EU approves Chat Control policy
11 comments
·November 26, 2025mrtksn
tux3
I assume this is a delay to get a foot in the door. After some time, the scanning will be made no longer voluntary.
One has to take rights away slowly, otherwise the frog jumps before you can boil it.
mckirk
While I fully agree with your sentiment, I'd like to take the opportunity to share a favorite fun-fact of mine: the frogs in the not-jumping-out experiment had their brains removed beforehand. Which might make the analogy more apt, actually, considering how much under siege our attention is these days.
foofoo12
"voluntary" can also be pretty meaningless depending on the context. In the UK, if the police suspects you of shenanigans, they'll politely invite you for an "voluntary interview".
Of course you can decide to not go, it's voluntary, right? Yes, you can. Your choice. And when you reject their kind offer they'll come and arrest you so you can attend the interview.
jasonvorhe
Good old salami tactics still work. Same goes for going way over target to then settle for your actual goal.
Good old democracy at work.
squigz
Taking the reasons at face value (for the sake of argument) I guess what I'm confused about is why this would be necessary. I would think there were already laws/regulations/liability reasons/etc requiring companies to make efforts to ensure they're not hosting CP and other such things? Am I wrong?
ChrisArchitect
mseri
Thanks for the link. I had missed the other two submissions.
If any admin is around, they should probably be merged. This is the other one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46055863
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bgwalter
They could have subpoenaed the unencrypted Gmail accounts of Maxwell, Epstein and Barak like two decades ago. They can still subpoena Barak's Gmail and other accounts, especially after Giuffre's allegations about "a well known prime minister".
I have the feeling this will not happen.
Xelbair
Oh but those people would be exempt from scanning anyways.
>At the beginning of the month, the Danish Presidency decided to change its approach with a new compromise text that makes the chat scanning voluntary, instead.
Hmm, so this will probably make the life for those who don't scan quite hard and if they experience a high profile scandal getting out of it will not be easy I assume.
I'm not sure what to think of it, not being mandatory and requiring risk assessment sounds like "Fine, whatever don't do it if you don't want to do it but if something bad happens it's on you". May be fair to some extent, i.e. Reddit and Telegram can decide how much they trust their users not to run pedo business and be on the hook for it.
On the other hand, it is a backdoor and if the governments go crazy like they did in some other countries where high level politicians are implicated with actual pedophiles and have a tendency for authoritarianism Europe may end up having checking user chats for "enemies of the state" instead of CSAM materials. Being not mandatory here may mean that you get constant bullying because you must be hiding something.