Chat Control is back: EU reopens scanning of your private messages

Chat Control: the scanning of private messages is back on the table

Chat Control is back. According to the quote circulating these days, the European Union is reviving the proposal that would allow service providers to track users' non-public content —messages, photos, documents— under the formula “Own-initiate searches by providers for non-public content”: platforms searching on their own initiative inside your conversations. The euphemism is textbook. And there is one point on which critical voices agree: they believe that, if this goes ahead, it will not be to protect anyone.

What exactly does the EU's Chat Control propose?

The key is who does the searching. It is no longer a matter of a judicial authority asking to review a specific chat; rather, under that formula, the provider —the messaging app, email, the cloud— would scan private messages and files on its own and without a prior order. The quote that Mikko Ohtamaa has circulated points to the Irish presidency of the Council, led by Micheál Martin (Fianna Fáil), as the driving force behind the text. For critics, the label sells protection, while the real scope is any private message.

From private messages to printer ink

The problem, many argue, is not yes or no but how far companies' eyes reach. The example put on the table: why does a printer company know how many documents you print and with what ink, when a generic cartridge costs a fraction of the original? Or that update that rendered hundreds of freezers useless and ruined their owners' food. The same logic that monitors a printer can monitor a conversation. What is accepted for convenience is rarely regained.

The vote that is repeated until someone presses the wrong button

“Once approved, it cannot be cancelled,” sums up the distrust. The suspicion running through the issue, raised by a participant, is that votes are repeated —he reckons about seven defeats have already piled up— until an internal shift in majorities makes it possible to scrape together the missing votes, or until the package slips through camouflaged inside another unrelated rule. Those who see it this way are not talking about parliamentary democracy, but about a mechanism that wears down dissenters by insisting.

Is there any point in turning off your phone?

Here the consensus breaks down. Some argue that throwing away the smartphone is the final surrender and that whoever masters technology wins, not whoever abandons it; they recall that operating systems without telemetry exist and that using them is a free choice. The reply comes quickly: the DNI (Spanish ID card) or a passport already tie you legally and financially to a number, so the independence of those who disconnect is more aesthetic than real. Technology, they say, never liberated anyone. And in the middle is the experience of someone who got their first smartphone in 2008, at 46 years old, and remembers a world that felt complete without it.

Some predict that, if the text continues on its course, the next generation will take it as normal that an app reads their messages and that whoever refuses is the suspect. The accumulated defeats, according to that count, show that the majority still resists. What is not at all clear is how much that majority can take before exhaustion does the work that voting cannot achieve.