it would be great if this article actually explained what Chat Control is somewhere at the top. it says it will, but I’m quite a few paragraphs in and have no idea what I’m supposed to be mad about yet
If you follow the link for "Chat Control" in the first sentence, and then scroll down for a while, you will find a subsection titled "What Is Chat Control". Probably they assume that if you do not know what it is, you should not care about it.
From that section:
> "In 2021, the EU approved a derogation to the ePrivacy Directive to allow communication service providers to scan all exchanged messages to detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Although this first derogation was not mandatory, some policymakers kept pushing with new propositions.
> A year later, a new regulation (CSAR) was proposed by the European Commissioner for Home Affairs to make scanning messages for CSAM mandatory for all EU countries, and also allow them to break end-to-end encryption. In 2023, the UK passed a similar legislation called the Online Safety Act. These types of messaging mass scanning regulations have been called by critics Chat Control."
People who know about it are generally already annoyed. The trouble is most people don't know what it is, and those are the people who should be targeted
right and if you read that subsection, it does not tell you what Chat Control is. which I find odd. it just goes on about how bad it is (after making an analogy earlier about police entering my home every morning). am I missing the explanation in the article of what Chat Control actually is?
the article also explicitly says it affects non-Europeans. I’m interested! I just can’t figure out what it is
A bit of a scroll past the probably justified but still alarmism is the actually bad proposal.
> The most recent proposal for Chat Control comes from the EU Council Danish presidency pushing for the regulation misleadingly called the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR). Despite its seemingly caring name, this regulation will not help fight child abuse, and will even likely worsen it, impacting negatively what is already being done to fight child abuse (more on this in the next section).
>The CSAR proposal (Chat Control) could be implemented as early as next month, if we do not stop it. Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material."
ah this is the relevant piece, which I did skim over given I was getting annoyed at paragraph after paragraph not telling me what it is:
> Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material."
I shared your comment with the author and we're going to reorder some of the sentences in a little bit to highlight the fact it's a backdoor earlier. We've talked about Chat Control so much over so many years (because it keeps reappearing) that it's easy to forget many haven't heard of it lol
I think one source of confusion is that many probably see "Chat Control", expecting it to be a reference to one specific proposal or legislation (a la "GDPR" or "DMA"), while it's an umbrella term you use to group different proposals pushing the same agenda and end-results. Readers look for one face to point at but it's a hydra and they just leave confused.
Clearly defining the term and its intended meaning would do well, I think.
I mean, if someone has an end to end encrypted conversation, it's encrypted when it gets to the carrier, and the carrier shouldn't (technically, not anything related about whether they are allowed to or not) be able to decrypt the conversation.
If the carrier is terminating the connection, then it's either not end to end encrypted, or it's broken.
edit: sorted the grammar/punctuation at the end to improve clarity
