European Parliament decided that Chat Control 1.0 must stop
You did it! 🥳 European Parliament just decided that Chat Control 1.0 must stop. This means on April 6, 2026, Gmail, LinkedIn, Microsoft and other Big Techs must stop scanning your private messages in the EU. #PrivacyWins 💪 [contains quote post or other embedded content]
That’s already (kind of) the name it has. “Chat Control” is a name given by critics.
this is litterally what they do. point at opposition and try to imply they are pro child abuse. actually really sick to use such a method. I suppose that is what u get for decades long degradation of education and other things. A bunch of childish freaks in power who can only try to chuck eachother under the bus instead of doing something actually good.
they care less and less about it being obvious too.
our new prime minister (NL) was asked about some campaign promises recently (ones important to a lot of his voters actually) and he justs plainly said somethin like: yeah well sometimes u just gotta say shit to get votes.
i mean, its not news ofc... but now they dont even care to mask it. They know the public will just bend over and take it anyway.
Sweep it under ProtectEU.
> The European Commission wants a backdoor for end-to-end encryptions for law enforcement
https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/the-european-commissi...
Exactly. Its real name is “Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse”.
Unfortunately, that population immediately equates the two for good reason. Bills that are presented as "for the children" usually are a power grab.
Even more unfortunately, the issue is so emotional that we can't have a reasonable discussion on it. This limits the discussion to proposals that sound good to angry people. And the opposition to those who can get angry about something else. Which limits how much reason is applied on either side.
For example, look at the idea of a national sex offenders registry, like we have in the USA. The existence of such a registry is reasonable given that we're no more successful at stopping people from being pedophiles, than we are at stopping them from being homosexuals.
But the purpose of such a list is severely undermined when an estimated quarter of the list were themselves minors when they offended. The age at which people are most likely to land on the list is 14. But a man who liked 13 year olds when he was 14, is unlikely to reoffend at 30. What is the purpose of ruining the rest of his life for a juvenile mistake?
Such discussions simply can't be had.
What's perfect is the marketing campaign to call it by what it actually wanted to do, ie Chat Control. Whoever did this was so successful that we didn't even know the bill's official name, instead knowing it by what it actually wanted to achieve.
Good thing the EU didn't take a page out of the US' book, because things like the PATRIOT act are already pithy and hard to outmarket.
If RPCCSA were actually called PROTECT, the nickname "Chat Control" would have been fighting a losing battle.
It's just a HN thing though.
Ask a European who isn't in tech, and they won't know what you're talking about. Maybe they will today specifically, this vote is bound to get some press, but in general, mainstream media doesn't care much about this bill.
Even Europeans in tech who aren't in the "tech equivalent of gun nuts" culture that HN seems to exemplify are 50/50.
> It's just a HN thing though.
It’s not. People on Reddit, Mastodon, and other websites are also aware (of course not everyone, but not everyone on HN either).
> Ask a European who isn't in tech, and they won't know what you're talking about.
People who haven’t heard about Chat Control haven’t heard the bill’s real name either. That’s true of the overwhelming majority of EU regulation, Chat Control isn’t special in that regard.
I’m confused by
> This means on April 6, 2026, Gmail, LinkedIn, Microsoft and other Big Techs must stop scanning your private messages in the EU
It had already passed and started?
Strong encryption provides privacy and security for everyone online. We can’t have private conversations, or safe transactions, without it. Encryption is critical to democratic politics and reliable economic transactions around the world. When a company rolls back its existing commitments to...
> It had already passed and started?
Facebook and others have been scanning your private messages for many years already. Then someone discovered that this practice is illegal in Europe. So they passed the temporary chat control 1.0 emergency law to make it legal. The plan was to draft a chat control 2.0 law that would then be the long-term solution. But negotiations took too long and the temporary law will expire on the 4th of April (not the 6th) which means that it will be illegal again for Facebook and others to scan the private messages of European citizens without prior suspicion of any wrongdoing.
The linked tweet is a bit misleading. There were 2 votes, one for amending the existing proposal re: "unknown messages", and the other for the whole proposal itself. The screenshot in the tweet is about the amendment, which was less important than the fact than then the whole proposal was rejected.
I think this article [0] discussed here [1] is much more informative, and I suggest merging the current comment thread there [1].
I am not sure of the logic of the amendment, as parties voted differently between proposals (eg left parties voted for the amendment and against the whole, and EPP voted against both, S&D voted in favour of both). In any case, one vote difference for the amendment is not really the point, the actual vote for the whole is what mattered, and this gained a more clear majority against chat control [2].
Not sure if this is higher because it is more "clickbait" (chat control 1.0) or what, but it is a single tweet with a screenshot and no context, imho HN can do better than this.
[0] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/end-of-chat-control-eu-parl...
The controversial mass surveillance of private messages in Europe is coming to an end. After the European Parliament had already rejected the indiscriminate and blanket Chat Control by US tech companies on 13 March, conservative forces attempted a democratically highly questionable maneuver yesterda
> EPP voted against both
EPP wanted indiscriminate scanning instead, not targeted one (the goal of the amendments).
Exactly. It is much easier to get people to agree to do questionable things, when there is pressure to "do something".
A more limited bill takes off the pressure to "do something", and therefore makes the more extreme bill harder to pass later.
In this case there is reason to suspect that the real goal of the bill is not catching pedophiles. Instead it is to give police broader powers of surveillance in the name of catching pedophiles, which they will then be able to use for other purposes. This is particularly problematic given the ways that it could be abused by some of the more authoritarian governments in the EU. Yes, I'm thinking of Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
> This is particularly problematic given the ways that it could be abused by some of the more authoritarian governments in the EU.
> Yes, I'm thinking of Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
Lol what?
The UK leads [edit: in Europe overall, obviously not the EU] with approximately 18 per 100k prosecuted for online speech. Germany is at about 4 per 100k. Poland at about 0.8 per 100k. Hungary about 0.1 per 100K.
For any definition of authoritarian that relates to chat control, the UK is two base-10 orders of magnitude more authoritarian than Hungary (7 base-2 orders of magnitude).
The issue isn't how much free speech online is being punished. It is how surveillance could be used to reinforce authoritarianism.
The UK does a lot of prosecuting people for having said nasty things online that someone else didn't like.
Hungary is far more inclined to surveil political opponents, put people in their network in jail without fair trial, surveil successful businesses whose bribes were insufficient, find excuses to punish those businesses.
Perhaps you haven't heard about this fairly obscure event called Brexit.
The UK is, eminently, not in the EU.
This figure in the UK is unsourced and I'm fairly sure is not true (or at least not what you've labelled it), and has been quoted out of context by people trying to stir trouble not reasoned debate. I'll assume good faith here and say the start of the video lays out why the figure is not what you've labelled it to be
That's happens often in parliamentary proceedings: when the other party succeeds in unrecognizably amending the law, the party proposing it will vote against.
Specifically for the European Parliament, this is also why, while it is true it doesn't have the power of legislative initiative, given the ability to amend at will any "law", in practice it doesn't make much of a difference.
> a screenshot and no context, imho HN can do better than this
There's been an influx of low-quality bluesky links being posted lately, HN either needs to be better enforcing existing rules or we need a new one banning editorialized social posts that then link out to primary articles (just post the actual article without the editorialized social post as intermediary!).
Here is the EPP's plea to get this passed earlier.
They even used a teddy bear image.
https://www.eppgroup.eu/newsroom/epp-urges-support-for-last-...
"Protecting children is not optional," said Lena DĂĽpont MEP, EPP Group spokeswoman on Legal and Home Affairs. "We call on the S&D Group to stop hiding behind excuses and finally take responsibility. We cannot afford a safe haven for child abusers online. Every delay leaves children exposed and offenders unchallenged."
Personally, I feel there must be other privacy-preserving ways to address child abusers than mass surveillance.
Also, for the record, here is the list of parties that lobbied for this for Mrs DĂĽpont, alongside very few privacy-focused organisations. Not sure why Canada or Australia are lobbying for EU laws.
ANNEX: LIST OF ENTITIES OR PERSONS FROM WHOM THE RAPPORTEUR HAS RECEIVED INPUT
- Access Now
- Australian eSafety Commissioner
- Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer (BRAK)
- Canadian Centre for Child Protection
- cdt - Center for Democracy & Technology
- eco - Association of the Internet Industry
- EDPS
- EDRI
- Fundamental Rights Agency
- Improving the digital environment for children (regrouping several child protection NGOs across the EU and beyond, including Missing Children Europe, Child Focus)
- INHOPE – the International Association of Internet Hotlines
- International Justice Mission Deutschland e.V./ We Protect
- Internet Watch Foundation
- Internet Society
- Match Group
- Microsoft
- Thorn (Ashton Kutcher)
- UNICEF
- UN Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/A-9-2020-0258_...
Later today, MEPs will face a simple choice: protect children or allow a legal loophole benefiting online sexual predators. Backing the EPP Group’s proposal is the only way to ensure continuity of protection for children beyond 3 April.The EPP Group h...
We need to add Palantir in bold letters to that list, they are behind this in every way except for 'officially'.
> The Commission’s failure to identify the list of experts as falling within the scope of the complainant’s public access request constitutes maladministration. [0]
> The Commission presented a proposal on preventing and combating child sexual abuse, looking in particular at detecting child pornography. In this context, it has mentioned that support could be provided by the software of the controversial American company Palantir... [1]
> Is Palantir’s failure to register on the Transparency Register compatible with the Commission’s transparency commitments? [1]
(Palantir only entered the Transparency Registry in March 2025 despite being a multi million vendor of Gotham for Europol and European Agencies for more than a decade)
> No detailed records exist concerning a January meeting between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the CEO of controversial US data analytics firm Palantir [2]
[0] https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/decision/en/176658
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2024-00016...
[2] https://www.euractiv.com/news/commission-kept-no-records-on-...
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