alt Hacker NewsReaffirming our commitment to child safety in the face of EuropeanUnion inaction
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Interesting way to frame the fact that the members of the european parliament voted 311 to 218 yesterday to reject the companies right to spy on you.
I'm the first person to admit the EU has democratic deficit, but MEPs are directly elected by EU citizens and they chose this in a democratic process. The companies are certainly making a choice with this blogpost.
So just a recap of what happened between the European Commission and the European Parliament and why the regulation has expired (it's a long story, I'm probably missing many nuances):
- In 2021 the European Parliament voted in favor of a temporary regulation that allowed companies to (i.e. voluntarily) scan private communications. Let's call it Chat Control 1.0. They chose to enact this because US companies were already scanning private messages in violation of the ePrivacy Directive which had come into force in the previous year. Instead of enforcing this directive, they chose to (temporarily) legalize the scanning of private messages while preparing more permanent legislation.
- In 2024 Chat Control 1.0 was extended for another 2 years. An amendment was adopted that explicitly noted that after this time "[the regulation] shall lapse permanently".
- From 2022 to 2025 the European Commission (together with member states) has proposed mandatory scanning, later updated with a proposal for client-side scanning (defeating end to end encryption), AI classification of image and text content, age verification and a lot of other invasive measures. This is what is known as Chat Control 2.0. The European Parliament has again and again voted against this proposal.
- In 2025/2026 the European Commission finally (temporarily) backed down from Chat Control 2.0 and instead proposed to extend Chat Control 1.0 for another 2 years, but has completely failed to negotiate with parliament to adopt a text that explicitly puts fundamental rights up front, something that a majority of the European Parliament had asked for since 2021.
- In response to this, the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament tabled amendments [1] that explicitly limits the regulation to the subject matter and prevents it from being used to weaken end-to-end encryption. Many of these amendments were adopted.
- Consequently, many conservative members of the European Parliament voted down the entire extension of the regulation. They apparently felt that it was better to let the regulation expire so that they gain more negotiation power to adopt a version of the regulation that the has less safeguards or contains measures like in Chat Control 2.0.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/LIBE-AM-784377...
When I see a corporation taking moral high ground I immediately assume their motives are nasty and 99% of the time I'm right.
"Think of the children" really means "think of the government and big tech control, privacy data monetization and data brokering we're able to force on these fools".
While I want parents to be able to protect kids in a sensible manner, selling out everything and everyone else in civilization and our core values isn't a price we should ever consider sacrificing in so-called democratic societies.
What a doublespeak title.
"Reaffirming our commitment to mass surveillance"
That's more like it.
The important thing you need to know about EU Chat Control is that the politicians will be exempted from the mass surveillance they are about to build.
Is there a more neutral and informative third-party article? The corporate press release is not a great genre fit for this site.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Seems like if it were possible to implement end to end encryption where google had no way to decrypt a communication, google could avoid liability for facilitating transmission of CSAM?
Shouldn't this big liability be pushing the big tech firms to do so?
Alright, at least now we can confidently put company symbols next to this incessant push towards Chat Control in EU parliament. Know your enemy, I guess.
How about we protect the children from Google and meta? Making children into depressed social media addicts is not great.
days since google was evil: 0
It's for the children!
BS. It's for control and censorship and data harvesting.
Meta alone spend $2 billion lobbying for age-restriction laws, which they tried to hide by pumping it through third parties. We don't know how much the other tech giants spent.
> Reaffirming our commitment to child safety
"We tried to build an even deeper panopticon to enslave you. Drats, you and your Democratic process. We thought we'd pulled the wool over your eyes claiming it was for the kids. We'll get you next time you peons. It's just a matter of time."
BigTech is quickly trying to punt their legal liabilities from their alleged actions, and transfer that risk elsewhere e.g. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/jury-orders-meta-p...
"We are once again sending out checks to EU commissioners to get our handcrafted legislation put into law"
Translation: "reaffirming our commitment to spy upon, control and censor users"
Fuck you.
> Reaffirming our commitment to regulatory capture and mass surveillance
FTFY
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Maybe if all of those companies hadn't paid large sums of money to one of the most famous child sex traffickers, their cries of "think of the children" wouldn't be so creepy
It’s never “for the children”, it’s about control and money.
I know people say Apple’s commitment to privacy is all talk, and there are valid criticisms of Apple and their business practices, but they seem better than the other big tech companies like Meta, MS, and Google by a very wide margin when it comes to privacy.
This is great, Google vs EU. Which one does HN hate more? Can't wait to find out.
In case someone is missing context, this is Google (apparently together with Meta, Microsoft, and Snap) coming out in favour of Chat Control legislation. This is something EU citizens have so far fought tooth and nail to repel. The fact that these US companies known for spying on people and invading privacy in the name of profit are lobbying for the legislation should be a warning to us all to avoid their services.