Parliamentarians from European countries have voiced their concerns over the European Commission’s plans for a so-called “chat control’’ law.
EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson presented the proposed Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse in May 2022.
It is designed to curb the spread of material showing the sexual abuse of children.
The law would make it compulsory for social media platforms to scan private encrypted chats on social media platforms for certain identifiers.
This might flag child grooming or the sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and to report any suspicious activity.
Under current law, this monitoring of online activity is voluntary.
Critics call this chat control.
They saw it as an attempt to scan all communication on the net, including encrypted messages, and they fear mass surveillance.
The 30 signatories to the document criticising the proposed law stated that although combatting sexualised violence against children is a high priority for them.
They believed the proposal formulated by the commission would lead to serious breaches of privacy.
They argued the law would oblige providers to introduce software to check the content of communications, undermine end-to-end encryption and result in the scanning of personal cloud storage.
On the website of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe a much larger body that was not part of the EU but which counted EU states among its members.
Every member has the opportunity to sign a petition posted there, based on an initiative by Konstantin Kuhle, deputy leader of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) parliamentary group in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag.
Members of the Council of Europe from Austria, Slovenia, Denmark, Ukraine, France and Switzerland were among the signatories of the document criticising the proposed chat control law.
From Germany, as well as FDP politicians, Green Party members of parliament Julian Pahlke and Max Lucks, and Norbert Kleinwächter of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) are among the signatories.
In April, the German government raised significant concerns about the European Commission’s proposal.
A statement put out by the Ministries of Family Affairs, Justice, the Interior, Family and Digital Affairs at the time said.
“In the German government’s view, significant changes are needed in the draft regulation to make it acceptable from the German point of view.’’
The EU countries and the European Parliament have not yet voted on their position on the proposed law.
Interior ministers, however, had recently shown themselves to be open to it.
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