>Now Paris “on the whole” agrees with the draft. France welcomes both mandatory chat control and client-side scanning.

A few months ago, a broad security law was passed by the National Assembly in France. Initially, this law contained provisions, including the scanning of private messages, which were removed from the main text by a large majority of lawmakers, as it was deemed too intrusive.

The few officials (including Macron) who now claim that "France is OK with chat control" represent a minority that currently holds power in a country whose government was ousted less than two weeks ago.

Crooks.

What I don't understand is, why don't the authorities think the actual bad guys will avoid the surveillance?

It seems to me that organized crime will find their own solution, and the rest of us will occasionally have a snooping policeman checking our private messages. It's not unknown, even in Denmark, that people who are given access to private data will abuse it, eg snooping on ex girlfriends, that kind of thing.

Why do people think this chat control thing will be effective?

I had a thought reading the comments here but isn't this a ploy to break the EU, there is no way individual population will abide by it, this will increase recentment against the EU and trigger exits. Too many actors would benefit from this to make clear accusations but the fact it is American companies proposing their technologies is a first indication.

Can somebody explain to me how backdooring every app does not lead to the real risk of an entire population's bank accounts being emptied, or similar more hidden but widespread attacks that absolutely cripple any country doing this? Almost immediately, enemy State actors will have almost as complete access as the government passing the law; blackmail will become trivial; they could just subtly weaken adversaries nonstop over the years for a more patient return, etc? It just seems ridiculously dangerous. How is having a single point of failure (or handful of points of failure) for an entire country or continent defensible simply from the perspective of opsec?

Contact your representatives and sign Mozilla Foundation’s petition: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/campaigns/tell-the-eu-d...

If you have been watching the world in 2025 you know Tor is gradually becoming essential. Install the Tor Browser and search for free speech in the hidden service HTTP response dumps here: https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/ Not censored, not safe for work, sorry.

Time to dismantle the EU. The writing has been on the wall for a long time.

I moved from a country that used to have strong privacy laws(Sweden) to another that still has them.

Although Switzerland is far from perfect, it is a stable democracy with protections for its citizens.

The problem is when you build these gigantic political organisations, like the EU or USA, there is nowhere to go when the political elite decides to ram down the ideology du jour down your throat.

The world should be moving towards decentralisation, direct democracy and voluntary cooperation, but unfortunately, the opposite is the case.

Peace

What if we went the other direction - push chat control but on government and rich folks? Make them fully transparent as the price of power/influence, and leave normies opaque?

Ursula von Der Leyen will go down history as the worse EU representative ever.

Varoufakis had a very important take: that Europe needs to learn to survive post-EU.

From the Euroskeptics to the anti-imperialists, everyone wants the EU dead. Sadly, I tend to agree with them more and more.

Ironic how the people that should actually prove their transparency, the politicians working for us, are excluded.

You would think the Danish are smarter than this.

I think the Swiss ought to be very scared as well. Lived there for many years and for some reason every website I visited was following EU rules when servicing Switzerland visitors. Maybe they can’t technically separate what’s what, or choose to do this, but if Chat Control passes then essentially all of Swiss messaging (and Liechtenstein’s) gets to be overseen too.

So this is the future? The government spies on all communications 24/7 like the stasi? Where does civilization go from here?

When all the commercial software is backdoored the criminals are going to use open source alternatives. Suddenly all my devices, my family and the tech community are in the cross-hairs of law enforcement. I don't want to be one of the new victims of another war on drugs mess. We have enough real criminals for the courts and law enforcement to handle without creating a whole new lot out of law abiding people.

You know what, let it go through!

If the European people are too stupid to stop it and simply keep on voting for the parties who support this sort of law, then so be it.

The criminals will move on to other means of communication, the privacy minded folks will move to sideloaded Signal-like apps and take their friends and families with them if possible and the rest will just have to learn to live under the new EU-Stasi regime and watch their privacy being stripped a little more day by day.

I didn't think Denmark was a pseudo-democracy but you learn new things every day.

am I understanding correctly that Chat Control will use AI to scan the text of every private message, and automatically report suspected "grooming attempts" to police? how the hell do they think that will work? does the AI know that the message recipient is a minor? that the message sender is an adult? that "want to meet up tonight?" is sent by a pedophile to a stranger's kid for an illicit rendezvous, and not by a dad to his son to work on a science fair project?

this is just bananas crazy. so many lives will be ruined by false positives. the chilling effect will be like an Arctic snowstorm. and any actual groomers will find ways to disable it.

Any protests planned?

The online Stasi analogies are simplistic. This is (mostly) about Tech companies' money, namely:

- Palantir Technologies

- 'not-for-profit' Thorn

> The Commission’s failure to identify the list of experts as falling within the scope of the complainant’s public access request constitutes maladministration. [0]

> ... the complainant contended that the precision rate of technologies like those developed by the organisation are often overestimated. It is therefore essential that any technical claims made by the organisation concerned are made public as this would facilitate the critical assessment of the proposal. [1]

> The Commission presented a proposal on preventing and combating child sexual abuse, looking in particular at detecting child pornography. In this context, it has mentioned that support could be provided by the software of the controversial American company Palantir... [2]

> Is Palantir’s failure to register on the Transparency Register compatible with the Commission’s transparency commitments? [2]

(Palantir only entered the Transparency Registry in March 2025 despite being a multi million vendor for Europol and European Agencies for more than a decade)

> No detailed records exist concerning a January meeting between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the CEO of controversial US data analytics firm Palantir [3]

> Kutcher and CEO Julie Cordua held several meetings with EU officials from 2020 to 2023 - before the former stepped down from his role - including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson, and European Parliament President Roberta Metsola.[4]

> The Ombudsman further concluded that Thorn had indeed influenced the legislative process of the CSAM regulation. “It is clear, for example, from the Commission’s impact assessment that the input provided by Thorn significantly informed the Commission’s decision-making. The public interest in disclosure is thus self-evident. [4]

> EU Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly has announced that she has opened an investigation into the transfer of two former Europol officials to the chat control surveillance tech provider Thorn. [5]

[0] https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/decision/en/176658

[1] https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/recommendation/en/179395

[2] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2024-00016...

[3] https://www.euractiv.com/news/commission-kept-no-records-on-...

[4] https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/07/18/european-ombudsman-...

[5] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-eu-ombudsman-l...

Who would be allowed to configure the scanners and receive the reports, an EU security body, or the member states?

You can go to any number of sites (here's a nice one https://webencrypt.org/openpgpjs/), and encrypt a message. You can exchange public keys over any text channel. You can then send encrypted messages over that text channel. Anyone who really needs to send encrypted messages, trivially can. Of course, many criminals won't, but should we all sacrifice our privacy for such a pathetic measure of security?

Okay, but who prevents me to exchanging a private key irl and sending encrypted messages over Whatsapp?

Will Chat Control be retrospective? I.e. once it's implemented will governments have access to all previous communications or just those from that point onwards? Also how does it work geographically? Is it based on my location, where my phone was made/bought, something else...?

1984

I can't wait to find out what politicians are sending!

its okay, they promise not to scan encrypted content.

Enjoy democracy, EU-style

Does anyone really think it won't pass?

You westerners are way too delusional about the world we’re living in.

I just had a conversation with American colleagues about life in Europe. And the things that stood out were “cookies policy,” trash recycling, and such trivialities.

Meanwhile, Europe is already at war. China openly wants to dismantle the good life Americans take for granted. Their news is full of militaristic propaganda, day after day.

This isn’t the 90s. It’s not the 1950s either. You didn’t “win” the war. You cant build, you can’t manufacture. And yet you talk about freedom?

Reality is going to catch up very soon. Many of you will lose not just your comfortable lives but your freedom too.

Take Denmark’s policy with LLM monitoring. What’s wrong with that? China and Russia do it already — and they benefit. That’s how you prevent both external and internal threats. That’s how you build a strong state.

If your adversary monitors and you don’t, you’re already in a losing position.

And don’t forget — the subject country is directly part of the brewing conflict in the Baltic Sea with Russia.