Two-thirds of European teenagers reject the European Commission’s proposed child protection law that would require internet providers to monitor personal messages, a new Episto poll published on Tuesday, March 7th, concluded.
Threatening the privacy of all Europeans, the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR), also known as ‘Chat Control,’ was proposed by the Commission last year in an effort to curb the dissemination of child pornography through messaging services using end-to-end encryption. Even though the legislative process is still ongoing, there’s almost no public discussion around it right now.
If approved by the European Parliament later this year, the CSA regulation would effectively mean that all digital correspondence of European citizens would be automatically monitored and scanned for keywords and pictures suspected of being child pornography, then flagged and sent into a central database for further inquiry and, if needed, prosecution.
The Commission aims to make the regulation mandatory for all email and messaging apps currently in use, including those with more advanced end-to-end encryption, such as WhatsApp, Signal, or Telegram. According to critics, Chat Control would effectively mean “the end of privacy of digital correspondence” in the EU.
So far, the proposal enjoys little to no support from European citizens. A widespread consultation done on behalf of the Commission in 2021 revealed that the majority of both citizens and relevant NGOs opposed making Chat Control mandatory in Europe, while over 80% of EU citizens opposed applying it to encrypted communication services. Nonetheless, the Commission went ahead with the proposal, which will be discussed in Parliament over the course of the next months.
The most recent poll measured public support behind the initiative among those most impacted: the children themselves. The survey, commissioned by members of the European Pirate Party and the European Digital Rights (EDRi), asked 8,000 European teenagers aged 13 to 17, in 13 EU member states if they agreed with the legislation. The majority of responders, over 66%, clearly rejected the proposed scanning of personal messaging. Additionally, over 80% of the minors said they would feel uncomfortable being politically active or exploring their sexuality if they knew their messages were monitored.
The violation of basic privacy is only one of the many issues raised by critics of the proposal. Under Chat Control, for instance, there would be an increased possibility of people being falsely reported and investigated for sexual abuse. Algorithms can easily flag completely legal material too, such as vacation photos or other family pictures taken by parents, as well as messaging between consenting teenagers. According to Swiss and Irish reports, some 80% of all machine-generated reports turn out to be without merit. Another report, released by German authorities, revealed that 40% of criminal investigations initiated for child porn turned out to be targeting minors.
Furthermore, collecting the personal communication of all EU citizens runs the risk of malign actors, such as hackers or outside governments, putting their hands on the data. For instance, if EU citizens travel abroad, their messages must be run through the local communication service providers to reach the central database, and there is no way to ensure third countries will always respect privacy laws.
Additionally, critics of Chat Control frequently point out that the legislation would not even provide an effective solution to the problem it aims to counter. According to NGOs and watchdogs protesting the law, actual child abuse material is rarely spread using conventional applications but is mostly disseminated over the dark web or using analog forms of communication.
In effect, Chat Control would do little to help solve the problem, and would even hurt the prospects of identifying actually harmful material by flooding the database with incorrectly flagged content, all while violating the privacy of all EU citizens, especially of parents and children, the very ones it aims to protect.
Despite the numerous issues, Chat Control is still on the EU agenda, with the LIBE committee (on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs) discussing and amending it by the end of May, intending to present it for a vote in the plenary in October 2023.
