“EU Chat Control – End of Private Chatting”:

The European Union is pushing forward with a controversial proposal known as Chat Control. It’s framed as a way to protect children and fight crime online. In practice, however, it could mean the end of private conversations as we know them. If passed, platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and even email providers could be forced to scan every single message and photo you send — even encrypted ones.

This isn’t just about criminals being monitored. It’s about everyone losing the right to private communication.

It seems the governments worldwide recently really try to push Internet surveillance to extreme.

What EU Chat Control Proposes

At its core, the EU’s Chat Control legislation aims to force digital platforms to proactively monitor private communications for illegal content, particularly child sexual abuse material (CSAM). While the goal may sound noble, the methods raise serious concerns:

• Mandatory message scanning – Apps and services would be required to scan all messages, images, videos, and even voice notes for “suspicious content,” regardless of whether conversations are private or encrypted.

• Breaking encryption – Services that use end-to-end encryption, like Signal, WhatsApp, or iMessage, would still have to scan every message and photo, before encrypting it, rendering the "end-to-end" aspect of encryption invalid.

• Cloud scanning - potentially even cloud storage providers will have to scan photos and documents that you have on their servers. This means that every photo you ever made or will make, will be scanned, unless you stop using cloud.

• Universal surveillance – Even innocent users become subject to mass scanning. In practice, this turns secure communication tools into government-mandated surveillance systems.

How is it supposed to work

The legislation proposes the monitoring to be performed by "client side scanning". It means that the scan is supposed to be performed on our devices and theoretically never leave it, unless a potential child abuse case is detected.

If the algorithm performing the scan deems something as child abuse related, the whole message of photo is send to the company owning the platform (eg. Apple, Meta, Discord) and then to the EU CSAM Centre.

UE politicians supporting this act are trying to convince everyone that no data will ever be shared as long as no child abuse suspicion will arise in relation to it. But that isn't true for various reasons:

• False positives: Innocent content (family beach photos, medical images, private jokes) could be misclassified and reported. If that happens, everything that was flagged would be send further

• Expansion risk: Once the system exists, governments could expand it to scan for other material (e.g., "Hate" speech, Copyrighted content, Terrorism).

• Gathering data for audits: To prove the system is working, companies may log some metadata (like “X photos scanned today, no matches”) for audit/compliance.

• Potential for missuse: Every single message sent and photo/document shared or stored on cloud, would be scanned by an AI algorithm. The key to extracting data from those scans, would be in hands of Big Tech Companies. Sooner or later, somehow that data will be either illegally used by the businesses themselves, or get stolen by hackers in big security breach. It's just a matter of time

---> If you are a citizen of UE member state, and you wish to learn more about this topic, or actively protest to the implementation of Chat Control, go here