EU doubles down on penalising privacy-friendly and encrypted messaging services

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/leak-eu-governments-double-down-on-penalising-privacy-friendly-and-encrypted-messaging-services-with-chat-control-bulk-scanning-orders/

by belter • 2 years ago

150 35 2 years ago

patrick-breyer.de

palata• 2 years ago

they will score worse on the risk scale, and will be more likely to be served a detection order mandating scanning of all communications content

What does that mean? Say a service collects no data at all: what's the point of a "detection order mandating scanning of all communications content"? They will get all the data collected by the service, which is none.

jand• 2 years ago

They will get all the data collected by the service, which is none.

(disclaimer: not rooted in knowledge, but in pessimism)

If the web service / whatever cannot provide the requested data, it would be in violation of the order.

So all you really need are harsh fines for not complying with the order and the problem morphs from a technical one to a business decision.

kvdveer• 2 years ago

Under current law, you cannot be compelled to share more data than you're already collecting. However, the term "collecting" is a bit wider than the most common use. If you receive some piece of data, you are collecting it, even if you don't keep logs, or don't do anything with it.

It's not much different than how detective work is done in the physical domain. You cannot be compelled to ask a customer for more info, but you can be compelled to share info that the customer gave to you, even if you didn't ask for it or never wrote it down.

vaylian• 2 years ago

Chatcontrol is mostly about data in transit. Anything that is sent to the internet can be scanned.

iamkonstantin• 2 years ago

Is this even legitimate? The post as well as the "leaked" document look so dodgy.

grunder_advice2• 2 years ago

How long will it be before I won't be able to post a comment like this online without providing my government ID?

AnimalMuppet• 2 years ago

Depends on what country you're in. In the US, it's going to be a while. In the EU, maybe not.

hedora• 2 years ago

In the US, they don’t bother asking for your ID because wouldn’t give them much more information than they already have.

GardenLetter27• 2 years ago

And think of what it's like for startups too - if you want to make your own social media competitor now you have tonnes and tonnes of bureaucracy - the GDPR, privacy policies, cookie banners, the DSA (and stopping "disinformation"), the Cybersecurity act, and now IDs.

andai2• 2 years ago

Ironic considering the EUs apparent stance against American megacorporations. They're just making it harder to compete with them.

derelicta• 2 years ago

Not really. You can run a Mastodon instance without any administrative overhead lol

raverbashing• 2 years ago

on the approach pursued by the Belgian Council Presidency

To be noted

The more noisy and outrageous this gets at this stage I can see more people making noise about it

dsign• 2 years ago

In some places, the mask of this being a child-pornography problem is falling down already, see [^1]. The Swedish Social Democrats, which is the biggest political party in Sweden, wants for everybody to use their IDs to comment in social media just so that the party can wage their electoral war.

[^1]: https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/swedens-socia...

Duralias• 2 years ago

Reading the article it isn't just that though, privacy problematic as it is, troll accounts spreading misinformation is an issue, especially for elections, and real weird for one of the major parties to admit to employing against even their supposed allies.

And while that mask fell off, a similarly hard to argue against reason that they bring up is the russian state, which no one here likes, so it isn't like they actually pulled off the mask, just swapped it for something almost equal, assuming they stick to that reason.

andai2• 2 years ago

This legislation confuses me. Why would a party /its lobbyists care about trolling? It seems that a greater effect would be that sockpuppet accounts can no longer be used. Wouldn't this represent a loss to authoritarians?

e.g. ones who openly conduct psychological operations on their own citizens:

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/article/explainer/...

beardyw• 2 years ago

I think the argument should be about making people care, not the dashed unfairness of it all. I doubt more than 1% are aware or care.

PartiallyTyped• 2 years ago

Is this really where we are going? We have freedom of movement but not the freedom to speak to each other without prying ears/eyes? Is this really what the European project has come to? Do we really not have more important problems than this?

I guess it's easier to squash dissent and fight electoral wars than to take meaningful actions for the people.

Dear HN'ers; what can we actually do about this instead of preaching to the choir?

grunder_advice2• 2 years ago

We have neither. Look at what happened to Yanis Varoufakis.

hiatus2• 2 years ago

What happened to him?

arlort• 2 years ago

Dear HN'ers; what can we actually do about this instead of preaching to the choir?

Lobby and get involved in national/EU politics. You can start by voting next week

sampa• 2 years ago

you can't do anything.

current governments in big/not-failed countries are way too powerful, so any idea that "people decide" is from an old age.

they just want you to continue to believe this, so they keep the sheep and you think you live in a good ole western democracy, while you're not

hcfman• 2 years ago

Sad but true I fear.

Detrytus• 2 years ago

I think that with current political direction of the "liberal" West, in connection with technical advancements, such as AI, the mankind is on path to become the Borg civilization from Star Trek: all private property abolished, any shred of individuality stripped, any non-conformant thought policed, everybody connected to the central hub through their smartphone (which soon will get direct mind-reading capabilities).

croes• 2 years ago

EU: secure communication is bad and helps criminals

The same EU: the Russians/Chinese intercepted confidential messages. We don't know how that could happen.

ben_w• 2 years ago

I suspect this is a fundamental mindset issue between thinking as a lawyer/law maker vs. thinking as a programmer.

https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/05/25-12.04.31.html

We can see how machines fail, and make the mistake of applying those standards to laws and money and so on, where they don't fit; law makers expect humans to be the ones actioning any given requirement, and cannot understand why it's so hard to only encrypt good content from good people and not bad content from bad people.

omginternets• 2 years ago

EU doubles down on penalising privacy-friendly and encrypted messaging services

Related Stories