already scan chats voluntarily, as long as they include this in their terms, and many do. A clear example is AI chats.
I recommend reading the dutch debate : https://www.tweedekamer.nl/kamerstukken/plenaire_verslagen/detail/2025-2026/17
And yes, the latter is currently a thing (but in a weaker form) but will no longer be allowed in april 2026, which is why this law is getting pushed so hard. Currently chats can be asked by police/interpol/… But they need good reasons, and the results can be varying because chat platforms like signal do not keep chat messages/stuff.
The new law forces them to have systems in place to catch or have data for law inforcements. It just allows for ‘any system to get the needed info’, it no longer says chat scanning is needed directly, but is rather indirectly which is as stupid and bad as before.Thanks for the link, and the clarification (I didn’t know about april 2026)… although it’s still confusing, to be honest. In your link they seem to allude to this just being a way to maintain a voluntary detection that is “already part of the current practice”…
If that were the case, then at which point “the new law forces [chat providers] to have systems in place to catch or have data for law inforcements”? will services like signal, simplex, etc. really be forced to monitor the contents of the chats?
I don’t find in the link discussion about situations in which providers will be forced to do chat detection. My understanding from reading that transcript is that there’s no forced requirement on the providers to do this, or am I misunderstanding?
Just for reference, below is the relevant section translated (emphasis mine).
In what form does voluntary detection by providers take place, she asks. The exception to the e-Privacy Directive makes it possible for services to detect online sexual images and grooming on their services. The choice to do this lies with the providers of services themselves. They need to inform users in a clear, explicit and understandable way about the fact that they are doing this. This can be done, for example, through the general terms and conditions that must be accepted by the user. This is the current practice. Many platforms are already doing this and investing in improving detection techniques. For voluntary detection, think of Apple Child Safety — which is built into every iPhone by default — Instagram Teen Accounts and the protection settings for minors built into Snapchat and other large platforms. We want services to take responsibility for ourselves. That is an important starting point. According to the current proposal, this possibility would be made permanent.
My impression from reading the dutch, is that they are opposing this because of the lack of “periodic review” power that the EU would have if they make this voluntary detection a permanent thing. So they aren’t worried about services like signal/simplex which wouldn’t do detection anyway, but about the services that might opt to actually do detection but might do so without proper care for privacy/security… or that will use detection for purposes that don’t warrant it. At least that’s what I understand from the below statement:
Nevertheless, the government sees an important risk in permanently making this voluntary detection. By permanently making the voluntary detection, the periodic review of the balance between the purpose of the detection and privacy and security considerations disappears. That is a concern for the cabinet. As a result, we as the Netherlands cannot fully support the proposal.
Id need to look for it again, but i remember reading she was saying that the current proposal is vague in what it sees as required to prevent what she calls risks. I remember them asking her multiple times if she was against a law to prevent csa and the sharing there off, in which she replied multiple times that she was not, but that the law was too vague about what it constitutes as necessary to prevent it. Did i dream it? ><
Edit: found it!
Mevrouw Kathmann (GroenLinks-PvdA): Het is niet per se alleen zo dat de huidige praktijk wordt voortgezet. Er zitten bijvoorbeeld ook zinnen in het voorstel die aangeven dat álle risico's moeten worden weggenomen. Het is ongelofelijk vaag, een heel grijs gebied, wat dat betekent. Dat is één. Dat is echt een heel groot risico. Daarnaast noemde de heer Van Houwelingen net al het punt van de leeftijdsverificatie. We hebben niet goed met elkaar kunnen bespreken wat daar nou precies in voorligt en hoe wij daar verder mee om moeten gaan. Dit zijn twee dingen die ik er nu zo uitpik.Ah, I see. Sorry, the text was too long and I’m not dutch so it was hard to spot that for me too.
But I interpret that part differently. I think them saying that there’s an ambiguous section about risks does not necessarily mean that the ambiguity is in the responsibility of those who choose to not implement the detection… it could be the opposite: risks related to the detection mechanism, when a service has chosen to add it.
I think we would need to actually see the text of the proposal to see where is that vague expression used that she’s referring to.
Ah, i see. Ye it can be interpreted in different ways, and reading the proposal might clear it up, but i doubt it. Its written extremely vague on purpose
just use signal
Ita not said they wont comply with eh standards
Xmpp, IRC, Matrix, all great decentralized alternatives, but good luck convincing people in contacting you on Xmpp…
This problem is a problem because it’s a social tendency, not because we don’t have alternatives… Very sadly…
XMPP is great but my wife hates it.
Hi Sorry can i ask what Is XMPP?
Btw as a secure messgaing app i use simplex, mabye i Will look into matrix
It’s an open, decentralized protocol used for real-time messaging, so you can find many apps using this protocol, on android there is conversations which is very light and modern, just choose a pseudo and chat, no other registration, it is a paid app on the app store but free on fdroid. I also used simplex before but it didn’t work well enough, the video calls were laggy.
What client do you suggest? I know It depends on the situation, but overall generally what would you suggest?
As I said as a client I suggest *conversations" on android to download from fdroid to get the free version.
Oki thanks
So XMPP is a messgaing protocol some apps use
Ty very much
And when they pull out of Europe because they won’t comply?
Write your own E2E encrypted peer-to-peer chat app (nobody has got time for that) or use some that doesn’t care about the law (pretty risky if it’s not open source, I doubt they’ll survive for long in the open), I guess
We are essentially manipulated into the belief that centralised internet is good and all. This is a push driven by the governments where the whole infrastructure is redesigned into essentially a police state where the only thing left is fascism.
Decentralisation must stay, and developments towards decentralisation must flow faster than ever. If the whole premise of the internet gets breached then it will be officially over, and we will all suffer in oppression.
It is available in fdroid
won’t help when their servers block access from EU
Wow, you mean taking instant messenger suggestions from Republicans in the House of Representatives organizing gangbangs wasn’t a good idea?
They probably drink water, too.
Hydration is important during gangbangs. Goes without saying
I dont see fdroid blocking the app. I think signal is in the guardian project repos. Anyway a repo can just be hosted in switzerland or on tor or something. I would be more worried about govenments blocking access to the signal servers.
All this theatre in the name of protecting kids, Yet the pedo formally known as prince andrew is still walking free.
Or Molly (alternative and more secure FOSS Android app for Signal), or Session or SimpleX.
