Yep, and this is a perfect example of a base rate fallacy situation... even if the scanner is 99.99% accurate, because an even higher percentage of photos are innocent, most matches the scanner will find will be false positives.

The bad consequences are diffuse, abstract and distant (conspiracy-looking, tinfoil-like), while it's very easy to viscerally understand that "even if they just save one child, it's already worth it".

They should give precise numbers of how many such crimes are detected via such means or are expected to be detected per year, and how many of those are not possible to catch through regular investigative work. It just seems ridiculously out of proportion especially that with all this flurry around the topic, the criminals surely aren't using WhatsApp for this any more, but especially won't be once the law is adopted. Sure, many are likely stupid but if they are so stupid, won't they fall into other honeypots?

Why are chat apps the best leverage for uncovering this? They'd have to justify this with some sort of data and numbers.

Because later they can just come back and say, well unfortunately they are now all using other means, so now we need to break https,we need to ban e2e, we need to ban vpns, tor and foss operating systems etc etc.

especially that the guard applying to protect the henhouse seems to have a suspiciously furry tail...

CSA makes ppl lose all logic, so is used to justify illogical things.

Reminder that none of this has any evidence that it helps CSA, but nobody cares about the actual children.

so much for the principle of least privilege..

Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, AfD) is a party that wants to revoke citizenship of brown people and expel them from the country. There are very good reasons they should be banned. Their opposition to chat control is completely incidental.

> Political groups are factions of the Parliament, while parties are alliances of national parties at EU level, funded through the EU budget. Neither the group in the Parliament nor the lawmakers will face any consequence if ESN loses its status as a European party.

It’s important to note the lawmakers stay in office even if the European party is banned.

Europe is also not the US and from my knowledge it seems that this is the only party suspected of not complying with values. There are many many more parties that they are not trying to ban.

This party is far-right neofascists that are openly hostile to the democratic order and wants to deport German citizens to Africa if they're not Aryan enough.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/01/11/l...

> It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values

This is a limitation of the American two-party system that incentives polarization instead of cooperation.

We have a working multi-party democracy and a majority across parties and ideologies voted for this.

To say this has anything to do with Chat Control betrays either a deep lack of understanding of European politics or a conscious attempt to mislead in order to garner support for extremists.

This is a bit skewed. AfD stands for a lot more than "merely" an opponent of chat control, including worshipping the 1930s era.

As another example, one of their members (Noah Krieger) fights on behalf of Russia, conquering lands and killing civilians (article from today only in german, sorry: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/videos-mit-schutzweste-u...). And many other problems I could list about AfD. So t he "they want to ban those opposing chat control" - sorry, that is a huge simplification.

> It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values.

Ah? And why are there only two corrupt parties in the USA to begin with? I mean that's no real choice. Both are corrupt, and one now entered cult-status with the mad orange king. His cronies get rich. Everyone sees this. So, sorry, but your attempt to promote the USA while praising the AfD, is simply flat out rubbish nonsense. We only have bad actors here, no good ones.

The party they want to ban are neo-Nazis.

> It would be a pity if I had to have a separate analog camera just for baby photos because then I'd need to learn the whole developing film stuff.

Polaroid coming back in business! I would not complain at all if we started reverting some of our lifestyle behaviors back to analog.

Apple's proposal was only for photos being uploaded to iCloud and not local ones.

IIRC weren't there some thoughts that they'd switch iCloud to E2E but add local scanning on upload (compare to what it currently when Apple, Google, etc. freely scan all your cloud photos anyway). That didn't seem like a terrible deal on paper.

I am not fully acquainted with the details, but I would not discard (3) make e2ee illegal, at least for platforms of certain size etc. That is what the proponents ultimately want anyway. If they settle for anything else, it's because of the resistance.

Platforms will stop offering E2EE . Didn't Instagram abandon E2EE ?

> The second is the Apple style on-device CSAM scanner?

This is exactly what has been proposed. E.g. WhatsApp has a piece of code that scans images and texts before sending. After that, they are "encrypted".

You are correct in that both option 1 and 2 are possible. For end-to-end encrypted messages only option 2 is possible. The content will be scanned directly on your own device and the data will be sent to the authorities without your knowledge, if the software detects something suspicious. This is called client-side-scanning.

Well it's privacy from private companies. The government still needs to see everything you do just in case. Its not like you have anything to do hide? Do you?

At this point I think it's obvious that EU is in turmoil. They're struggling to come to grips with the idea of a Russian invasion on their eastern borders, and simultaneously USA pivoting to Asia and not willing to front their defense after 40+ years of imploring them to do so themselves.

They've outsourced nearly every critical component of a large sustainable society to the rest of the world: Russia, USA, China, India.

But at the same time, their politicians can't do anything because the minute they suggest that they might have to start cutting pensions and public welfare, and all of these different things in order to start supporting national industry and defense, they lose support immediately.

>everyone else is doing it so why miss out the opportunity

You are now finally realizing what a trojan horse is.

Yes, the derogation expired on 4 April 2026.

This should not be put in the same category as Chat Control 2.0. Doing so severely dilutes the brand Chat Control.

> EU politicians spend more time on chat control than on the reopening of Hormuz

I thought I'd heard it all here on HN, but expecting EU to clean up after the US shooting itself in the foot with a completely unnecessary war probably comes somewhere in top 5 easily.

Would've been so much better to reduce the scope of your comment to just energy security.

I don't see how the EU lived live with already higher energy prices compared to the US for so long and still don't make better renewable policy top priority.

They do have us in their power. They don't have Iran under the same power.

Funny you think they think that. They just want control.

Short-term, follow the steps on the website and contact your political representative to explain to them why it's such a bad idea.

Long-term, switch to another messenger app that's opensource and truly E2E encrypted.

That also shows why this is such a foolish proposal.

The truly scary people are not on the "consumer" chat apps anyway and most certainly will be the first ones to switch to another communication channel if this passes. If this will have any effect it'll be that some, "dumb" criminals will be caught.

Use the submission form on the site to email your representatives.

Vote for parties that oppose this nonsense. In the meantime, install Linux on your desktop/laptop, and a free Android variant on a compatible phone. Use Signal, and urge your family and friends to do the same.

The irony is that those questions can only be legally questioned when they're approved (and sometimes have a defined implementation)

Then there's the whole kerfuffle about how to actually implement this

So the thing that comforts me is that it's a dumpster fire all the way down and I'm sure there will be plenty of legal complaints about it

No, it has to be burned down. The people in charge will never allow real changes.

  Dismantling the EU is like burning down your own house 

Of course Americans want us to dismantle the EU, we are even weaker against US influence without it.

Exactly. This is ridiculous behavior. Simple solutions for complex problems are usually the wrong ones.

One griefer which promised prosperit fueled Brexit, which caused Britain visible stagnation and now he is a candidate for MP promising to fixing it all yet again.

I need to repeat, that Simple solutions for complex problems usually do not work.

the eu has always been an instrument of american imperialism. leader like ursula was casted away of german politics for corruption and most of the other big names had ties to american companies like goldman sachs or’other financial institution. the eu is a prison for all of us. for a moment germany thought they could use it as an instrument to win and crush its biggest competitors (france and uk) but now they dont have an energy sector (lost thanks to their dear american friend bombing nordstream and foreign countries financing an anti nuclear narrative) and as such they now also lost the heart of their economy : their industry. the final nail in the coffin is spain opening the gates to millions of mens from less developed countries while major european economies have record youth unemployment.

its a crime against what was not so long ago some of the greatest nations on earth. now were as citizen are living under a distopia of urss with the worst of capitalism combined with the worst of communism. mass surveillance, removal of all personal freedom (freedom of speech, right to own property and cars, right to inherit, right to have a nation for our people, harshnpunishment for any contestation’up to jail timz for memes while at the same time very lenient justice toward murderers, rapists and other criminals.)

we gave away our right to exist and be nations and we did that without even a fight

>Dismantling the EU is like burning down your own house just to get rid of flies.

I don't like this comparison at all. Europe, the land that housed, fed and scarified my ancestors, is my house, not this supra-governmental corrupt bureaucratic institution called the EU that does not represent me nor speak in my name.

Empires, monarchies, governments and all such man-made institutions like the EU get torn down all time, when they become too bloated, incompetent, corrupt and cronyistic and lose legitimacy in the eyes of the people. See all human history.

Forests go through prescribed burns in order to be saved, for their own good, and so must political institutions. And when the rot is too big, it can't simply be "patched" anymore, it needs to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch with fresh new people, which in turn will get corrupted over time and get torn down, and so on, rinse and repeat because that's human nature.

Ironically, the EU has achieved its goal of uniting all Europeans, as in they're all now united via hating what the EU has become and what it's doing.