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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.

its also just disastrous for signal to noise ratios. scanning everything means any sort of error rate is going to cause massive amounts of incorrect labelling. this means innocent things getting flagged and put into a system where people are treated like offenders when they arent until they can get an actual human with authority to review their circumstances (not guaranteed to happen at all btw), or some actual offenders get away with more bc they passed a scan

outlier cases aside, there is also just a large amount of processing power that will go into this, the service can only be worse off for it. Privacy is not just about being able to hide things, it is also about being in control of how you present to the world. not because that control is maniupulative but because we all exist within our own microcosms of uniqueness, using words slightly differently than each other, and having certain balances of intention and meaning with those we send messages to that cannot be fully presumed from a 3rd party. even in images.

Are they really saying "if you want to send private messages then go make your own network" ?

I’ve shared this before, I really like this quote:

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."

H.L. Mencken

I have put up a list of all the MEPs who voted for the urgency procedure yesterday (in breach of EU rules) as well as their voting history on fundamental rights issues and who has been lobbying them:

https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chat-control-the-415-who...

In the list of people that are worried about children.... the government is at the very end.

> Most everyone would love to see more work on stopping child sexual abuse.

By the parents. Install parental controls that only allow to message you and closest relatives. Problem solved.

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.

> Rather than narrow and specific - it's a broad based law

Because narrow law is easier to avoid or find the loophole and a single case is enough to induce panic and anger.

At some point we just have to accept the kids as collateral.

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..

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

Technology is, furthermore, the wrong place to address child abuse of any kind, sexual or otherwise.

This is like trying to prevent burglary by working with the factory that manufactures pry bars.

> stopping child sexual abuse

> suddenly touches everyone

..............I see what you did there.

> How would these laws prevent me from just side loading my own open source client?

They do not.

> 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.

> 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".

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 ?

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.

There are in betweens of an iphone and analog camera. You can use a digital camera with an SD card that you plug into a laptop that never connects to internet.

You make it sound as though this is a proposal for legislation in the US...

It was never about children. They're just using children as political weapons to justify their 1984 panopticon dictatorships.

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?

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

You are now finally realizing what a trojan horse is.

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.

It's 100% about control - it's the same in the UK.

Last year it was about having to scan your face to verify your age to access porn (to protect the children). They said: It's not about control, it's about protecting children.

Last month the same government announced they will use the same technology to prevent access to Youtube and Twitter without giving over your ID and confirming who you are... Still under the 'protecting the children' banner.

This just says Facebook is allowed to scan for child porn though?

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.

> Does that imply it's currently not allowed?

Not for the last few months, no; Chat Control 1 expired.

People (well, the European Parliament, which is arguably the closest approximation) have clearly and repeatedly opposed Chat Control.

The Commission is an expression of _governments_ (and this one in particular is the result of painstaking compromise) and is only loyal to presidents and prime ministers. It has no accountability to the EP, and it shows.

Conservatives and right-wing. Gives them more control. It‘s a pattern that gets obvious once you see it. It’s so they can hide their own secrets better. In Germany, we have a law that grants you access to information, the "Informationsfreiheitsgesetz“. This was used in the past to uncover morally wrong or illegal behavior, mostly done by the conservative party. This party, as they are currently in charge, is now actively working to change the law, so it's in their benefit.

They could make all e2ee chats, group chats. Where instead of a 1-1 chat between two people or many-many chat between a lot of people, they do 1-1+1 or many-many+1, where the +1 is the government. Technically the underlaying company or anyone else still won't have access to messages and e2ee won't be "broken", except for the fact that there's one more party in the key exchange.

Or they scan at the edge on the user's device.

Either way, both are very prone to false positives and and very much privacy invading.

They either just ban E2EE messaging or add a client-side scan of the content before "encrypting" it.

That's down to how the EU works. These kind of decisions are made in multiple governing bodies. There's the council, which is made up of representatives from member states governments and the parliament, which is made up of directly elected MEPs.

The national government of Bulgaria's position isn't necessarily in line with Bulgarian MEPs.

> Supreme Court allows Texas to require age verification for mobile apps

> 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.

What shows up in your news feed and what the politicians are spending time on are wildly different things.

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.

Who's arguing for that? And why is it not "reasonable" to ask for basic privacy?

This is a strawman argument. Almost no one who wants to preserve their right to free and open communication without government knowledge or interference, wants that so that they can hack.

It’s not about catching hackers or child predators, it’s about government 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

Even if there was no lobbying or corruption, the EU is structurally flawed: the Council, which is made up of 27 mandates that were given for local politics, is used by nations to launder their domestically unpopular laws through an EU indirection layer, the Commission has no electoral link (VDL was appointed, when afaik the Parliament should nominate a Commission President), the Parliament, the legislative body, has no legislative initiative, and despite rejecting laws drafted by the Commission, as we've seen, those laws can be forced through indefinitely until the Commission gets the rubber stamp it needs.

Their stance is of non-compliance and leaving EU market if Chat Control 2 get into law.

https://aboutsignal.com/news/the-end-of-private-conversation...

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

Look at this other piece in the frontpage:

> Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera (allaboutcookies.org)

the eu should never have been born. The above are its results - and just an example. How do we fix that disaster?

The EU is beyond reform, this law targets exactly this: nascent political projects that threaten the status quo.

I believe that the EU will cause so much strife that the long peace we've enjoyed on the continent will be brought to an end, not because of the EU, but because of the wedges drawn between pro-EU and EU-skeptic countries.

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

I was a big EU federalist but now it seems just a tool for liberal authoritarianism pushed by the established parties.

>Europe is our home.

At the same time parts of my country feel less and less like home if at all and those politicians really hate adressing it.

>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.

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