The European Union is slowly banning online privacy

A confidential document from the Council of the European Union reveals the intention to discourage the use and spread of tools to protect online privacy.

Imagine a kind of social scoring system that only applies to companies providing digital services. Imagine that this scoring system overturns any criterion of common sense and aims to discriminate against companies that protect the privacy of their users, rewarding instead those who do not.

Absurd, right? I agree. Unfortunately, it is not the product of an Orwellian fantasy, but the subject of a confidential document from the Council of the European Union that was leaked online…

The document is part of the legislative process of the infamous “Child Sexual Abuse Regulation” known among insiders as “Chatcontrol”.

The regulation has been the subject of numerous analyses by me since 2021, and rightly so. From the start, I was among the few to claim that this Regulation was merely a pretext to combat the spread of encryption systems and to boycott online privacy. Today we will see that it is indeed the Council of the European Union that confirms it!

For those who may not remember, Chatcontrol is a regulation created to combat child pornography online. In practice, however, it will be a mass surveillance law with serious implications for the spread of so-called “privacy enhancing technologies” like encryption.

Chatcontrol establishes, among other things, that companies to which it applies can be subjected to surveillance orders, called “detection orders,” by the authorities. These orders require scanning all communications and content that pass through the systems in order to identify, remove, and report potentially illegal content.

The issuance of these surveillance orders follows risk assessment criteria: the more dangerous the services provided by the platform are considered, the more likely the platform will be targeted by authorities…