Chat Control: Your private messages will be scanned
The European Commission is preparing a new law designed to protect children against abuse. The law seeks to prevent the spread of child abuse material by scanning all citizens' messages. Protecting children is essential, but the proposed law would allow governments to scan all our communications, seriously infringing on citizens' rights, and would not actually help address child abuse.
Discover how the chatcontrol proposal would affect you by watching our interactive film on the left.
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The EU commission has proposed a new law to protect children against abuse. The cause is good, but the law itself is bad, because it requires online services with messaging functionality to be surveilled, if there is a possibility for children to use the service or if users could potentially use the service to exchange child abuse material. This will affect many communication services and it will mean that your communication will be scanned, because all users of regular communication services will be treated as suspects for child abuse. More specifically this means that your e-mails, chat-messages, video- and voicecalls will be analysed by algorithms, to determine if they contain illegal content. The analysis will happen directly on your computer/smartphone, so that the algorithms can see what you say/write before it becomes encrypted.
Whan can be done against this proposed law? It is important that more people know about it. Share the link to this page! Chat with others about it and talk with your representatives in the European Parliament about it (or write a nice e-mail to them). It is important that there is a public discussion about this topic, so that politicians realise that the law is a bad idea even though this is for a good cause
If you want to help the campaign, you can join our mailing list. There we discuss actions for informing more people in Denmark about chatcontrol. We also talk about improvements of this website. If you have some good ideas or want to help out, you are also very welcome to join the list. To subscribe to the mailing list, simply write an e-mail to campaign-subscribe@lists.chatcontrol.dk and follow the instructions.
We also recommend that you sign the petition against chatcontrol.
More information
- Updated proposal from 28.3.2024 🇬🇧
- Proposal from 12th of September 2022 🇬🇧 🇪🇺
- Consultation response from IT-Pol Denmark to the proposed law 🇩🇰
- News article on ChatControl (from panoptikon.dk)
- More details about the planned law and timeline 🇬🇧
- Presentation about ChatControl at BornHack 2022 🇬🇧
- Mattias Tesfaye (danish minister of justice) is in favour of the surveillance law. 🇩🇰
- Story about a false positive in a chat with a medical doctor 🇬🇧
- Historic film: Complete telecommunication surveillance under the german occupation 🇩🇰 🇬🇧
- German alliance against ChatControl 🇩🇪
- Chat surveilance in China against pro-democratic protests 🇬🇧
- Stop Scanning Me campaign 🇬🇧
- If enforced, EU chat control will limit Free Software 🇬🇧
- Fact Sheet: Client-Side Scanning 🇬🇧
- Chatcontrol is an acute threat against open source in the EU 🇩🇪
- Cryptography professor: "The EU’s “chat control” legislation is the most alarming proposal I’ve ever read. Taken in context, it is essentially a design for the most powerful text and image-based mass surveillance system the free world has ever seen." 🇬🇧
- Swedish anti-chatcontrol website 🇸🇪
- Dutch anti-chatcontrol website 🇳🇱
- Portugese anti-chatcontrol website 🇵🇹
- Slides from the Bornhack 2023 presentation 🇬🇧
- The german child protection association declares their disagreement with chatcontrol 🇬🇧
- Apple explains to a child protection organisation why scanning of encrypted data is not a good idea 🇬🇧
- President of the Signal Foundation: "Apple's statement is the death knell for the idea that it's possible to scan everyone's comms AND preserve privacy." 🇬🇧
- UK law similar to chatcontrol failed to pass with client-side scanning because the technology doesn't exist. 🇬🇧
- A very long list of criticisms of chatcontrol 🇬🇧
- Bornhack 2023 talk: Chat Control – the next months will be critical 🇬🇧
- The danish government supports the law but the whole opposition is against it 🇩🇰
- Investigative Journalism: Who would benefit from chatcontrol? 🇬🇧
- Europol would like to have all pictures even if they are not related to child abuse 🇬🇧
- Danish cryptographers: "Chatcontrol will undermine the whole idea of end-to-end encryption" 🇩🇰
- Berlinske: The EU wants to check all digital content to fight child pornography 🇩🇰
- Jyllands-Posten: The EU wants to check all digital content to fight child pornography 🇩🇰
- IDA and other organisations: The EU chatcontrol proposal is total surveillance 🇩🇰
- The complete opposition to the government: You are violating the spirit of the constitution 🇩🇰
- Open letter to minister of justice Peter Hummelgaard 🇩🇰
- Cybernauts on Chatcontrol 🇩🇰
- Scandal: The EU-Commissionen uses microtargeting to spread misinformation about chatcontrol on X 🇬🇧
- Dutch technology expert: "The commission used religious and polical beliefs to categorize users for targeted advertisement" 🇩🇰
- Berlinske thinks: The support for mass surveillance highlights yet another blind spot in the government's understanding of democracy 🇩🇰
- European Data Protection Supervisor: "there is a very broad and almost unprecedented consensus between the different groups of stakeholders, including data protection bodies, legal experts, academia, industry and civil society, national legislators and law enforcement authorities that the proposal is not only ineffective, but also harmful" 🇬🇧
- EU-countries disagree on law against child sexual abuse 🇩🇰
- Oh, the irony: "Going-Dark" working group is working in the dark 🇩🇪
- Evidence collected by the Commission in support for voluntary chatcontrol is insufficient 🇩🇪
- 2023: A good year for privacy, a bad year for chat control 🇬🇧
- Thorn's software is nowhere near as good as advertised to classify child abuse material. 🇬🇧
- European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption 🇬🇧
- Chatcontrol 1.0 extended until April 2026 🇬🇧
- German book: Direkt vor unseren Augen. The book explains what is really happening in the world of criminal pedophiles and why politicians have the wrong ideas. 🇩🇪
- Analysis of the updated chatcontrol proposal 🇬🇧
- Open Letter from Cryptographers: The updated chatcontrol proposal is still based on unrealistic ideas 🇬🇧
- History of the chatcontrol law from 11th of May 2022 to May 2024 🇬🇧
- New chatcontrol proposal: The users are forced to accept being surveilled or else they will not be allowed to share pictures, videos and links 🇬🇧 🇫🇷 🇩🇪
- Global Encryption Coalition says: [Chatcontrol] will not solve the problem of the online spread of child sexual abuse material, but will introduce significant security risks for all citizens, companies, and governments. 🇬🇧
- Strong increase of false positive detections for CSAM 🇩🇪
- Chat Control: Horse Trading While Nobody is Watching 🇬🇧
- Hungary's upcoming Council presidency means that chatcontrol is far from dead 🇩🇰
- "Upload Moderation" undermindes End-to-End Encryption 🇬🇧
- Open letter from many politicians: Reject the chatcontrol proposal! 🇬🇧
- EU ministers want to exempt themselves from surveillance 🇬🇧
- Edward Snowden warns against chatcontrol: This can lead to »total surveillance« 🇩🇰
- Most suspects for "child pornograpy" are minors 🇩🇪
- EU going dark group: The surveillance plan for the new EU Commission has been leaked 🇬🇧
- A member of the EU Commission admits: Chatcontrol vil break encryption 🇬🇧
- No One Wants "Chat Control" 🇬🇧
- European Ombudsman: The commission has conducted maladministration 🇬🇧
- Slides from Bornhack 2024 presentation 🇬🇧
- Chronology of a hypothetical future with chat control 🇬🇧
- Updated open letters from researchers: Chat control is still unacceptable 🇬🇧
- Switzerland: Chat control threatens rights of swiss citizens 🇨🇭 🇫🇷 🇩🇪 🇮🇹
- EDRi: Protection of children on the internet should be based on empowerment of children and not exclusion 🇬🇧