The Netherlands only remains “neutral” because of the clause that forces companies to detect unknown CSAM and/or “grooming” material (last time I checked). It’s only a matter of one or two countries that can make the difference, with most neutral countries probably having similarly “minor” objections.
Would be handy if they included a pre-written pdf to oppose this proposition + emails or forms to easily submit your opposition to each of the countries.
Instead it’s a general “contact your government”,
which 99% of normal people do not know how to do, me included.from the linked website:
Ask you government to call on the European Commission to withdraw the chat control proposal. Point them to a joint letter that was recently sent by children’s rights and digital rights groups from across Europe. Click here to find the letter and more information.
one paragraph below that:
When reaching out to your government, the ministries of the interior (in the lead) of justice and of digitisation/telecommunications/economy are your best bet. You can additionally contact the permanent representation of your country with the EU.
the bold parts are clickable URLs in the original text.
Not necessarily the best idea. My representative went on national television accusing bots of spamming her email, even though every single one of those probably was a person using some template that was provided. Those forms go straight into trash unfortunately. Best to use them as a guideline and write your personal concerns instead.
Alternatively, ChatGPT. No idea if it works, though.
Honestly I just wish I could take the steps written in the article but it would most likely be of no use.
I have very few close relationships and am not widely liked or popular by any means, don’t use social media because nobody sees my posts anyway, and the country I live in has a lot of media censorship, therefore the vast majority of the population is very conservative, uneducated and narrow-minded about most political topics.
I’ve been taking a lot of steps lately to reclaim my online privacy, and would hate to see it all thrown out the window by the EU, a union I thought was doing Europe justice before now…
This was already long canceled wasn’t it? This is old.
Governments have been trying to impose chat control for over a decade now but so far they haven’t been able to get it through. That doesn’t stop them from trying over and over again though and this time their chances are looking better than usual. Even if they fail once more they’ll do it all over again soon afterwards. This topic will never get old.
It was pulled from voting a second time, it will undoubtedly return for another round.
Folks, this should inspire you to start self-hosting a federated, decentralized chat server with freely available source code by yourself or with a small community. Governments can coerce these big, usually-corpo centralized servers to give up data but good luck if there are hundreds of thousands (of millions?) of small servers with 1–10 users on it & clients not controlled by a single entity for distribution (easier now that y’all coerced Mommy Apple to let you sideload applications & use alternative package managers).
All federated services grossly violate GDPR.
How so?
If you’re federating the data to servers you don’t control, it’s impossible to guarantee deletion of it. GDPR requires that users be able to request deletion of their data
I knew about that, but I thought it only applied to personal information (with limitations with regards to there being some professional entity collecting it). If I make a statement to the press that goes on print, I cannot demand them recalling papers in order to be compliant with GDPR.
That being said, I am by no means very knowledgeable about this.
I mean, GDPR is a fucking disaster. Nobody is getting it right, same with cookie consent. This is because the last time geriatric imbeciles at the European parliament seen a computer was back at 98.
Since all those people are using it, it kinda doesn’t matter for them. As if not having their data harvested from every single click makes them not care about GDPR and the other bullshit. What a surprise.
Sounds like GDPR is the problem then, not federated services.
You don’t need to worry about data retention when you own the server & you are the only user. It’s the servers you or someone you know & trust don’t own where you should actually worry about this.
It’s also more problematic with all systems built on eventual consistency models, so best to avoid those since you’ll never be able to get the data dropped. Chat being ephemeral is good.
Matrix I guess?
If you don’t trust matrix.org, then you can self host the server yourself. Plus, the article you included is outdated.
As someone that is red/green colorblind… wut?
Did my best, but my European geography identity the best and may have missed a couple:
Germany & Poland oppose. Netherlands, Austria, Estonia, Slovenia and Czechia neutral. Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Greece support.
Relying on legislation to get passed or not get passed only gets us so far. Yes, absolutely, write your reps and vote, but also donate to your favorite decentralized, private tech project so they can improve the user experience and get more users. We need to make tyrannical censorship & surveillance not only technically impossible but politically unfeasible. The way we do that is by building better tech and getting more and more of the population to use it.
Can someone explain to an American what chat control is?
Basically scanning communications and breaking encryption, under the guise of predictably stopping child abuse
and technically, how would they achieve this?
Originally governments wanted backdoors into encryption protocols, but now they seem to want client side scanning (i.e. scanning messages on your phone before it’s encrypted and sent out)
[Already implemented by google, facebook, and microsoft]
Working like shit then? Has it made a difference?
Force all the big platforms to share their encrypted data. Banning end-to-end encryption. It’s all very stupid and will never actually catch any bad guys.
I have been running my own matrix server andere cliënt for a while. So if I keep running it and just don’t update it, that would suddenly be illegal? Geus it is time to see how my for relay is doing.
If it actually did catch that many bad guy… would fuck regional court, complete overload. we have struggle deal with number of ukraine immigrant, now imagine deal with all the fake report because ai just bad?
The fuck is with these stupid bots that try to turn every conversation into “muh immigration”
If I understand correctly, its what the NSA “allegedly” doesn’t do to U.S. citizens already. Except, these countries are being public about it. This way they can actually follow through without the “secret getting out”.
Make no mistake, Germany isn’t opposing this out of a principled stance. The German government too wants more ways to control people’s activity.
If only in the same breath we would make all the politicians text messages public, guess they only want other chats to be controlled but not their own.
Even if I deeply like the Idea, something like this could backfire if it’s done constantly and not just once. But I would like to see a law that makes the usage of government communications mandatory for all government-related communication while storing everything revision-proof on their servers with different access rights. And a second law that makes it possible to access it by requiring petitions to be singled by a low number of people. Less extreme but still makes it harder to be corrupt.
I keep mentioning this idea, hoping to someday make it seem less extreme: the government should be under total surveillance 24/7.
Like, anyone at any time can look through any of the tens of thousands of cameras saturating every government building.
Open source government, eh? Don’t know if this would work completely but I like the direction.
Army and police get to have non-camera operations of course. They’re still recorded, just not broadcast for whatever delay makes the tactical information obsolete.
Honestly this is an intersting idea. Albeit, it may be hatd to implement since some buildings have to be private for national security reasons (specifically regarding military strategy and such).
Military’s camera feeds go into memory crystals that automatically unshuffle after like 50 years. That way history is guaranteed to get a full accounting of the conflict, but there’s no possibility of strategic information giveaway.
Julian Assange tried to do that and he was nearly lynched for it.
And then blamed for ruining the 2016 American election.
Snowden showed the government was spying, had to flee, deemed a terrorist. Assange showed the government disobeys the laws it enforces on everyone else, deemed a terrorist. Manning showed that war crimes are constant, deemed a terrorist, subjected to inhumane torture.
Every time a whistleblower exposes corruption and violations of laws in every country, they are punished. China, Russia, America, England, they’re all guilty of it.
Every time a whistleblower exposes corruption and violations of laws in every country, they are punished.
Typically by being accused of acting as foreign agents. Assange was a Radical Islamist under Bush, a nefarious Russia/China double agent under Obama, and an insidious Hispanic cartel boss under Trump.
I don’t know why but I’ve got this strange tingling feeling it might just be a human nature group thing.
Therefore there is a real threat that the required majority for mass scanning of private communications may be achieved at any time under the current Hungarian presidency (Hungary being a supporter of the proposal).
Why did they let this Hungarian pro-Nazi idiot regime lead anything?
because it changes every 6 months and everyone get’s a turn
I understand that this has been a recent topic in the EU but I’d really like to see information on government positions on this in more areas of the world.
Here’s some more information about the world: https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/internet-censorship-map/
once upon a time freedom of speech was a thing
At first glance I thought it was only Belarus who opposed it. That’d be a weird world where totalitarian government opposes totalitarian control.
Let me guess: You are an American with no clue about Geography / foreign politics?
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Belarus isn’t in the EU. Its position doesn’t matter, independent from which side they are on.
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Belarus is part of the big grey blob in the east of the map (alongside Ukraine and Russia). So the map doesn’t state anything about Belarus’ opinion on the topic.
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In case you thought the dark green blob in central Europe is Belarus: those are Germany and Poland.
No, I’m Belarusian.
- In case you haven’t noticed, I said “At first glance”
- Due to the map being zoomed in a little closer than usual, and because of the omissions of countries borders, it shifts visual appearance of countries towards right. A honest mistake if you ask me, and which I found to be funny, hence the comment.
- Why so serious?
- What being an American has to do with this? Anyway, I’ll take that as a compliment for my English.
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They’ll keep bringing this up again and again and again until it passes, huh.
Next Council deliberations and vote in October-December.
To quote the IRA, “We only need to get lucky once but you need to get lucky every time”.
That’s the thing. People have to keep voting forever to keep this from coming into effect, but they only need it to pass a vote once for it to be enacted for basically ever.
How I wish a chat privacy law could be passed to make more difficult to continue eroding our rights.
Idk about yall but that feels like a bad system…
We need a strong authoritarian government with a strong leader (lemmygrad probably)
The real goal is to get the population to regret demanding things like gdpr.
Similar to the plastic industry’s covert legislative push to ban plastic straw.
Irritate the public enough to stop them demanding more.
In this case it’s a double whammy of also getting our sweet private data for their AI models.
Got any more info on the plastic straw plot? Because I’d love for that to be true, but I’m just getting craploads of articles saying the opposite.
Of course, the mad men won’t leak those details until they’re on their death bed and need to repent.
Here of a slightly more refined take.
Anti plastic straw campaign is an industry gambit to undermine environmentalist anti plastic movement. It create maximum public inconvenience and backlash against the environmentalist cause for a minimal loss of profits. This moves protects the rest of the industry by reducing support to the anti plastic caused through backlash and the feeling of accomplishment and sacrifice
Chatgpt re interpretation
This perspective suggests that the anti-plastic straw campaign is a strategic move by the plastic industry to protect itself. By targeting plastic straws, which are a minor part of plastic waste but widely used, the campaign creates significant public inconvenience. This inconvenience can lead to a backlash against the broader environmental movement. Consequently, people might feel that the inconvenience of giving up straws is enough of a sacrifice, reducing their motivation to support more substantial anti-plastic initiatives. Meanwhile, the plastic industry sustains minimal financial impact since straws represent a small fraction of their overall product lineup. This theory implies a sophisticated tactic to safeguard the industry’s interests by diverting attention from more impactful areas of plastic production and consumption.
So just a personal theory then?
There was definitely a time when I would have called this seriously tinfoil-hat… but given the stuff that keeps coming out, the industries support for community recycling programs that they knew would never work, etc. I’m giving it a 7/10 for probably and a 10/10 for creativity ;-)
Personally I tend to believe that generally well meaning people thought that paper straw technology would continue to improve, didn’t involve PFAS or microplastics… or that we’d all carry around a personal straw. But I do love the smoke filled room of mad men architecting a masterful conspiracy propped on the plastic shoulders of the humblest of columns.
Yes and no As long as there is no wide spread opposition they will Long term we need to make this a very unpopular stance
