The EU wants to introduce Chat Control: Protection of children or invasion of privacy? Slovakia voted for

The European Union tries to protect citizens against the dangers that lie in wait for them on the Internet in various forms. The main reason is mainly child pornography and sexual violence against children, which it deals with European Commission already from 2022. Companies that create communication platforms will have to introduce the so-called Chat Control.

Chat Control and its impact on personal communication

One of the main reasons for the introduction of this measure is the search for suspicious content, which mainly includes the aforementioned child pornography. Just a function Chat Control should be able to identify such content. It will work on the principle of monitoring people’s private communications through chats, which angered many EU citizens.

This is a huge intrusion into the privacy of users of various communication platforms, which even breaks the encryption. It was for this reason that a great wave of criticism was launched from various sides. This is a violation of digital human rights.

How the scanning of message content will take place should be decided by the individual member states of the European Union through their own security services. This would open the possibility for them to monitor anyone’s communication without the need for the consent or information of the affected person.

Documentin which you can find the full text of the proposal, contains information that the application in use allows certain “upload moderation”. This actually means that the artificial intelligence recognizes the content you want to share and can immediately reject your submission. This recognition method should apply to images, texts and other content.

How did the member states vote?

The hash will help detect inappropriate content without scanning

Identification of inappropriate content should be based on hashu, meaning the system does not need to scan and examine the image itself. If some images are marked as inappropriate, they will receive their hash and it will be used to determine if someone is trying to send such an image.

However, it will not only be inappropriate content for adults, and the system will also be able to identify the sending of files without copyright. Applications such as WhatsApp a Signal however, they use end-to-end encryption and thus no one can find out what you are writing to whom. However, after the adoption of this proposal, a decryption mechanism would have to be introduced for these applications as well.