Quokk.auReality Check: EU Council Chat Control Vote is Not a Retreat, But a Green Light for Indiscriminate Mass Surveillance and the End of Right to Communicate Anonymously
Blaze (he/him)www.patrick-breyer.de/en/reality-check-eu-counc…
4 Comments
Comments from other communities
aev_softwareRemember that the Council is meant to protect and enable trade. They only care about citizens for submitting them to exploitation.
If you discuss “the EU” you have to distinguish between Council and Parliament. The Council has no obligation to act according to the Parliament’s wishes. They are not a democracy.
Thanks for your comment. I’m still only learning how legislation in the EU works. However, so far I haven’t been able to confirm what you’re saying. Could you help if you know? (I assume not only me, but possibly other readers, too)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_European_Union
Here it doesn’t say (almost) anything about “trade”. Admittedly I’ve only read 2-3 pages and then used Ctrl+F to search on the rest of the page though.. Is it a de-facto split between the legislative powers of the Council and the Parliament? Where to read about it?
Ok, it seems there is little doubt that EU chat control will be implemented. The question then becomes: How can individuals opt out of this? What existing technical solutions are already available, and what needs to be newly developed?
there is little doubt that EU chat control will be implemented
Personally, I believe there’s a chance for stopping this. EU is not an authoritarian state. I wouldn’t give up too early – instead would rather fight and provide public pressure for the direction of the law that supports mine and everybody’s freedom.
This is like the 15th time they’ve tried to implement this. The fact that it came up, they were told his is a bad idea, it was shot down, and they STILL want to keep pushing and keep pushing it; what it really aught to tell you is that it’s time to re-evaluate your diagnosis of the EU and its tendencies.
Authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere, because opportunists see vectors to power available everywhere in technology, now that it has firmly propagated among everyday people. They can spread lies and misinformation, and a huge swath of people just fucking buy it. Consent can be manufactured at the drop of a hat.
They can’t allow dissenting opinions or pesky truth tellers to get in the way of their petrofortunes, of their pedo rings, their yachts, their security blankets.
EU is not an authoritarian state
…yet. At this point I wish some aliens had mercy on us and nuked certain parliaments & sniped billinaires on this planet simultaneously, giving us a chance to try & start over.
rnercle…yet. At this point I wish some aliens had mercy on us and nuked certain parliaments & sniped billinaires on this planet simultaneously, giving us a chance to try & start over.
why would we need aliens to do that? people reclaimed their “chance to try & start over” many times before.
quick_snailAny centralized chat protocol is prone to centralized control. This is why Signal Messenger is also affected.
Opting-out of this threat is only possible by using a decentralized protocoll that can also be easily setup by individuals.
Matrix is practically centralized as the majority of its users is on one server, probably due to the setup being not so easy.
There are decentralized protocols that are also practically decentralized. First coming to my mind: XMPP. Many servers offer sign-up for free. If someone wants to setup their own server instead, it takes an hour with Prosody including all configuration. They made it particularly easy as decentralization is their selling point.
TropicalDingdongWho is promoting this and why is it constantly coming back?
The timeline is here
Currently Denmark pushing it, they hold the EU presidency at the minute. Their minister for justice - Peter Hummelgaard is responsible for the big push and the wording. Specifically trying to pull the wool over the general public.
Ireland are next (they take over in January)
And the minister for justice in Ireland (Jim O’Callaghan) is also in favour of it.
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights - Right to privacy in the digital age
Thank you.
But what groups are advocating for this? There is clearly a significant campaign behind this. It doesn’t seem at all grassroots.
At a guess, I’d imagine big tech companies are lobbying as most of the information that they use comes from data gathering. Using data directly from texts etc. Leaves them open to court cases.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/12/eu-gdpr-data-law-us-tech-giants-digital
The options are limitless to the politicians regarding money making opportunities pushing x,y and z through once our private correspondence and devices are being scanned.
For example, in years to come insurance companies could refuse to pay out on all sorts of claims using that data.
Doctor may have recommended you walk a mile a day and change your diet.
You don’t do it, or just miss a day, your life insurance policy is voided.
Car crash not your fault, no payout because you missed something else etc.
I couldn’t begin to to guess the amount of ways that this information could be used, but it’s a complete u-turn from what the EU was saying only a few years ago
They still recommend using signal - but only internally.
Which in itself is bizarre.
And exempting themselves from being scanned is just showing what they really think.
I’m trying to learn more about EU politics, and when something like this won’t die after being beat down several times, in the US it’s almost always some industry lobbying organization.
And a problem we have globally, is that there isn’t an organized counter movement in the opposite direction (that privacy is a human right, that this isn’t a path to security, that states need to be restrained and restricted in their tendencies towards authoritarianism).
Without that countermovement, it’s almost inevitable something like this will pass as the lobbying organization can long outlive the current generation of activists or politicians who see the problems with something like chat control.
https://www.corporateeurope.org/en/2025/11/roll-back-digital-rights-prepared-secrecy
Yes, that’s the same with many things. No counter movement.
We will see how transparent it all is
https://transparency.eu/briefing-lobby-transparency-in-the-eu/
We have to be the ones that continue building the movement. Plenty of us already are but with each of us active, and getting others active-connected it will help so much. We all can way more in a healthy way get things done. Let’s not make it easy for them at all.
Getting people to switch to Matrix, & Stoat for real-time collaboration.
Piefed for overview and more organization by having people doing.
Pixelfed, & Loops by Pixelfed for Live-Streaming Incidents.
Also, to stop them infecting people’s minds with their virus
melroyI know who.. all kinds of people in different governments government organizations like in the Netherlands these people: https://organisaties.overheid.nl/46813/mr_drs_HP_Schreinemachers/
He is head of Justice and Security Ministry.
It feels like this is just going to keep coming back, and that it’s being pushed by a centrally organized project. If privacy protections aren’t effectively enshrined in law, inevitably this kind of nanny state surveillance will happen.
2000% true. We will slowly move to a surveillance state. And we end up in the same list like North-Korea, China, etc..
Stop soft giving up. Say yeah they try but we will not let them. Get active and do with others! Brainstorm together!
ell1eI posted this before, but it doesn’t even seem to be voluntary at all, from what I can tell from the draft:
“Upon that notification, the provider shall, in cooperation with the EU Centre pursuant to Article 50(1a), take the necessary measures to effectively contribute to the development of the relevant technologies to mitigate the risk of child sexual abuse identified on their services. […]”
“In order to prevent and combat online child sexual abuse effectively, providers of hosting services and providers of publicly available interpersonal communications services should take all reasonable measures to mitigate the risk of their services being misused for such abuse […]”
These quotes sound mandatory, not voluntary. And let’s look what these technologies referenced are:
“In order to facilitate the providers’ voluntary activities under Regulation (EU) 2021/1232 compliance with the detection obligations, the EU Centre should make available to providers detection technologies […]”
“The EU Centre should provide reliable information on which activities can reasonably be considered to constitute online child sexual abuse, so as to enable the detection […] Therefore, the EU Centre should generate accurate and reliable indicators,[…] These indicators should allow technologies to detect the dissemination of either the same material (known material) or of different new child sexual abuse material (new material), […]”
Oops, it sounds again like mandatory scanning.
The new draft seems to pretend better to look less mandatory, but it still looks mandatory to me. Feel free to correct me if somebody can figure out that I’m wrong.
The current proposal as far as I understand it is that they will tell a company/service to “voluntaraly” scan the content.
Then an open source project that is forced to comply can just stop development and be forked on the last commit and shrug shoulders.
Which will buy enough time, because legally making those requests will take time and work. I can easily see fork related infrastructure for end users making it really eash or automatic to keep up with that cycle.
But even better would be to develop open source hardware based communication solutions, that don’t have the ability to add a backdoor through a software patch. Think like a pager with all the security and privacy bells and whistles.
A much better and desired solution is to stop this law from ever happening by societal pressure, in my personal opinion. I wasn’t born in the EU, but I live here many years now. I choose to believe that EU isn’t fully corrupted, and that many good and meaningful changes are still happening.
Yes, but how though?
We’ve stopped chat control over and over for years. But now they seem to have went through with it.
Usually the linked website has instructions. Now it simply says:
About the Vote: The Council mandate was today endorsed by the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER).
About the Procedure: The text will now be negotiated with the European Parliament. The Parliament’s mandate (adopted in Nov 2023) explicitly rules out indiscriminate scanning and demands targeted surveillance based on suspicion.
If there is an organized protest in front of the parlament, link it please.
I feel like the biggest issue is the lack of 3rd party app stores or the need to “sideload” as opposed to just fucking installing an application like any normal computer
Whats the difference between sideloading and installing? I don’t get it tbh.
On windows for example, it is the norm to go online to a website, download an exe and double click it - instead of going to the microsoft store. And both are ways to install software. Neither way is doing it sideways.
But also
I can easily see fork related infrastructure for end users making it really eash or automatic to keep up with that cycle.
There could be a store that installs software from github (there already is) and additionally tells you “hey this app you have got forked and the fork has more development happening, do you want to switch to that one and migrate all your settings? y/n”
I think the term was originally coined for installing apps on jailbroken iphones, but every company with its own app store has since adopted it because it makes it sound shady.
There shouldnt be a difference but there is. Most iPhones require sideloading to get non-Apple App store apps.
The issue is for most people, if the government fucks around and gets Signal banned, Apple is their enforcer all the while harping about security and standards and other nonsense. Its horseshit because the lack of encrypted messengers like Signal makes people sitting ducks for surveillance and prosecution from a corrupt governement and Apple enforces their violent monopoly on deciding if the people using its products have safe access to quality, encrypted appz
if the government fucks around and gets Signal banned
you can use threema or wire or something else will become available on the appstore
lascapiGood luck to find people to use this apps.
You know, the network effect etc… 😔
But wait, the same EU is asking for interoperability to fight the network effect !! Maybe there is a light !
Why wouldnt they do the same to Threema and Matrix/Elements/etc
The same stuff would likely apply to Threema, any chat app that publicly is known for e2ee and refuses to backdoor it will be fair game
Cooper8Prohibition leads to the propagation of means of evasion. By attempting to ban teenagers from popular means of communications they will incentivize mass adoption of “illicit means” of communications, and create another generation both familiar and comfortable with “illegal online activity” like the Napster generation. Just like Napster, this will also accidentally push youth into online platforms and channels where they are more likely to encounter content not suitable for minors and malware.
The only “truly effective” form that this type of internet control can take is requiring a digital ID verification to establish a connection to the network at the ISP, and that is a nightmare setup we should be prepared to fight tooth and nail.
that won’t work anymore, because today not even just to youth, but everyone the only thing that matters is convenience. their friends are not on there? they are not interested! maybe they would try it for fun? too bad, their phone does not allow installing it
You are vastly underestimating the youths current addiction to social media. Take it away and you will see some rapid pursuit of novelty.
who said they’ll take away social media. the popular addictive services will remain
Australia is leading the way, multiple EU nations have stated interest/intent: https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/science/these-nations-might-ban-social-media-for-teenagers/story
Recommend you read https://goodgoodgood.co 2 articles on Hope: study find hope key to a meaningful life, & new study finds hopeful people live better lives (14 year study)
Doom and gloom gets nobody anywhere. Get active with others. Together we brainstorm and do. Plenty of people globally are already doing as well but the more the merrier.
The more of us doing the quicker, better, and faster we succeed! Switch people to open source!!
AkasazhThe “voluntary” aspect will be just like when Don Corleone makes “an offer that he can’t refuse”.
What changed in the German stand the earlier from “That’s not acceptable, that won’t happen under our watch”?
I vaguely read somewhere (?) that there might have been a deal with the French about something completely different in exchange of support. Is there any information on that?
For the record, it’s possible to implement age verification with zero-knowledge proofs. IIRC, California has a proposal for this. It’s a myth that surveillance and encryption are compatible, but it’s also a myth that age verification necessitates a loss of privacy or anonymity.
Unless there’s a proper assessment, ZKP looks a bit like a magic wand to a very complex problem. Provided that it’s done right (how exactly?), it might turn to a superb fingerprint facilitating tracking and surveillance for every one. Eg. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/zero-knowledge-proofs-alone-are-not-digital-id-solution-protecting-user-privacy?language=en.
I’m only arguing that such a magic bullet is possible. Every objection this article raises seems like it is a straw man criticism – they’re imagining potential flaws in a zkp system of their own design. Take this one:
What ZKPs don’t do is mitigate verifier abuse or limit their requests, such as over-asking for information they don’t need
If the only info available is y/n “I am a minor,” then this isn’t possible.
or limiting the number of times they request your age over time.
well… we could just limit this! The user’s browser needs to cooperate for this anyway, so the user would obviously need to consent to each of these.
Look, I agree that this shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. And the EFF is right to raise the concern that ZKP has to be done right if it’s going to be done at all. But I’m disappointed that this is resulting in misinformation about ZKPs.
Listen, guys. The oligarchy urgently needs to implement a totalitarian fascist dictatorship before automation renders billions of people unemployable.
You understand, right? They need to surveil everyone 24/7, otherwise the 99% might successfully organise a revolt and redistribute the collective output of human civilisation before we achieve GAI, or have produced armies of killbots capable of genociding the masses who are incapable of providing any value to capitalism.
There really isn’t any alternative. It’s their god given right to own all matter, space, and time in the universe, and — most unfortunately — you can’t exist without consuming or occupying an infinitesimally small microcosm of it.
That’s why plenty of us have been getting active together. Brainstorm and do! We all can accomplish anything together!
This is a disgrace.
The only way this can’t conflict with the charter on eu citizens human rights is by calling all eu citizens criminals.
Deleted by author
Thank you. It gave me an error, so I tried again. Thank you for letting me know.