THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT voted in favour of measures on 9 July to allow tech companies to monitor online chats in an effort to clamp down on child abuse.

These reduce the privacy protections for users of messaging platforms, so that their conversations can be scanned for child sex abuse material (CSAM) and potentially flagged with authorities. 

However, the rhetoric around the vote has been so extreme that it’s not always clear that opposing sides are discussing the same thing.

“There is no legal basis allowing platforms to detect, report, and remove child sexual abuse material online,” reads a 7 July post on X by the European People’s Party Group — the largest bloc of the European Parliament, and which Fine Gael is a member of.

The EPP was talking about the temporary provision that later passed in the European Parliament on 9 July; critics dub this, and related plans as “chat control”.

“This is not about catching criminals. It is mass surveillance imposed on all 450 million citizens of the European Union,” reads the website fightchatcontrol.eu.

‘Chat control’

Whether under the banner of “chat control”, or as the EU’s measures to “prevent and combat child sexual abuse”, these rules include a “derogation” that expired in April, another derogation that passed on 9 July, and proposed laws on how children should be protected online.

The lapsed derogation was passed in 2021 and allowed these companies to ignore parts of Europe’s privacy laws for the purposes of stopping the spread of CSAM and alerting it in the hope it will be assigned to a national police force. 

Google, Meta, Microsoft and Snap have all said that they will continue monitoring for CSAM.

Although there are ideological debates around these proposals, there are also genuine disagreements about how the current laws, and any future ones, will work in practice.

An open letter objecting to the measures, with more than 800 signatories from academics and other experts, stated that “it is simply not feasible to perform detection of known and new CSAM for hundreds of millions of users with an acceptable level of accuracy”.

There are also concerns about how reports to police will be treated. The recently passed derogation states that “any data should be immediately and permanently deleted as soon as they are no longer strictly necessary”.

The Irish Council For Civil Liberties found that An Garda Síochána have retained reports received from the US child protection agency years after confirming they were not legitimate cases of CSAM.

Further, a 2023 impact assessment for the European Parliament expected the “overall effectiveness” of the proposed rules to be “limited”.

In response to queries, the EPP directed The Journal to statements by Noeline Blackwell of the Children’s Rights Alliance.

“A recent worldwide study found that approximately one in five children in Western Europe reported experiencing unwanted or pressured sexual interactions online before the age of 18,” Blackwell wrote, arguing that platforms should be asked to continue “the weak monitoring they were doing.” 

Encryption

One of the major objections to chat control is that the scanning of messages before they are sent will make end-to-end encryption — the technological system that keeps (some) messaging services private — obsolete.

The debate about this is extremely technical but has been deftly avoided, for now at least, by the European Parliament.

The derogation that was passed on 9 July comes with amendments excluding “communications to which end-to-end encryption is, has been or will be applied”.

This means that some messaging apps, such as Signal and Telegram, will not be covered by the law.

Given the facts and the layout of the disagreements, it’s fair to say that there’s been misleading statements from both sides of the debate.

For example, the EPP said there was “no legal basis allowing platforms to detect, report, and remove” online.

But this overstates the case: there is a legal basis for platforms to do all those things on websites and most of the platforms that people would consider social media.

In a response to The Journal’s inquiries, the EPP said that the current rules did not allow service providers “to actively detect and report CSAM in interpersonal communications, such as private messaging”.

A sober look at the derogations or future proposals don’t indicate anything that we usually think of when we hear “mass surveillance”.

None of these proposals would, for example, allow the government to read the messages of individuals at will. Instead, messages that are flagged by algorithms (rightly or wrongly) and sent to an anti-child abuse agency.

Privacy

This latter scenario can certainly still be considered a breach of privacy. The report commissioned by the European Parliament brings up a relevant example: “teenage minors who are consensually sharing sexual content”.

That report also notes that there might be a “chilling effect”, where people avoid legal behaviours, such as sharing an image of their sick child’s symptoms with a doctor, for fear that they might being flagged.

In both cases, images could be tagged as potential CSAM and shared with an outside agency for further investigation.

Even if we could resolve all the technical disagreements, it is likely that opponents would still argue over where best to strike the balance between people’s rights not to be monitored by the authorities, and protecting children.

The report commissioned by the European Parliament remarks that they must work toward “a balance between protecting children” and safeguarding users’ right to privacy, data protection and expression.

Many of the opponent’s of chat control also argue that it is the “thin part of the wedge” — allowing a small bit of monitoring for a good cause now will normalise more invasive surveillance later.

The open letter by academics and experts warns that the proposals “will create unprecedented capabilities for surveillance, control and censorship”.

As it stands, the 9 July vote approving a further derogation is not yet in effect; it had yet to be approved by the EU Council.

Negotiations continue within the EU on establishing a “permanent regime” on how to prevent child abuse online, or, as critics see it, on how to control the internet.

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