The European Parliament negotiators on the draft regulation on the removal of child sexual abuse material from the Internet reached agreement, on Tuesday 24 October, on the report tabled by Spanish rapporteur Javier Zarzalejos (EPP) and will vote on it in the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties on 13 November.
The outcome of these negotiations will be presented publicly on Thursday 26 October, but according to the Greens/EFA shadow rapporteur, Patrick Breyer (German), who spoke in a press release, the rapporteurs were in favour of a different and new approach to protecting young people from online abuse and exploitation, distinct from the generalised surveillance of private communications that results from the Commission’s draft.
“The winners of this agreement are on the one hand our children, who will be protected much more effectively and in a court-proof manner, and on the other hand all citizens, whose digital privacy of correspondence and communication security will be guaranteed”.
According to the MEP, there is already one major difference compared to the Commission’s initial text: targeted surveillance of telecommunications by means of detection orders will only be limited to individuals or groups of individuals suspected of being linked to child sexual abuse material.
In order to protect young people from grooming (solicitations for sexual services), the political agreement also requires internet services and apps to be secure from the outset and by default. “It must be possible to block and report other users. Only at the request of the user should he or she be publicly addressable and see messages or pictures of other users. Users should be asked for confirmation before sending contact details or nude pictures. Potential perpetrators and victims should be warned where appropriate, for example, if they try to search for abuse material using certain search words. Public chats at high risk of grooming are to be moderated”.
In addition, the new EU Child Protection Centre will have to automatically and proactively search for publicly accessible internet content.
With regard to secure end-to-end encryption, “we clearly exclude so-called client-side scanning, i.e. the installation of surveillance functionalities and security vulnerabilities in our smartphones. We guarantee the right to anonymous communication and remove mandatory age verification for users of communication services”.
“Even if this compromise, which is supported from the progressive to the conservative camp, is not perfect on all points, it is a historic success that having stopped chat control and saving secure encryption is the common position of the entire Parliament. We are doing the exact opposite of most EU governments who want to destroy digital privacy of correspondence and secure encryption, following the Chinese example”, he commented.
When contacted, the rapporteur’s office declined to comment ahead of the public presentation of the agreement.
Ylva Johansson defends herself in front of MEPs
On another note, the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, defended herself, on Wednesday 25 October, before the MEPs from the Committee on Civil Liberties against accusations of having favoured tech companies, particularly US ones, in the drafting of this regulation. She said she was still convinced that the text presented in May 2022 was proportionate.
“Two years of public consultations have been organised, including two public stakeholder consultations. 455 citizens, 62 NGOs, 21 authorities, 16 businesses and 4 Academic research institutes were involved”, she explained the day before in a blog.
The Commissioner also denied any involvement in a campaign conducted by the Commission in September to convince Member States of the benefits of the regulation, in which the Commission allegedly used micro-targeting techniques, potentially breaching EU data protection rules.
The Dutch newspaper Volkskrant revealed these facts and the author was subsequently censored on X.
EUROPE will continue to follow this story. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)