It freaks me out to the point that I rather have my country leave the EU.
What makes you think that your country’s politicians don’t want that but some people in Brussels are forcing it?
Those people in Brussels are just people from all the countries, including yours. You also vote them in.
The desire of governments controlling the population is universal.
They do not answer to anyone and they collude with lobby organizations to push an agenda. This is the far from being a democratic process.
Rules for thee not for me.
[0]: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-eu-governm...
So if the worst happens and a mandatory chat control will gets implemented by the government, then it is a good thing that other parts of the government helped making sure, there are working alternatives avaiable, that are not so easy to regulate.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/data-retention-france-illeg...
> In a decree made public today [18. October 2022], French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne has extended the temporary retention of communications data of all citizens in France for another year. The blanket retention obligation concerns identity data (surname, first name, date and place of birth, postal address(es), e-mail address(es), telephone number(s)) as well as payment information, connection data (IP addresses, port numbers, identification numbers of users and their devices, date, time and duration of each communication, data on supplementary services and their providers)
The good thing about it is that it's an ungovernable nation and they havd mass protests and strikes when the government does something unpopular.
'They' in the Council of Ministers do not represent us, they are not elected by 'us', and their names sometimes are not even on polls.
They also have a conflict of interests, as Minister of Interior wants more power for himself and his services.
There are a lot of software developers in this forum.
And that is ignoring the fact that if your country left, you would in practice still adhere to those stupid rules because half of your country does business with the EU. You would just lose influence on those rules.
At least being a part of a large entity has some advantages on the world stage.
- Spain
It is hard to even comment on in idea that extreme. The rest of us are lucky the EU has failed so comprehensively at establishing a global tech presence.
- There was (and is) a fee on every CD-R, DVD-R, BR-R, hard drive, SSD, printer... as a "just in case it happens to store/copy copyright-protected material at some point ever" fee [0].
- They forced link aggregators to pay newspapers/sites for linking to their content, even just using their <og> tags. [1].
So such insane statement comes as an absolute non-surprise to anyone who's followed Spanish tech legislation for a while.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociedad_General_de_Autores_y_...
[1] https://pressgazette.co.uk/platforms/google-news-spain-faceb...
Sadly, Spain isn't the only country that does this. The copyright lobby has been very successful at making people fund their failing business model.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/catalonia-ban...
From this background, it's more understandable they want to all possible methods to spy their own citizens.
> The rest of us are lucky the EU has failed so comprehensively at establishing a global tech presence.
Lots of us think that the world would be better if tech companies didn't play so fast and loose with our data, and were better regulated.
EU’s function is to create a mechanism to find a common ground but that’s very hard so that’s why EU is has made a name for being slow and ineffective.
Spain and Switzerland or Sweden and Italy would have very, very different understanding on what the state should be able to do and how much involvement they must have because the way they govern their countries and the problems they face are very different.
Spain or Italy would usually be arguing on preserving some traditional way of doing things, Finland and Denmark would attack the issue very pragmatically and have great ideas that can’t possibly work anywhere else and the France and Germany would propose something that would increase their power in the area and the original concerns would be secondary.
Spain's central gov's been found to actively spy trhough malware politically opposing parties[1], so hearing they are against e2e encryption just sounds about right.
Are you SURE your own are not part of the support?
Remember the Lisbon Treaty, which necessitated a referendum in Ireland - which was repeated until the politically desired result was in.
What is the best path of action for someone who is privacy minded? Buy a dumb phone?
The problem would be with the messaging/media services that have EtoE encryption integrated in the same app.
I am not sure how buying a dumb phone solves anything.
But this won't be the end of it. Obviously the pervs will simply move to an open source app that doesn't obey this scanning. Or they'll use some kind of overlay encryption. Like sending gpg encrypted files as you point out.
So, in a year or so the police will rightfully complain they can't filter those and there's too many apps to check for. So what will the EU do? They'll mandate client side scanning in the OS that scans everything being displayed on screen. It's the only way to catch everything. They just killed privacy for everyone using an off the shelf phone. And perhaps PC if they include those.
But this won't be the end of it. Obviously the pervs will simply move to an open source OS.
So, in a year after that the police will complain they can't check open source devices. So what will they do? They'll mandate running a signed OS and using attestation to access the internet. They just killed FOSS and privacy for everyone using technology.
And of course, no that won't be the end of it. The pervs will share their pics on paper or whatever. And everyone else will be under surveillance for the rest of our lives.
This endeavour will only lead to erosion of privacy and will not lead to prevention of sharing this material because they'll just find another way.
Whatever the EU will come up with, it'll either easily be bypassed, or it'll be unthinkably draconian. The former won't solve the problem and the latter will end society as we know it. There is no solution other than hard police work.
Many Europeans still remember the dark times before 1989. Why there is a need to come back to it?
Soon , they'll expand it to wrong-think and who knows maybe disable your device if you dare criticize the EU or someone in power. I mean why stop at CSAM right? Any other reason will work. It's the ultimate power in the hands of politicians.
This woman, who is behind Chat Control is a former communist party member. I think that she must remember with fondness the time where the state has absolute power over it's citizens and decided now, was good time to bring this back to life.
Norwegian actress Tonje Gjevjon faces up to 3 years in prison for saying men cannot be lesbians https://nypost.com/2022/12/15/tonje-gjevjon-faces-up-to-3-ye...
Swiss LGBTQ+ rights groups hail 60-day sentence for polemicist who called journalist a ‘fat lesbian’ https://apnews.com/article/lgbtq-discrimination-switzerland-...
Woman’s conviction in Austria for calling the Prophet Mohammed a paedophile did not breach her right to free speech, European Court of Human Rights rules https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6316567/Woman-corre...
Not to mention the dubious benefit of preventing abuse.
