Chat Control approved: Certain EU countries will see your private messages. Is yours on the list?
https://euroweeklynews.com/2025/11/29/chat-control-approved-certain-eu-countries-will-see-your-private-messages-is-yours-on-the-list/Open linkView original on programming.dev336
Comments94
Countries which support the implementation of Chat Control:
Spain, Romania, Portugal, Malta Lithuania, Hungary, Ireland, France, Denmark, Croatia, Cyprus, and Bulgaria.
Countries that are undecided:
Belgium, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Slovakia, and Sweden.
Countries which oppose Chat Control:
Slovenia, the Netherlands, Poland, Luxembourg, Germany, Estonia, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Austria
"This list is outdated, see here fightchatcontrol.eu"
Fuck, only 4 are against
And Italy is one of them??? Lmao
I know, last time i checked It was indecided and im Happy its against now.
I Hope more countries Will shoft beacouse its not looking good
Can someone help me understand the likely outcome in countries that implement chat control? Will those governments force Google and Apple to remove apps that do not comply (e.g. Signal) from their official app stores? Will those governments somehow detect users who find workarounds and go after them? I figure most people in those countries will shrug their shoulders and move on with their lives, but how will this impact citizens who do not wish to comply?
misleading headline, this isn't a list of countries in which the law will (if it passes) be different (it won't be, it's an EU law, so will be the same in all EU countries), it's a list of countries that currently support/oppose the law
It isn't misleading (that'd be a technically true headline, which this isn't). This is a downright lie, or as some might say, "fake news".
This is not true btw. It's not a mandatory law, and if you read the news about this the last 3 weeks, you would know that.
EU laws are not automatically mandatory. That's not how it works at all.
The law will be the same in all EU countries, including whichever parts you think will be "not mandatory" (I did read those news articles and am fully aware that mandatory scanning is no longer on the table).
I'm missing a bit the fact that this is not a law yet. This is the position of the commission, which the parliament will then need to approve and has to get past the ECHR as well most likely.
And here I was thinking the EU was winning its fight against authoritarianism. Guess nowhere is safe, everyone's gotta push back no matter where you are. Fucking exhausting that they can't just leave us the fuck alone.
We are embracing authoritarianism everywhere. Democracies are dying.
Politicians are not ignorant of the risks; as the article mentions, they had several advisors, including scientists, who warned of the danger. If our leaders didn't know it, they wouldn't exclude themselves from the proposal.
Politicians and cops are THOSE who do this.
Fuck politicians on the right. ACAB, ACAB!
Sociopaths will be sociopaths. They'll continue saying that protesting and violece are never the answer, while eroding our basic rights and ignoring all pushback.
When people rise up: "How dare you destroy property value!"
https://x.com/martinsonneborn/status/1995182586612609241
These pathetic morons think they'll be safe through this exemption. In reality these deliberate security holes will affect everyone. How will these morons be safe when every person they have contact with IRL is a walking microphone for every foreign intelligence agency?
So you're telling me the one person who's been making deals behind closed doors (illegal), and then 'accidentally' deleting all messages regarding said deals (also illegal) will be exempt from having all their communication scanned?
people miss the most important problem with this. chat control is a fascist tool that can and will be used against us minorities. this is especially dangerous when more and more countries are starting to lean right.
hitler would have had a field day with this kind of tech.
Danes are fascist, they pushed it through.
danes are sucking thiels cock for their own wicked reasons.
as we've always said; never trust a dane!
Danes have been quite xenophobic lately.
It also makes what the Stasi in Socialist East Germany did to its citizens look harmless in comparison. It's literally Big Brother, but you carry him around with you.
Isn't North Korea already a dangerous dictatorship with its citizens in a vice? I don't think their benevolent leader needs to "get away" with any of the shit he does at this point, or what do you say? Is there any chance of overthrowing him?
Is there something we can do to effectively oppose that shit ?
Maybe start here? https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
Why? Why is the loss of such a significant amount of privacy necessary?
It isn't necessary.
It isn't it's just an excuse to put people you don't like in some kind of hole where they rot to death.
People will figure out that the war in Ukraine actually started before 2014.
Because authoritarianism
Literally pedophiles.
Allegedly.
Everyone who originally proposed this or otherwise helped in drafting this should be thoroughly investigated under suspicion of foreign affiliation. Chat Control doesn't just start the EU's transformation into a surveillance state. It also weakens its digital defenses. No matter how you look at it, this is treason both towards the European people, as well as towards the individual countries and the Union as a whole.
The one good thing of brexit: UK isn't beholden to this.
The bad thing is that their own laws aren't much better. And of course all the other brexit bad stuff
From the Online Safety Act Wikipedia page:
Dear mods, watch what you remove from these chats, our freedoms are getting fucked, people should be allowed to be indignant.
That being said i hope the legislators sit on cacti all day every day, those fucking assholes are exempt from this bullshit.
They will take my data out of my cold dead hands. It was a matter of time, sure, but I was actually holding on to hope for this one. I am pissed, dismayed even.
Session, signal, simplex are your friends. If those give up the ghost and bend the knee then we are going back to irc and aliases. Fucking shit!
It's kind of unclear what "voluntary" means. Is it voluntary for countries to enforce? Is it voluntary for companies to scan chats?
I thought it was the latter.
In that case, is there any change? Companies could already do that if they wanted. Many of them already did.
It seems the reason companies are currently allowed to do this in the EU is because there was in 2020 a temporary derogation from certain provisions of the e-Privacy Directive.
But it was temporary, so it will expire in April 2026. With this new law the intention is to make that "voluntary detection" a permanent thing they allow service providers to do, as a norm. The providers still have the choice to not do it, so I don't think this affects services like signal, as far as I understand.
The later. However, they could still be fines for not doing what is needed to reduce "the risks of the of the chat app", whatever the fuck that can mean when talking about illegal.content
Where is this explained? the article might be wrong then, because it does state the opposite:
It makes it sound like it's each state/country the one deciding, and that the reason "companies can still be pressured to scan chats to avoid heavy fines or being blocked in the EU" was because of those countries forcing them.
Who's the one deciding what is needed to reduce “the risks of the of the chat app”? if it's each country the ones deciding this, then it's each country who can opt to enforce chat scanning.. so to me that means the former, not the latter.
In fact, isn't the latter already a thing? ...I believe companies can already scan chats voluntarily, as long as they include this in their terms, and many do. A clear example is AI chats.
I recommend reading the dutch debate : https://www.tweedekamer.nl/kamerstukken/plenaire_verslagen/detail/2025-2026/17
And yes, the latter is currently a thing (but in a weaker form) but will no longer be allowed in april 2026, which is why this law is getting pushed so hard. Currently chats can be asked by police/interpol/... But they need good reasons, and the results can be varying because chat platforms like signal do not keep chat messages/stuff.
The new law forces them to have systems in place to catch or have data for law inforcements. It just allows for 'any system to get the needed info', it no longer says chat scanning is needed directly, but is rather indirectly which is as stupid and bad as before.
Thanks for the link, and the clarification (I didn't know about april 2026).. although it's still confusing, to be honest. In your link they seem to allude to this just being a way to maintain a voluntary detection that is "already part of the current practice"...
If that were the case, then at which point "the new law forces [chat providers] to have systems in place to catch or have data for law inforcements"? will services like signal, simplex, etc. really be forced to monitor the contents of the chats?
I don't find in the link discussion about situations in which providers will be forced to do chat detection. My understanding from reading that transcript is that there's no forced requirement on the providers to do this, or am I misunderstanding?
Just for reference, below is the relevant section translated (emphasis mine).
My impression from reading the dutch, is that they are opposing this because of the lack of "periodic review" power that the EU would have if they make this voluntary detection a permanent thing. So they aren't worried about services like signal/simplex which wouldn't do detection anyway, but about the services that might opt to actually do detection but might do so without proper care for privacy/security.. or that will use detection for purposes that don't warrant it. At least that's what I understand from the below statement:
Id need to look for it again, but i remember reading she was saying that the current proposal is vague in what it sees as required to prevent what she calls risks. I remember them asking her multiple times if she was against a law to prevent csa and the sharing there off, in which she replied multiple times that she was not, but that the law was too vague about what it constitutes as necessary to prevent it. Did i dream it? ><
Edit: found it!
Ah, I see. Sorry, the text was too long and I'm not dutch so it was hard to spot that for me too.
But I interpret that part differently. I think them saying that there's an ambiguous section about risks does not necessarily mean that the ambiguity is in the responsibility of those who choose to not implement the detection.. it could be the opposite: risks related to the detection mechanism, when a service has chosen to add it.
I think we would need to actually see the text of the proposal to see where is that vague expression used that she's referring to.
Ah, i see. Ye it can be interpreted in different ways, and reading the proposal might clear it up, but i doubt it. Its written extremely vague on purpose
Matrix would be the best alternative
Wow, this is bad. I thought this was over when Germany chose not to support it. Apparently not!
I believe Germany is now in favor of this new proposal, according to https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
Only Italy, Netherlands, Czech Republic and Poland are against. This seems to be based on "leaked documents from the September 12 meeting of the EU Council's Law Enforcement Working Party".
Show is not over until the fat lady sings.
If chat control would have been made mandatory, you can bet (and i'd be willing to bet a lot of money on it) that you're going to have AfD in germany and FPÖ in austria (since they're already pretty anti-EU) making a lot of noise about how evil the EU is for infringing on people's privacy. (And they would be right about this, as much as i don't like to agree with them.) This would give them more votes, than they already have.
Making it voluntary is a clever trick of the EU to not make yourself extremely unpopular among the population. Well done, i'd say.
If they work anything like the far right in the U.S., they’ll raise hell about it til they get elected then implement it themselves.
Exactly the play, not just in America, but all capitalist backed politicians. Left and right wing
Orban's Hungary is in favour, after all.
I long for the day that he dies.
That's weird, our fascists in France are all against privacy, unless it's theirs.
AfD is already #1 party in Germany
It seems the article is misinterpreting things. It's not that it's "voluntary for individual EU states".. but rather "voluntary" for service providers. The service providers don't have to implement this chat detection if they don't want to.
The thing is that if they don't pass something like this, then by April 2026 a bunch of current services that are already doing CP detection would be breaking the law, since the temporary derogation of the e-Privacy Directive will expire. But I don't think this affects services like signal/simplex who voluntarily choose to not try to detect it.
If this came to Canada, my sister and I will be using Briar.
Now let's hope Parliament will still vote against it.
OK I'm getting a flip phone
I thought making calls and sending SMS was one of the least secure things you could do regarding communication? That secure and encrypted communication with messaging apps was the only way.
Now we have nothing. 😐
At least if you just do phone calls the attack surface is reduced... They can scan your calls maybe, but not your entire chat history with all of your contacts and give it to an AI which could profile you based on that + you are not scanned on everything else you do on your phone / locked into proprietary ecosystems.
The ideal would just be using a Linux platform and using something like xmpp, but who are you gonna convince to use it? People use what they are used to use, if it's not popular messaging apps is phone calls.. And now it seems a more private alternative..
Just get an Pixel 9a from a local shop, install GrapheneOS on it and use it as your primary.
Can confirm, the 9s are the best phones. Love my Pro.
Every single person that voted in favour must be held on corruption charges. No running free.
Welp guys, looks like I'm moving to [insert country without that sh*t] (TBD). Or atleast my router is.
The implementation is client-side, so this wouldn't work. It forces all apps to have a client-side backdoor.
The thing is.. that even if there are countries publicly rejecting this, once the infrastructure is in place and a backdoor exists due to it being enforced by some other country, how can you be sure it's not being used / exploited?
Even in the (hypothetical) case that the government is not using it (regardless of what they might say to the public), I wouldn't trust that this backdoor would be so secure that nobody else than a government could make use of it.
@CleoCommunist @pylapp
leggendo sul sito fightchatcontrol.eu/ sembra che l'italia sia già contraria
Sisi lo so, go guardato.
In un commento dopo lo avevo detto
just use signal
And when they pull out of Europe because they won't comply?
Write your own E2E encrypted peer-to-peer chat app (nobody has got time for that) or use some that doesn't care about the law (pretty risky if it's not open source, I doubt they'll survive for long in the open), I guess
It is available in fdroid
I dont see fdroid blocking the app. I think signal is in the guardian project repos. Anyway a repo can just be hosted in switzerland or on tor or something. I would be more worried about govenments blocking access to the signal servers.
All this theatre in the name of protecting kids, Yet the pedo formally known as prince andrew is still walking free.
won't help when their servers block access from EU
Doubt it. Tourists are free to use signal and travel to EU.
More like EU would block Signal servers, but I doubt thst too.
They probably drink water, too.
Xmpp, IRC, Matrix, all great decentralized alternatives, but good luck convincing people in contacting you on Xmpp...
This problem is a problem because it's a social tendency, not because we don't have alternatives.. Very sadly...
This is definitely the biggest barrier. I'm not sure what the proper solution is. Probably needs government backing.
Ive convinced a decent chunk of my friends to message me on Signal by simply being unresponsive on WhatsApp lol. It's much harder to get people to use Matrix instead of Discord though...
XMPP is great but my wife hates it.
Hi Sorry can i ask what Is XMPP?
Btw as a secure messgaing app i use simplex, mabye i Will look into matrix
It’s an open, decentralized protocol used for real-time messaging, so you can find many apps using this protocol, on android there is conversations which is very light and modern, just choose a pseudo and chat, no other registration, it is a paid app on the app store but free on fdroid. I also used simplex before but it didn't work well enough, the video calls were laggy.
So XMPP is a messgaing protocol some apps use
Ty very much
What client do you suggest? I know It depends on the situation, but overall generally what would you suggest?
As I said as a client I suggest *conversations" on android to download from fdroid to get the free version.
Oki thanks
Or Molly (alternative and more secure FOSS Android app for Signal), or Session or SimpleX.
Ita not said they wont comply with eh standards
Matrix will not be affected. At all.
CP is just a pretext here.
this also does nothing to pgp encrypted email, or criminal with a brain cell capable of encrypting the files before sending it