Countries which support the implementation of Chat Control:
Spain, Romania, Portugal, Malta Lithuania, Hungary, Ireland, France, Denmark, Croatia, Cyprus, and Bulgaria.
Countries that are undecided:
Belgium, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Slovakia, and Sweden.
Countries which oppose Chat Control:
Slovenia, the Netherlands, Poland, Luxembourg, Germany, Estonia, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Austria
Can someone help me understand the likely outcome in countries that implement chat control? Will those governments force Google and Apple to remove apps that do not comply (e.g. Signal) from their official app stores? Will those governments somehow detect users who find workarounds and go after them? I figure most people in those countries will shrug their shoulders and move on with their lives, but how will this impact citizens who do not wish to comply?
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.
I'm missing a bit the fact that this is not a law yet. This is the position of the commission, which the parliament will then need to approve and has to get past the ECHR as well most likely.
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.
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, they wouldn't exclude themselves from the proposal.
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.
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?
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.
Is there something we can do to effectively oppose that shit ?
Why? Why is the loss of such a significant amount of privacy necessary?
It isn't 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.
People will figure out that the war in Ukraine actually started before 2014.
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.
The one good thing of brexit: UK isn't beholden to this.
The bad thing is that their own laws aren't much better. And of course all the other brexit bad stuff
From the Online Safety Act Wikipedia page:
The act also requires platforms – including end-to-end encrypted message providers – to scan for child pornography and terrorism content, which experts say is not possible to implement without undermining users' privacy.
Dear mods, watch what you remove from these chats, our freedoms are getting fucked, people should be allowed to be indignant.
That being said i hope the legislators sit on cacti all day every day, those fucking assholes are exempt from this bullshit.
They will take my data out of my cold dead hands. It was a matter of time, sure, but I was actually holding on to hope for this one. I am pissed, dismayed even.
Session, signal, simplex are your friends. If those give up the ghost and bend the knee then we are going back to irc and aliases. Fucking shit!
It's kind of unclear what "voluntary" means. Is it voluntary for countries to enforce? Is it voluntary for companies to scan chats?
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.
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
Wow, this is bad. I thought this was over when Germany chose not to support it. Apparently not!
If this came to Canada, my sister and I will be using Briar.
For years the plan was to make this scanning mandatory. In early November 2025, however, the Danish government amended the text: scanning is now “voluntary” for individual EU states to decide upon. That small word change was enough for the 27 EU countries to agree on November 26.
If chat control would have been made mandatory, you can bet (and i'd be willing to bet a lot of money on it) that you're going to have AfD in germany and FPÖ in austria making a lot of noise about how evil the EU is for infringing on people's privacy. (And they would be right about this, as much as i don't like to agree with them.) Since they're already pretty anti-EU. This would give them more votes, than they already have.
Making it voluntary is a clever trick of the EU to not make yourself extremely unpopular among the population. Well done, i'd say.
If they work anything like the far right in the U.S., they’ll raise hell about it til they get elected then implement it themselves.
That's weird, our fascists in France are all against privacy, unless it's theirs.
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. 😐
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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