Surveillance: EU Council leaders want to make voluntary chat control permanent

The new Polish EU Council Presidency wants to cut the Gordian knot in the years-long dispute over the EU Commission's draft regulation on mass online surveillance under the banner of the fight against child sexual abuse. A leaked proposal from the Presidency of the Committee of Ministers envisages deleting the particularly controversial discovery orders for electronic communications.

The Commission wanted to be able to use this form of chat control to force providers of end-to-end encrypted messaging and other communication services such as WhatsApp, Apple with iMessage, Signal and Threema to uncover abusive photos and videos in their users' messages. The EU Parliament largely rejected this. At best, it wants to allow such orders as a last resort. Services with end-to-end encrypted communication should be completely excluded. The previous Hungarian Council Presidency did not go far enough, which led to a permanent blockade of the proposed legislation due to Germany's veto, among other things.

With its draft, Poland is now also proposing to replace the current transitional regulation on voluntary scanning for sexual abuse images with a permanent permit. This option was approved by the EU legislator in 2021 through a hastily adopted exemption from the ePrivacy Directive. The exemption allows Facebook, Google, Microsoft and other service providers to search their users' private messages in the EU for relevant material on a legal basis. Last year, the EU Parliament extended the corresponding clause until the end of 2025.

Data protection advocate warns of blanket surveillance

The Commission recently hailed this "voluntary chat control" as a success, even though it has no meaningful data to show for it. Ninon Colneric, former judge at the European Court of Justice, however, also considers this approach to be incompatible with EU law. It would disproportionately violate citizens' fundamental rights to privacy, data protection and freedom of expression. Former Federal Data Protection Commissioner Ulrich Kelber also sharply criticized voluntary scanning. He described the "blanket and unprovoked monitoring of digital communication channels" made possible by this as "neither expedient nor necessary".

The Council Presidency wants to retain the planned EU center for the fight against misrepresentation. However, it is to be consistently focused on prevention and no longer on the detection of such material. The equally controversial option for web blocks and the obligation for age verification by hosting and cloud services, email providers and app store operators, for example, will also remain. Critics fear that this could undermine anonymity on the internet.

(nen)