🇪🇺 After the UK's Online Safety Act and Australia's decision to restrict much of social media to teenagers, the European Union plans to take it a step further than the two countries and implement AI scanning tools to read the private and public groupchats of European users and look for child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

The European Union wants to adopt by October 14th a final draft of its Chat Control Act which is marketed, just like in the case of the UK's Online Safety Act and Australia's ban on teenagers from using social media apps, that it is being done to protect the children!

The European Commission's premise with this act is that all European citizens are closeted pedophiles who regularly share CSAM in their private conversations and thus everything must be verified by the state to make sure that this premise is not confirmed. Not only does the EU want to implement this AI groupchat scan tool, it wants to implement everything that the UK and Australia did like mandatory age verification upon login, social media bans for teens etc.

End-to-end encryption apps in the EU would stop working as a result of the tech company not complying with this regulation or would be broken entirely upon compliance.

Unlike the UK and Australia, the EU wants social media companies to have AI scan tools not only detect CSAM but also automatically report it to the police. Hashing tools which are already in use by law enforcement and most tech companies to identify potential CSAM give way too many false positives, to the proportion of 1/5 hashed messages. The EU also wants internet providers to block certain URLs from outside the EU upon request from national authorities.

Currently there's no consensus among EU countries on how far this bill should go, with some concessions being made that users can refuse to have their conversations scanned but will then lose the ability to upload pictures, videos or audio files and also won't be able to receive any. Consensus on the matter is being expected to be reached by October 14th and by the end of 2025, a final draft should be ready.

The governments of Belgium, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Slovenia, Luxembourg and Romania haven't decided if they support this bill or not. Only Austria, Poland and The Netherlands oppose this bill.

🔗 https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/