Take it like this: your phone already "reads" absolutely everything you put on that phone. Apple or Google could do anything they want with that, but you trust them. You trust that they don't send everything that goes into your phone to their servers.
ChatControl would run locally on your phone. It would compare the images that you receive/send to a list of illegal images, and if you happen to deal with one of them, it would report you.
How is that destroying your democracy?
Disclaimer: I am against ChatControl, but too many people seem to not understand what the problem with ChatControl is.
Because it's closed source so you have no idea of what is happening. You can then scan for other things, such as "hate speech", or "tax evasion" and then the slope becomes more slippery than a lube party on a vinyl sheet, and Kim Jong Un awaits you at the Ski Bar at the bottom.
Those passive surveillance systems have a chilling effect on democracy, just like mandatory ID on social media, and provide politicians a lever so convenient that you know that it will be used, especially in the EU.
> Because it's closed source so you have no idea of what is happening.
Exactly! That's the problem!
It's not killing the encryption, it's not sharing all your communications with the government. Those are invalid arguments. The problem is that whoever controls the proprietary part of ChatControl (and that includes the list of illegal material) can abuse it to e.g. detect political opponents, or whatever they can imagine.
I am just asking that we use the valid arguments against ChatControl. I read a lot of invalid arguments that won't help convincing politicians that it is a bad idea. They need to understand why it is a bad idea, the real reason.
I think that the correct sentence would be that it kills the purpose of encryption. Which is to prevent anyone aside of the recipient from reading your message.
For the vast majority of people, the purpose of encryption is not to prevent a trusted law enforcement from reading the message.
Say the police knocks at my door and asks me nicely to read my messages, I will show them. Doesn't mean I don't care about them being encrypted when I send them over the Internet.
Are we still having to discuss arguments such as "Why are you afraid? You should have nothing to hide!" in 2025 Yeah, safety measures are useless until you face a risky situation.
Also I don't care that "the vast majority of people" prefer Facebook chat to discuss online. That they are free to do so doesn't mean I shouldn't be free to preserve the secrecy of my communications.
> That they are free to do so doesn't mean I shouldn't be free to preserve the secrecy of my communications.
My point is that ChatControl does not say that all your communications will be shared. And you will still be able to send encrypted messages with Signal, and your ISP won't be able to read them, and Signal won't be able to read them. So it's not true that it won't preserve the secrecy of your communications. If used correctly, it will preserve the secrecy of almost all your communications. And it would be possible to have a version of ChatControl that would absolutely preserve the secrecy of all your communications (e.g. by only using a list of hashes instead of machine learning).
Maybe you think that you should be free to have illegal material on your phone, but I am not sure the rest of the population agrees. If one could prove that ChatControl never made a mistake (e.g. it's just a hash comparison) and that the list of illegal hashes is never abused, then I'm pretty sure most people would find it okay.
The problem is that we cannot prove that, and in fact it's pretty clear that it is fundamentally difficult to make sure that the list of hashes is not abused. Even more so if instead of a list of hashes it is a machine-learned set of weights.
So ChatControl would be a powerful tool that is difficult to audit, and that therefore could be abused by whoever controls it. This is the risk, this is what we should be talking about.