In January 2024, Belgium assumed the presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU). With this, the Chat control negations that had previously stalled were revived. Initially started 2 years ago, the conversation seemed buried after EU states were unable to agree on a common position on mandatory chat control.
Ironically, the intrusive laws are being discussed by pioneers of modern-day data privacy regulations, the GDPR. The core concept of the original proposal is to scan private (and encrypted) messages for criminal offenses and report it to the authorities. However, European parliament characterized this as mass surveillance and insisted that only unencrypted content from suspects should be scanned.
Compromises in the Chat Control Negotiations
The Belgian Council Presidency has introduced a new “compromise approach.” Belgium suggests restricting chat control to “visual content,” specifically images and videos, while excluding “audio communication and text.” Additionally, encrypted content should “not be included in the discovery orders. Earlier versions also included text and audio, but this has been temporarily excluded due to concerns about intrusiveness.
Notably, Belgium has not included any definition of end-to-end encryption. The Netherlands criticized this, arguing that the country “should incorporate a definition.” Belgium disagrees, stating that doing so would result in “losing ground”.
Further, Belgium proposes internet services should search for known child pornography using techniques like “cryptographic and perceptual hashing.” Additionally, they should detect grooming and new abuse material using AI, including machine learning tools and advanced algorithms.
As part of the compromise, users will only be reported to the police after two strikes. This measure is intended to address the issue of false positives in existing Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) recognition systems, prone to errors, they can wrongly accuse innocent individuals of serious crimes. Belgium has not explained how this is supposed to work technically.
Another aspect of the compromise is that you will only be scanned if you “consent” under a proposal called “upload moderation.” Users who do not consent will be unable to send any type of media. It is hoped that in practice, almost everyone (except criminals) will consent, thereby exposing themselves.
However, several states criticize the restriction on images and videos. Netherlands being a notable example. The country has rejected the new proposal. It completely rejects the inclusion of unknown CSAM and grooming due to the high error rates, describing it as “a political decision in the Netherlands”.
Belgium Running out of Time
Previous versions of this proposal faced opposition from certain EU member states. However, these recent modest changes have seemingly been sufficient to gain the support of France, Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland, in the spirit of “compromise”. This is despite France having a plethora of question concerning the practical implementation of the proposal.
It’s important to note that some states oppose the compromise proposal because they believe it doesn’t go far enough. For instance, Denmark wants to include text message scanning. Ireland fears chat control is “losing effectiveness”.
The Belgian Council presidency stated, “Overall, there is currently insufficient support for a general approach.“
The Council Presidency has proposed the exemption of secret services, police and military from chat control. Further, Belgium wants to exempt “confidential information, including classified information, information covered by professional secrecy and business secrets” from the mandatory chat scans.
As of now consensus has still not been reached. Belgium is organizing a few more rounds of negations to iron out the contentious issues. However, time is not on their side, the country’s Council Presidency ends on June 30th and Hungary will take over.
Importance of Chat Apps
Internet dependent chat apps are extremely popular and crucial platforms for global communication. At the end of June, WhatsApp is projected to have 3 billion users. Telegram surpassed 900 million monthly active users as of March 2024, and has grown by 60% since April 2022. Meta’s Messenger also has over 1 billion active users. Currently, more than 100 billion messages are sent each day on WhatsApp.
Regarding EU chat control proposal, Head of WhatsApp at Meta, Will Cathcart said, “We want the internet to be more secure, but some in the EU keep trying to make it less secure. These attempts to weaken the security of private communications are dangerous and we need a course correction before it’s too late.”
In the recent past, WhatsApp has threatened to quit India and UK if they demand weakening of the platform’s end-to-end encryption. Alarmingly, there have been allegations that vulnerabilities in WhatsApp’s huunda end-to-end encryption have been used by government agencies to track and find individuals.
In January, a letter signed by EU tech and security firms, along with policy bodies warned against the proposal.
