For years the plan was to make this scanning mandatory. In early November 2025, however, the Danish government amended the text: scanning is now “voluntary” for individual EU states to decide upon. That small word change was enough for the 27 EU countries to agree on November 26.
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.
The thing is that the moment 1 country voluntarily decides to mandate it, the infrastructure for the backdoor needs to be set up in place, as a mandatory requirement.
For it to be truly optional there should be a demand for the opposite too (ie. countries placing fines to those who do chat scanning), otherwise it doesn’t make much difference… any chat app that wants to work globally in the EU is gonna end up implementing the scanning EU-wide, even if there are countries that don’t enforce it.
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.
The thing is that the moment 1 country voluntarily decides to mandate it, the infrastructure for the backdoor needs to be set up in place, as a mandatory requirement.
For it to be truly optional there should be a demand for the opposite too (ie. countries placing fines to those who do chat scanning), otherwise it doesn’t make much difference… any chat app that wants to work globally in the EU is gonna end up implementing the scanning EU-wide, even if there are countries that don’t enforce it.
AfD is already #1 party in Germany
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.
Orban’s Hungary is in favour, after all.
Exactly the play, not just in America, but all capitalist backed politicians. Left and right wing
That’s weird, our fascists in France are all against privacy, unless it’s theirs.