Chat Control Must Be Stopped

Posted by _p2zi 9/8/2025

Chat Control Must Be Stopped(www.privacyguides.org)

788 points | 259 commentspage 2

causal 9/8/2025|

The article gives some examples of scope creep but missed the biggest one IMO: copyright enforcement. I suspect if you follow the money, copyright is what keeps things like Chat Control coming back. Fully expect Sony, Disney and other IP to be added to the list of flagged content, keeping us safe from dangerous pirates.

dkdcio 9/8/2025||

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

warkdarrior 9/8/2025||

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."

dwedge 9/8/2025|||

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

dkdcio 9/8/2025|||

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

warkdarrior 9/8/2025||

The other page I was referring to does have some more detail: https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/02/03/the-future...

SV_BubbleTime 9/8/2025||

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."

dkdcio 9/8/2025||

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."

thanks!

jonaharagon 9/8/2025|||

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

3np 9/8/2025||

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.

awesome_dude 9/8/2025|||

> including end-to-end encrypted ones

How the hang are they planning to do that?

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

LocalH 9/8/2025||

I imagine they'll push for apps to do the scanning prior to encryption and directly after decryption.

deadbabe 9/8/2025||

Sometimes I think if this stuff ever got really bad, abandoning smart phones altogether wouldn’t be so bad.

I’m already taking most photos with a dedicated digital camera and they are so much better than phone captured images. I hate social media these days and am waiting to give myself a reason to delete all the apps and my accounts entirely. The internet is a shithole, most my search is done through LLMs and my interaction with people is through comment sections. I have no interest in being in group chats, I’d rather meet up with people in person and socialize that way.

It’s not the end of the world if smartphones just become a convenient way for governments to track you, there is totally a different way to live without them, and maybe it’s simple and beautiful.

If you really have a serious use case for peer to peer end to end encryption, you should be using something like Meshtastic.

poly2it 9/9/2025||

Enlightening, I'm already looking forward to the next ten years of civilisation!

bojo 9/8/2025||

This was my thought as well. Back to dumb devices and call it a day.

deadbabe 9/8/2025||

Yup. Everything a smartphone does can be done by other things way better.

closewith 9/8/2025||

For context, this refers to the proposed EU Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Co...

zmmmmm 9/8/2025||

Of all the arguments presented I'm surprised to see absent the one that seems most obvious to me: encryption is just math, there's no way to actually ban it. If criminals think their conversations are going to be detected they aren't going to just say "oh well let's not crime now". They are going to simply spin up their own e2e encrypted channels. The software is nearly trivial, the technical barriers are very low - it's hard to think why it won't happen.

So then what? They start outlawing encryption altogether? knowledge of math? How would you claw back all the public and freely available software that people can already use to encrypt messages to each other?

jonaharagon 9/8/2025||

> They start outlawing encryption altogether?

This is the direction places like the UK have gone in, yes. Can't decrypt something? Then we assume it is illegal content.

Tade0 9/8/2025|||

Steganography it is then. Can't assume something is illegal, if it's hidden.

int_19h 9/9/2025||

Sure you can. For example, UK will jail you if you refuse to disclose a cryptographic key for something encrypted that the court wants to see, so long as the judge is convinced that you know it. I could easily see that extending to steganography: "there's no rational justification for you to have this file, and statistical analysis patterns show that it likely has a steganographic payload".

Tade0 9/9/2025||

"Sir, those are just internet memes I've been sharing with a friend of mine"

The whole point of this technique is that with sufficiently low information density the data is not recoverable unless you know what you're looking for, because it's indistinguishable from noise.

int_19h 9/9/2025|||

> "Sir, those are just internet memes I've been sharing with a friend of mine"

"I don't believe you, so now you're going to be in the locker for contempt of court until you provide law enforcement access to this critical evidence."

Tade0 9/10/2025||

"What evidence? This is normal noise associated with lossy compression. Have an expert look at it - they'll confirm what I've said."

mbs159 9/10/2025|||

> "Sir, those are just internet memes I've been sharing with a friend of mine"

Then it is reasonable to assume that you can just show us these internet memes?

Tade0 9/10/2025||

Of course, because I can bet on the fact that no one will find anything having just those images.

Again: the signal is below the noise floor. Unless you really know what to look for, you'll just find noise. Whoever seizes these files would have to at least know the specific method used, particularly if the content is also encrypted.

Take for an example JPEG as a vessel for steganographic content: the image is divided into 8x8 pixel chunks. If you encode just one bit of entropy in each chunk, a 320x240 image will yield 1200 bits, so 150 ASCII characters. Mangle it with a one-time pad for good measure so that it actually looks like noise. How did that noise get there? Well, it's lossy compression your honor.

There are so many ways to encode that one bit in such a large piece of information that authorities are better off drugging, bribing or torturing you or whoever was the recipient of that message than trying to decode it.

Nursie 9/9/2025|||

I mean, not just the UK - it eventually changed in the US, but anything deemed too strong to crack was classified as a munition for a while in the 90s and 00s, and some things are still banned from being shipped to some places -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

"It's just math, you can't ban it" has never been true.

jihadjihad 9/8/2025|||

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

dlivingston 9/8/2025||

> Any image file or an executable program can be regarded as simply a very large binary number.

This had never occurred to me before but is totally obvious in hindsight. An interesting corollary is that, given an infinite natural number space, all programs that have ever and will ever exist can be found as a single point on this natural number plane. The larger the number, the more complex the program. What else is emergent from this property?

ImPostingOnHN 9/9/2025|||

Sounds like The Library of Babel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

latexr 9/9/2025|||

https://github.com/philipl/pifs

zamadatix 9/9/2025|||

I'm sure many core proponents of Chat Control would like to also make it illegal to "hide" from scanning by applying your own encryption (and, even if not caught directly, it would add to the list of crimes someone might be charged with) but that large of a change probably puts it too far outside the Overton Window of today in a single push.

Nursie 9/9/2025|||

People have been selectively "banning math" for decades -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

const_cast 9/9/2025||

They don't even need to spin up their own channels, they can just continue to use existing channels and encrypt their messages.

I mean, if youre in the business of CSAM surely you don't mind encrypting a zip and emailing it or putting it on Google drive or whatever. Its trivial, requires next to zero technology knowledge.

Its inconvenient, sure, which is why we don't currently do that. But I'm sure the CSAM distributors don't care. Why would they?

MaKey 9/8/2025||

I emailed all MEPs for my country one month ago. Apart from out-of-office notices I didn't get anything back yet.

fbhabbed 9/9/2025|

You will eventually get a canned AI made reply (just like all the canned AI mails they have received these days due to websites creating templates for them).

txrx0000 9/8/2025||

They control the guns, so you can't fight back with bullets. They control the airwaves, so you can't fight back with ideas. You're running out of options.

The next step is to control your mind.

egorfine 9/9/2025||

I'm afraid the Chat Control will pass, sooner or later. The procedure is very simple: reintroduce the bill every other year until the public will not be bothered to hear anymore.

Now, you may think you are the smart one and can always revert to the good old days of OTR[1].

But no, the next thing I can see happening is the smartphone OS conveniently doing client-side scanning of everything on the screen for you. You know, for developers' convenience. And then it's game over: you will not be able to take a look at the Tiananmen Square picture in any installed app.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging

jongjong 9/8/2025||

The only long term solution for this is for people to use more different platforms. Communities should be seeking out new platforms, building their own chat platforms with their own protocols. There is no such thing as a single 'decentralized protocol' - There are incompatible protocols and then there are centralized protocols. When it comes to censorship resistance, incompatibility is a feature. Lack of adoption (unpopularity) is a feature.

If other people around you recognize the name of a chat platform you're using, then it's not decentralized and it's almost certainly monitored.

0xc0ff338 9/8/2025||

I fear we're long past the point of no return. We are exactly one 'policy update' away from not being able to install non-compliant messengers on our phones. Sure, there are still some devices that will let you unlock the bootloader and you can still sideload unverified apps, but let's be honest, most people today barely manage to install an app from the store. If installing a decentralized messenger is more involved than that, 99% of people aren't going to do it.

jongjong 9/9/2025||

What about web-based apps which users can access in the browser without download? They can be very user-friendly. Big companies which do surveillance make their browser-based web apps crappy on purpose in order to coerce people into using their app-store app; precisely because it gives them more surveillance capabilities (e.g. location, file access, camera access, ...). A well-intentioned chat app does not need such permissions so a web app is a good medium.

0xc0ff338 9/16/2025||

I don't know if that's the case now, but not many years back Safari on iPhone wouldn't let you subscribe and receive push notifications. Even something as simple as that is enough to render a web based messenger useless. There's also no API to synchronize your contacts, which is something a 'normal' user would expect, nevermind rather awkard mobile browser tab management which confuses even me, someone who is intimately familiar with how web browsers work.

sterlind 9/9/2025||

those platforms will be banned. this will doom Signal, the fediverse, and countless smaller platforms. anything that isn't compatible will become illegal.

EGreg 9/8/2025|

Would chat control also force open source software to put in backdoors? Like if users run their own little servers somewhere, and those load websites, or they sideload apps to the app store (thanks to EU hehe).

sterlind 9/9/2025|

I'd personally like to have a FOSS, privacy-aware CSAM (or even generic gore/porn) detector I could plug into Matrix/Lemmy/Mastodon servers. something self-hostable, so I could run those services without worrying about pedos and trolls ruining my platform.

I'm not sure if something like it exists. I'm not sure if it could exist. PhotoDNA (the old CSAM detector) ended up being somewhat reversible, so that you could actually turn signatures back into obscene material. because of this, the signature databases were shared under strict NDA, only to large players.

probably the most realistic solution is a generic porn classifier convnet. if it blocks adult porn, it should block CSAM too (hopefully?)

they are not reliant on image hashes, and reversibility concerns apply less because the dataset used to train it was presumably legal (if distasteful.)

beeflet 9/9/2025||

I am working on something like this using multimodal models

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