Conversation

The EU's proposal to force all service providers to automatically search all content that is either stored or transmitted anywhere in Europe, forward all illegal results to the police, and to block access to all non-European illegal content is expected to be presented to parliament in April. It's currently focused on algorithmic identification of unknown CSAM and of any social interactions that could be child grooming — basically, an AI trying to guess if an image might be child porn or a conversation might be trying to lure a child for sex — but it's unlikely that once the capability exists it won't be expanded to other crimes. The proposal would also force all services to age check their users (which means identifying them) and effectively ban anyone under 18 from interacting with the internet. There are no exceptions for end to end encryption and stored data not being shared is included.

To be clear, this proposal is not going to work. You know how bad chatGPT is? This is trying to solve a much harder problem, one humans struggle with, with much less compute power. What it will do is end all private communication in Europe, waste an amazing amount of police time, and leak a spectacular amount of private material to local police, some of whom — looking at you Hungary and Poland — are more than happy to use it to harass queers and trans people. It is fundamentally incompatible with the basic rights the EU is legally bound to uphold. It's also, in case they care, going to be a nightmare for corporate security and intellectual property control and will create a massive barrier to entry for anyone smaller than Google or Facebook running communication services in Europe.

Please call or write your MEP today and tell them to stop #ChatControl and preserve freedom of expression in Europe.