‘Chat Control’ Back on E.U. Agenda ⇥ techradar.com
Chiara Castro, TechRadar:
Hungary, the country that now heads the Council of Europe after Belgium, has resurrected what’s been deemed by critics as Chat Control, and MEPs are expected to vote on it at the end of the month. After proposing a new version in June, the Belgian presidency had to take the proposal off the agenda last minute amid harsh backlash.
Popular encrypted messaging apps, including Signal and Threema, have already announced their intention to rather shut down their operations in the EU instead of undermining users’ privacy. Keep reading as I walk you through what we know so far, and how one of the best VPN apps could help in case the proposal becomes law.
This news was broken by Politico, but their story is in the “Pro” section, which is not just a paywall. One cannot just sign up for it; you need to “Request a Demo” and then you can be granted access for no less than €7,000 per year. I had to settle for this re-reported version. And because online media is so broken — in part because of my selfish refusal to register for this advanced version of Politico — news outlets like TechRadar find any way of funding themselves. In this case, the words “best VPN” are linked to a list of affiliate-linked VPN apps. Smooth.
[…] According to the latest proposal providers would be free whether or not to use ‘artificial intelligence’ to classify unknown images and text chats as ‘suspicious’. However they would be obliged to search all chats for known illegal content and report them, even at the cost of breaking secure end-to-end messenger encryption. The EU governments are to position themselves on the proposal by 23 September, and the EU interior ministers are to endorse it on 10 October. […]
This is a similar effort to that postponed earlier this year. The proposal (PDF) has several changes, but it still appears to poke holes in end-to-end encryption, and require providers to detect possible known CSAM before it is sent. A noble effort, absolutely, but also one which fundamentally upsets the privacy of one-on-one communications to restrict its abuse by a few.