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.