On Tuesday 11 November, former German MEP for the Greens/EFA, Patrick Breyer, denounced the latest text from the Danish Presidency of the Council of the EU on online child sexual abuse material (see EUROPE 13748/8), saying that “Chat Control” (mandatory content detection orders for web hosts and private messaging service providers) was being “pushed through the back door”.
The EU Council was due to discuss the issue on 12 November. Officially, “explicit scanning obligations have been dropped. But a loophole in Article 4 of the new draft obliges providers of email, chat and messenger services like WhatsApp to take all appropriate risk mitigation measures. This means they can still be forced to scan all private messages – including on end-to-end encrypted services”.
The “supposedly voluntary “Chat Control” goes far beyond the previously discussed scanning of photos, videos, and links. Now, algorithms and AI can be used to mass-scan the private chat texts and metadata of all citizens for suspicious keywords and signals”, resulting in a “flood of false positives”.
Link to text: https://aeur.eu/f/jdd (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)