Posted by gasull 1 day ago
Instead of using the criticism to improve the system, the corrupt system starts to attack and forbid the criticism.
"A temporary derogation from the ePrivacy Directive that allowed (but did not require) providers to scan private messages of unsuspected users for potential child sexual abuse material."
Does that imply it's currently not allowed?
EDIT: apparently not enforced at least:
"Chat Control 1.0 expires
The legal ground for voluntary, indiscriminate scanning ends. Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Snap state they will continue scanning private messages regardless. "
https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195338
They did id sneakily.
https://www.politico.eu/article/president-vs-parliament-robe...
As I understand it, there will still be another related vote on Thursday, so call your representatives!
Not for the last few months, no; Chat Control 1 expired.
The Commission is an expression of _governments_ (and this one in particular is the result of painstaking compromise) and is only loyal to presidents and prime ministers. It has no accountability to the EP, and it shows.
That framing is distracting us from the authoritarian vs civil liberties issues, which is a dangerous and immediate threat to our ability to have any significant political influence of any kind.
If a conservative wants to preserve some status quo, basically all policy they use (and have available as a tool) in a permanently changing and developing world (socially, technologically) is that of restrictions, especially on civil rights, and of authoritarian mechanisms like police power. For weird reasons, conservatives never* want to preserve status quo civil rights like workers rights, freedom of information rights and similar that are anti-authoritatian.
This can change in the future, as it has before, but in 2026, even libertarians only care about personal freedom for a certain class of people.
In Spain (you can see this in the website) our traditional left and right parties are largely in favor, while the parties in both ends of the spectrum (at the lack of better term: far left and far right) seem to be largely against.
The sad thing is that it seems that the parties that are already established or likely to alternative in power are the ones that are pushing for it, and this makes it very difficult to fight against
there is more than one left wing faction in the eu - we got greens (more radical and oppose chat control), s&d (mainstream parties like german spd, mostly support), the left (hardcore socialist/communists) and renew europe (centrist liberals). none of them are completely united on this.
far right parties are also against chat control most of the time. christian parties (moderate right wing) support it for moral reasons. its really more of a establishment/alternative issue than left/right.
Or they scan at the edge on the user's device.
Either way, both are very prone to false positives and and very much privacy invading.
Scan on end user's devices, but never transmit the result of that. Only report it ON the device itself to the user. A false positive when you send a pic of your naked kid to your spouse might show a warning icon asking you if you are sure you want to send it.
Also: for minors (Who is a minor not determined by some central age verification, but by me specifying in the Apple/Android family settings who my kids are) you could make sending certain things it blocking or subject to parent approval. E.g. if my daughter is tricked into sending nudes, it's something that's handled the same as if she wants to install an app or visit a specific web page.
No encryption is ever backdoored. Anything beyond this, e.g. reporting any user actions, would be allowed only through a court, just like any wiretapping always was.
So then the user can "just" install their own client.
Concretely, are there documented examples of abuses ? Are the checks & balance sufficient ? I understand ChatControl 2.0 goes way beyond, be it goes "beyond" enough that it does not get a majority in parlement, and can't move forward.
But for CC1.0 we don't need to imagine anymore - we have 2 years of application. Is that enough to evaluate ?
I thought I'd heard it all here on HN, but expecting EU to clean up after the US shooting itself in the foot with a completely unnecessary war probably comes somewhere in top 5 easily.
We aren't done yet. Game on after the midterms.
Please don't pretend to misunderstand a point just to manufacture the opportunity to reply in bad faith.
Nobody in EU is saying the EU should clean up others' mess around the world, people are just saying the EU should be busy building domestic capacity and capabilities to insulate itself from the issues caused by others around the world, such as securing domestic energy supplies so that the next time USrael blows up the middle east, the EU can just eat it no issue indead of being at the mercy of foreign oligarchs for overpriced energy.
US is so monetary rich and energy rich that they can afford to blow up the middle east every 10 years with little domestic consequences for them, and still have enough gas to drive their Ford F-450s Super Duty to Walmart, heat their pools and AC their homes, without leading to national unrest, but EU is so energy starved that securing energy independence should have been a national security issue for the past 20 years already, not since 2022.
And not just energy, EU is exposed in other areas as well (SW, AI, semiconductors, lithium batteries, agriculture, manufacturing, defense, etc), and again, it will only wake up in panic mode at the 11th hour when US or China twists their arm in some spontaneous international dispute. But politicians instead of focusing on preemptively securing these vulnerabilities BEFORE shit hits the fan, are too busy focusing on controlling people's privacy, which is what EU citizens and commenters here are criticizing.
If this is what you wanted to have said, say that from the beginning instead of leaving some vague and ambiguous "general complaint about the Strait of Hormuz" and maybe others like me will understand you better.
Somehow you seem to imply none of those things are happening right now in Europe, is this really your perspective? You think no one is thinking about domestic energy supplies? Do you not understand how EU works? Lots of things are happening in parallel, not the least a lot of work around energy dependency and other core infrastructure issues.
"The purpose of a system is what it does". So far there's no sign of any progress, it's just getting worse. The Draghi report was two years ago and nothing has been done to address the issues it raised.
That's literally what the top poster said.
Your points make sense, "EU should reopen Hormuz" is laughable
Exactly, that's why it was obvious he was speaking implicitly.
And well... EU will have to clean up others mess that they sprayed all over Europe anyway.
So americans will be paying 2x as well its just that some of that money will stay in the country instead of going to the middle easter or US (which happens to be the largest supplier of oil to the EU)
Back in 2025 EU imported ~15% from the gulf. China was over 40% and Japan at 95%...
It's unlikely to happen, but that's the one thing I can see that the EU could contribute to the opening of Hormuz.
Add to that the risk that every diminishing level of comfort for a population in EU seems to bring new percentages for extremist parties.
The second order and third order effects of any decision are too big and almost everyone posting EU should do <insert here a single simple thing> is most probably wrong in ways they dont even know about. That does not mean we should not debate but we should slow down a bit the extreme choices and try to be a bit more understanding of various details.
Yup, go set up an EU Stasi ready for them when they get to run the show.
What is there to debate? The US and Israel have attacked Iran without a very clear plan to prevent it from acquiring nuclear capability and this has backfired with Hormuz straight traffic being blocked. Whatever the EU says at this point won't solve anything. What they've done up to this point, stay out of it, was the correct corse of action. Right now the US is basically bullying Iran to make a deal or get bombed.
Tbf this is only the position of a few extreme governments. Other European countries have been perfectly happy to let the US use their bases for this.
Probably also why we now have a flood of lame Trump jokes about Meloni.
“Next Stasi”, “eurocrats”, “cripple domestic agriculture”, “dumping German diesel cars”, “useless talk”. None of this actually responds to the point about European energy dependence.
I don't see how the EU lived live with already higher energy prices compared to the US for so long and still don't make better renewable policy top priority.
The national government of Bulgaria's position isn't necessarily in line with Bulgarian MEPs.