Chat Control: Your private messages will be scanned
The European Commission is preparing a new law designed to protect children against abuse. The law seeks to prevent the spread of child abuse material by scanning all citizens' messages. Protecting children is essential, but the proposed law would allow governments to scan all our communications, seriously infringing on citizens' rights, and would not actually help address child abuse.
Discover how the chatcontrol proposal would affect you by watching our interactive film on the left.
Speed
The EU commission has proposed a new law to protect children against abuse. The cause is good, but the law itself is bad, because it requires online services with messaging functionality to be surveilled, if there is a possibility for children to use the service or if users could potentially use the service to exchange child abuse material. This will affect many communication services and it will mean that your communication will be scanned, because all users of regular communication services will be treated as suspects for child abuse. More specifically this means that your e-mails, chat-messages, video- and voicecalls will be analysed by algorithms, to determine if they contain illegal content. The analysis will happen directly on your computer/smartphone, so that the algorithms can see what you say/write before it becomes encrypted.
Whan can be done against this proposed law? It is important that more people know about it. Share the link to this page! Chat with others about it and talk with your representatives in the European Parliament about it (or write a nice e-mail to them). It is important that there is a public discussion about this topic, so that politicians realise that the law is a bad idea even though this is for a good cause
If you want to help the campaign, you can join our mailing list. There we discuss actions for informing more people in Denmark about chatcontrol. We also talk about improvements of this website. If you have some good ideas or want to help out, you are also very welcome to join the list. To subscribe to the mailing list, simply write an e-mail to campaign-subscribe@lists.chatcontrol.dk and follow the instructions.
We also recommend that you sign the petition against chatcontrol.
More information
- The current proposal (12th of September 2022) π¬π§ πͺπΊ
- Consultation response from IT-Pol Denmark to the proposed law π©π°
- News article on ChatControl (from panoptikon.dk)
- More details about the planned law and timeline π¬π§
- Presentation about ChatControl at BornHack 2022 π¬π§
- Mattias Tesfaye (danish minister of justice) is in favour of the surveillance law. π©π°
- Story about a false positive in a chat with a medical doctor π¬π§
- Historic film: Complete telecommunication surveillance under the german occupation 🇩🇰 🇬🇧
- German alliance against ChatControl π©πͺ
- Chat surveilance in China against pro-democratic protests π¬π§
- Stop Scanning Me campaign π¬π§
- If enforced, EU chat control will limit Free Software π¬π§
- Fact Sheet: Client-Side Scanning π¬π§
- Chatcontrol is an acute threat against open source in the EU π©πͺ
- Cryptography professor: "The EUβs βchat controlβ legislation is the most alarming proposal Iβve ever read. Taken in context, it is essentially a design for the most powerful text and image-based mass surveillance system the free world has ever seen." 🇬🇧
- Swedish anti-chatcontrol website 🇸🇪
- Dutch anti-chatcontrol website 🇳🇱
- Slides from the Bornhack 2023 presentation 🇬🇧
- The german child protection association declares their disagreement with chatcontrol 🇬🇧
- Apple explains to a child protection organisation why scanning of encrypted data is not a good idea 🇬🇧
- President of the Signal Foundation: "Apple's statement is the death knell for the idea that it's possible to scan everyone's comms AND preserve privacy." 🇬🇧
- UK law similar to chatcontrol failed to pass with client-side scanning because the technology doesn't exist. 🇬🇧
- A very long list of criticisms of chatcontrol 🇬🇧