EU data protection officials: “Serious deficiencies” in the planned chat control​

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eu data protection officials serious deficiencies in the planned chat.jpg
eu data protection officials serious deficiencies in the planned chat.jpg

The EU data protection officers are united against the EU initiative for nationwide child pornography scans. You want to keep secure encryption.

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and the EU data protection officer Wojciech Wiewiórowski sharply criticize the EU Commission’s draft regulation on combating child sexual abuse and the associated monitoring of private messages (“chat control”). They warn that the proposal is likely to pose more risks for citizens and society than for criminals.

With the highly controversial project of the EU Commission, providers of consistently encrypted messaging and other communication services such as WhatsApp, Apple, Signal and Threema should also be able to be obliged by authorities and courts to locate photos and videos of child abuse in the messages of their users.

Overall, the privacy advocates have serious concerns about the impact of the planned measures on the privacy of citizens. They criticize a “lack of detail, clarity and precision of the conditions” for issuing a “disclosure order”. There is a risk that a legal basis for “general and indiscriminate scanning of the content of practically all types of electronic communication” will be created.

The EU data protection officers are concerned that the end-to-end encryption of messengers could be undermined. Cryptographic processes contribute “in a fundamental way to respect for private life and the confidentiality of communications, to freedom of expression, to innovation and to the growth of the digital economy”. AI filters used to search for abuse images and grooming attempts could easily lead to errors and false suspicions. The experts also consider the planned web blocks to be disproportionate.

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Vice-EDSA chairman Ventsislav Karadjov referred to “serious deficiencies” in the initiative. Even children using the collected communications services could be overly monitored. The negative consequences of the instruments desired by the Commission are “so serious that they cannot be justified by the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights,” added Wiewiórowski.

The Federal Data Protection Commissioner, Ulrich Kelber, compared the chat control with “mass surveillance without cause”, which is otherwise “only known from authoritarian states”. Germany and the federal ministries involved must work at EU level to protect fundamental rights and telecommunications secrecy.


(vbr)