For context, this refers to "Chat Control 1.0", allowing facebook and other messaging providers to scan chats for harmful content (which they had been temporarily allowed to do by a recently expired law).
This is still problematic, but the far more dangerous Chat Control 2.0 that would weaken end-to-end-encrypted messengers like Signal is not being discussed here.
Not to diminish the gravity of the new development, but the defeatist "no way to prevent this" narratives that are already popping up here are getting old -- when in fact it looks like 2.0 is off the table for good because protest against it has proven effective.
Why is it currently illegal? If I have a service that let's users communicate, why is it illegal to look through those communications? (especially after they've signed my 400 page EULA). It would make moderation impossible otherwise.
Or are we saying this is being used for something specific that happens to be illegal?
Why should you have any right to look through everyone's private communications? Nobody really has any choice to reject your EULA if they want to stay in contact with someone on your service. I could force you to sign a ToS that includes "By using our service you owe us $10 million and agree to donate your kidney to our CEO" in order to reach your overseas grandma, but that doesn't mean it's actually enforceable or legal...
People sending unwanted DMs is an obvious reason. At the very least, users should be able to report DMs and then that should allow for moderation.
It's very common in some spaces to get people who send unwanted (spam/harassment/etc) DMs to tons of people. Just expecting everyone to block those people makes for a horrible user experience, because it means new users might be suddenly met by a bunch of unwanted DMs from aggressive randos that remain unbanned. You really need to be able to ban these people (and that means being able to verify that they did what they're accused of).
Moderation is when others remove publicly posted content because you don't want to see it. (Censorship is when others remove publicly posted content because they don't want you to see it.)
You don't need moderation for your private communication.
> Why is it currently illegal? If I have a service that let's users communicate, why is it illegal to look through those communications?
Not all services should be treated equally. We've figured this out earlier about letters, it's typically illegal, even for postal services, to open and read your letters without your consent, because there is an expectation about privacy.
Fast forward some years since then, and now basically IMs are the new letters, and sadly we have few big actors (yet again) controlling the transportation of our communication. People generally still want privacy in their communications, so regulations were made that companies cannot open your messages ("letters") without your consent, so we humans still have more or less the same protections as before, just tailored to the new specific implementation.
It guarantees that the content of sealed letters is never revealed, and that letters in transit are not opened by government officials, or any other third party. The right of privacy to one's own letters is the main legal basis for the assumption of privacy of correspondence. The principle has been naturally extended to other forms of communication, including telephony and electronic communications on the Internet, as the constitutional guarantees are generally thought to also cover these forms of communication
Those narratives pop up from users that have a clear anti-EU bias (and I suspect they might not even be from the EU considering how ignorant they seem to be about how it works, its function ans structure, etc.
The EU already has in place, apparently, a Digital Services Act that basically stops access to some part of the web. That the slope may bring to enlarged web inaccessibility - and an unlivable eu ("What do you mean you have no internet, no web access?! We take it for granted").
That some actors may ride it, is not their stain, but the eu's.
Kindly explain why some platforms have issued notice that access would be restricted pending age verification. To my inquiries, that is owing to the DSA. Was I fed wrong information? Where, in which part?
And, about «precisely the misinformation I mentioned earlier»: you think this infomess was caused by foreign agents, instead of internal european lack of clarity?
You see an article about how the EU tries to force a law after it got struck down by forcing it through with a legal trick and all you can think of is how any comment that critizes this is propaganda? Get a grip
It's strongly connected to the structure of the EU though, and the weak control that voters have over appointments to the commission, and every level of indirection is one at which the appointer can be influenced.
If EU institutions are used to push this sort of thing, we must treat that as what they are for. Systems do not get a pass because someone external is 'using them', but must be treated holistically.
Even if it is foreign propaganda, the problems it exploits are real. Either you're solving the problems, or you're pushing people into the arms of said propaganda.
It is quite disturbing that more and more ofent critique of policy or a political system like the EU is framed as some convinient boogey man's propaganda.
If a government body wants to interfere in your privacy and take it away, isn't it normal to be against that government body pushing that policy?
It's not a bias, it's just a normal common sense reaction to tyrannical behavior, and pushing against that government body is the only way to enact the positive change you want to see.
Otherwise if you just bend over and take it all the time, just so randos on the internet don't accuse you of being "anti-EU", then nothing will change and you'll see more and more of your rights taken away. And even if it were "EU bias" it's my right as an EU citizen and taxpayer to have it if I want to.
Alos BTW, what's with this defensive attitude of treating the EU like some sacred cow that's somehow beyond reproach HN? Are they paying you guys to AstroTurf or what?
In that case you're against the people currently in government, not the body itself, i.e. some people against Chat Control ask for the dissolution of the EU, but would they ask for the dissolution of their national state if a similar law was passed in their national parliament? I think no
I've never seen anyone ask for the dissolution of the EU in chat control threads, and I read every one of them.
What I see people (Europeans) lamenting is how undemocratic the EU is. As much as I think von der Leyen should be imprisoned, the issue is not the people in the government, but the institution itself. The Commission and the Council are the ones pushing these things, every time.
The people in government are bad, and there's no reason whatsoever to think that'll improve amy time soon: what prevents bad people from doing bad things is the regulatory apparatus of checks and balances, which the EU very much lacks (in parts, granted). Worse, it has introduced US style corruption (or "lobbying") into countries that historically lacked it.
If Chat Control 2.0 passes, given the general direction this would be showing, I'd very much understand people wanting to exit from the EU and cut the amount of undemocratic bullshit they have to contend with.
But to return to your point, when something people strongly reject happens in their country, they do, rightfully, advocate for the dissolution of that government. Much harder to do with unelected bureaucrats sheltering in another country.
Something particularly ironic is that much of the EU's undemocratic nature comes from features designed specifically to prevent the EU from subsuming its member states. The best path to making Europe democratic again... would be a federal EU, with all the protections for individual member states stripped out, because member states are not a protected class.
The Euroskeptics want to go about this backwards. They correctly see the anti-democratic nature of the current EU structure and conclude that this is the only way European integration could happen, ergo we should not integrate Europe. The problem with this is that, even as 27 individual sovereigns, the former EU member states would still need to form agreements with one another and with other countries. Except this negotiation process is completely outside the democratic process even more than the EU currently is.
The underlying problem is that democracies do not stack or sum. Two democracies negotiating with one another become a dictatorship of whoever is doing the negotiating. The only way to preserve democracy is to give the people of both countries equal control over the matters assigned to the whole. The people must rule as one or they cease to rule at all.
I can entertain that this idea could be a solution IF done well, but what would be the path to democratic decision-making in this integrated EU? I strongly believe in people organising against the government, I think this is what can lead to change, or at least maintain the fighting spirit going.
The EU is handicapped by its very diversity on this. Imagine the situation where the EU is integrated, and the government wants to pass Chat Control 2.0, or some equally unsavoury measure. Imagine that some people or orgs manage to whip up the people of the Netherlands into protesting in the streets against it: it's extremely unlikely that Poles or Spaniards would be able to build a protest movement on top of that, if they were even aware of it, because of language and national sentiment ("it's just some people over there being angry about whatever, and mainstream media says there's nothing to see there, or that they're evil terrorists, and I don't understand their funny language enough to check").
There are some promising moves towards a EU-wide party in Mera25 for example (if I understand it correctly), but it's ultimately a party for English-speaking, basically well-off, educated, currently left-leaning, young people, which is nothing that one can build a deep movement on.
>The EU is handicapped by its very diversity on this.
Thousands of years of cultural heritage can't be bulldozed over and turned into a faceless economic zone similar to the US, just because the business class elites see it as a disadvantage to advancing their WEF globalist agenda where every person on the planet is to be an identical blank slate in an excel sheet and there's no borders, no religion, no identity, and no intellectual, educational, cultural and behavioral differences and all everyone just compete to be cattle in a race to the bottom for their corporate and real estate empires. This will always get pushback, mostly via voting far right.
If you want to convince people to freely give up their culture and identity in the name of EU economic advancement, you need to give them an incentive, a big economic one, and the EU sucks at this, and ambitious people looking for money go to the US, Dubai, etc. Money in the EU is still gatekept based on where you live and what nationality you have. EU will never go anywhere if still keeps this caste system where western/northern europeans are the noble gentry and eastern/southern europe the cheap labor peasants without any skin the game as they just become mercenaries who will sell their talent to US, China, etc anyone how will pay them better than Europeans.
>it's ultimately a party for English-speaking, basically well-off, educated, currently left-leaning, young people, which is nothing that one can build a deep movement on
Out-of-touch theater kids from upper class families who never did any hard labor jobs and spent their lives in an eternal Erasmus travel and party program, aren't gonna be popular with anyone but their own bubble as nobody who's struggling to pay bills, deal with unemployment from layoffs or lack of safety in public spaces due to migration, will ever empathize with them. It's the same posh European nobility cohort the hugely unpopular and equally out of touch Ursula von der Leyen comes from, where she grew up living abroad, traveling, partying and studying surrounded by private security, and then lectures the working class on "difficult decisions". We would guillotine people like that for less.
> but would they ask for the dissolution of their national state if a similar law was passed in their national parliament? I think no
?! Yes. Well, to some of us maybe not yet chat control given some proper well conceived legislation. But age verification, yes, may be one of the reasons to ask for dissolution.
That exemption had an expiration date for a reason. That they failed to consolidate that practice into a better law does not make forcefully overriding that expiration any more democratic.
"If not for the EU, a much worse version of this would already be law in the nation states."
In some, in some not. Not everyone is the UK. Many nations which had a totalitarian government in the 20th century are more wary about this sort of sweeping surveillance power.
The "charm" of pushing this through the circuitous path via Brussels is that few people and even few media outlets are paying attention to what happens in Brussels. Everyone is still obsessed with their national politics.
Exactly. As demonstrated by several countries pronouncing themselves against it every time this comes up.
If the government of Denmark really wants to implement this, let them, but the idea that a tiny country's officials, elected by a population of 6M that their media managed to convince of the utopia to come when privacy doesn't exist, manages to make another 450M in 26 countries comply to their will (not to call it delusion) is frightening.
Sure, you are right, but that does not mean that the EU as such is totally innocent in this.
Most liberal constitutions of Europe operate on the principle that their governments cannot be fully trusted in execution of their power and need a lot of oversight from the people. This is a result of hundreds of years of bad experience with politicans who had too much power.
The EU is somewhat more idealistically built and thus easier to abuse as a loophole for pushing things that would domestically hit a lot of counter-wind - by the same governments that are domestically limited by their constitutional order, but nevertheless still full of power-hungry people who are seeking ways to increase their power.
Frankly, for me that means that the EU should be reformed to make that less easy, but a colossus of 28, soon-to-be-more countries is approximately as amendable as the US Constitution - theoretically, yes, practically, the hurdles are extremely high.
I don't think we can fundamentally solve the problem that politics attracts psychopaths. We can only limit their power, and that, as of now, works better on the national level than on the continental one.
If the majority of national governments didn't want this, the Council wouldn't push for it. That's literally who the Council is composed of.
I think a good step for transparency would be forcing Council votes to be open so the ire could be redirected at the appropriate national governments instead of letting them EU-wash their unpopular ideas.
That's a completely backward way of seeing it. "Nations" want nothing. The EU council is obviously an EU institution, the institution least accountable to the people of the EU. They want it and force it through as best they can. The parliament, the EU institution most accountable to the people of the EU (not that it's saying much) tried to stop it.
The Council represents state governments, not nations. A nation consists of all the people in it, not just those who appointed themselves to speak on its behalf.
... appoint themselves? You are aware how governments are chosen in all member states? Are you calling into question the democratic processes of national governments?
Either way, your issue is with national governments and not the EU, which curbs their excesses.
Far from it. This is a classic example that national governments use EU to launder unpopular policy at home. "We have to, it's a EU requirement". It's hard to think it's not by design, that indeed EU is made to "curb the excesses" of popular accountability.
UK played that game for decades, and it went as it had to go.
I think the problem is really that law enforcement have got used to outsourcing this kind of policing to private operated platforms (at least here in Germany). I was actually at the local police station because I notified them via an online mechanism about sth that looked very CSAM to me in a random forum tracking some gossip/Internet meme (actually I did not really look further than a title because that can be already illegal). Just dropping the link (which I thought would be just auto scanned and sent into some central pool), led to the fact that I had to go there in person, wait and had to listen to a speech about the fact that it can be easily illegal to be in certain places in the Internet and that I should be careful because I had a daughter in the age. It was almost that they are threatening me. They told me that all the CSAM stuff anyways comes through the provider and that they would do raids if needed. They cannot do much anyhow on the state level if they do not get the local ISP and IP delivered.
It felt rather absurd and somewhat scary/dystopian that there are Internet companies that sent cops out to do raids based on some IP. According to the police officer it seemed very effective.
You wouldn't be the first person to try reporting a crime and then discover that police care about arresting people a lot more than they care about arresting the right people, as they threaten you with arrest yourself. That was my first experience with police too. I was under investigation for a year before they dropped the charges.
Would be interested in seeing your sources for this. I've yet to see evidence that this has the significant upsides that would, definitely not justify, but at least explain, the push towards limiting fundamental freedoms.
There's a reason "who will think of the children" is ridiculed: there's no evidence that this is the intent or that there are outcomes. Everything I've read to date shows that surveillance is not effective in curbing CSAM, that the people (and especially organised crime) that engage into such activity are not using plain text and twitter to talk to each other, that those solutions that are known to have outcomes are not being invested in or enforced, etc.
The whole Epstein sage is very closely tied to the current US administration, I haven't seen much of it being tied to anything about the EU Council. I think you might confuse the government ties Epstein had, at least the ones we knew about.
> You think the European wealthy are innocent of pedophilia?
You think children should be executed in the streets? Neither of us said any such thing, why ask that as a question even?
My only point being that Epstein himself doesn't seem related to EU Council, based on facts, while he was very close friend of the current sitting US president, and the whole thing is still being actively swept under the rug by the US Justice Department. Two governments located on two different continents...
Ahh, to be that naive again. Those were the times. One definitely sleeps better.
If you haven't done any digging, don't make such claims. This is a network that goes way beyond the current US administration. I'm sorry you're still trusting whatever media you consume.
(I'm not gonna debate this. It's not that difficult to find some investigative research on this.)
I think you're misunderstanding something here. "Chat Control" is a term invented and popularized by privacy groups who oppose any scanning of private chats for any purpose; any confusion caused by having the same term refer to different things has to be laid at their feet, although they argue it's appropriate because any kind of scanning is abusable in basically the same ways. The people who support scanning private chats don't use the term "Chat Control".
The central bank, council, and commission have to get thoroughly investigated. The amount of questionable decisions coming from those three in the recent (15) years is extremely unsettling. The parliament and courts are practically the only institutions preventing things from hitting the fan at this point, and struggling to do so, it seems.
Ironically, those are two separate cases of one high-profile EU politician (in fact, the very head of the same parliament that pushes for mass scanning of private messages) BOTH involving secret text messages that the mentioned politician refuses to reveal.
I’m convinced of widespread corruption here. We need to follow the money. Who is funding and pushing this agenda to blanket spy on all Europeans? I guess my question is rhetorical.
And no committee, no bureaucracy, no regulations, just let corporations do whatever they want, works great right!? It's not like it immediately collapses to despotism as the slightly bigger fish gobbles up everything in a positive feedback process.
With an egalitarian government, corruption is a problem, its bad, its something we try to fight and there are mechanisms to do so. Having no government is just giving up and going straight to 100% corruption.
Ok, theres defo a lot of idiots on HN and in USA who disagree with you.
Still, kinda weird to complain about bureaucracy and regulations in this context cus its the only solution to these problems of egality and corruption which humanity has been struggling with ever since the dawn of civilisation.
Tho, It's kind of a solved problem too. We should all just try to be like Denmark, they at the top or near the top of practially every metric. Happiness, corruption index, Gini, Quality of life, healthcare, education, carbon.
They have a massive powerful bureaucracy, lots of strong regulation, extremely high taxes, low corruption.
The solution to any eco-geo-political issue is just "be more like Denmark".
Once everyone gets to that level we can think about further improvement.
Wait, but doesn't Denmark have the strictest immigration policies in the entire EU?
> they at the top or near the top of practially every metric. Happiness, corruption index, Gini, Quality of life, healthcare, education, carbon.
I don't understand. Are you suggesting deporting all migrants to improve the statistics to Denmark's level? But that's impossible in our legal system. We've been actively importing culturally incompatible foreigners for decades now, and many already have citizenship. You can't just strip people of their citizenship in an attempt to improve the statistics.
Yes that one thing, pushing chat control, negates their amazing metrics and makes the country entirely shit. Excellent debating style bro! I must bow to your logic.
I genuinely don’t think such folk have as much influence and power as everyone thinks. In my (direct) experience it’s just a complete mess and they’re reacting naively to every problem.
They’re fighting a battle against the real problem which is the paid up influence campaigns that give them problems to defend. Start at the press, the social media companies and the think tanks.
They form these groups to network and do favors for each other and provide cover for each other. After a while you are asked to do increasingly compromising things to yourself to do deeper into/stay part of the club such as blood rituals. Bohemian Grove high priest Henry Kissinger led simulated animal sacrifice rituals attended by many others in the "inner circles" of the top strata of decision makers and wallet holders. They do this because engaging in a common taboo unites the group extremely strongly, and these behaviors are the ultimate taboo.
I was told by Brussels insiders a few decades ago the Commission people are not really corruptible. They are guaranteed a very comfortable life and the sanctions are harsh. That might have change, I don't know.
What I was explained is the system is designed for lobbying. The main input is by the lobbies, not the people.
Most of us assume the EU is designed like the US system or individual countries like Germany, Italy or France but it is not. The power of the Parliament is very limited, but we see here that little power has become too much of an inconvenience for the people in power.
For anyone daring to look into the boring design of that thing will come to the conclusion it is absolutely not democratic.
After how many layers does the democratic part get watered down and is just members of the elite picking other elites?
Role | Chosen by | Direct citizen vote?
-----------------------------+------------------------------------------------------+----------------------------
Commission President | European Council proposes, European Parliament elects| No (indirect via EP)
European Council President | European Council (27 heads of state) | No
European Parliament President| MEPs elect from among themselves | No (indirect via EP)
ECB President | European Council, after consulting Parliament | No
>I live in a country where the prime minister is picked by the parliament. I don't directly vote for him.
That's kind of whataboutism. If that works for your country and the people are happy with the arrangement and the results of this system, I don't see an issue.
>By your own ridiculous standards
I don't think direct accountability to the citizens is a ridiculous concept. If you're unhappy with a MEP, your prime minister, you can vote them out or protest till they quit. But the head of the EC, Ursula, is impossible to dethrone by the people via democratic vote or protest. You're stuck taking up the ass from someone you never voted for and don't support.
Not the parent, but chill with the aggressive tone.
When you vote in your elections, you almost certainly know who's going to lead the country.
Not so with the EU: look up Spitzenkandidat method and the deviations from it, including von der Leyen in 2019 being parachuted into her post not based on any vote.
I think those people are largely in your imagination. You seem to be assuming a whole lot of dark motives or unsavoury opinions in reaction to people simply saying the EU is not perfect.
Unrelated to this chat, but I wonder what your political leaning is, just to understand where this aggressive defense of the EU is coming from. I assume you're not left or right, not radical in any direction. Would you describe yourself as moderate/centrist/Starmer's Labour/Macronite?
> I think those people are largely in your imagination.
Nope, they are in this very thread, complaining about "unelected" officials.
Initially I dismissed this as a product of ignorance, but they keep repeating the same bullshit after being corrected. It is clearly bad faith.
> You seem to be assuming a whole lot of dark motives or unsavoury opinions in reaction to people simply saying the EU is not perfect.
That is not the argument. The EU is far from perfect, and if that's the discussion, I wouls have a lot of things to say about it.
> but I wonder what your political leaning is, just to understand where this aggressive defense of the EU is coming from.
I tend to see myself as left of center, although I did drift further to the left over time.
I am not from the UK to describe myself in in the UK political spectrum, although looking from the outside I have the impression Labour is largely ineffective and Starmer is (was?) running the government pretty much as the tories would have.
I am also not French. My understanding is that for French standards Macron is center-right?
Those are primarily figureheads with limited power. The EU is not a presidential system. Which is good, because a single person can never well-represent an entire population, directly elected or not.
The council is more problematic, since a blocking majority might only represent 25% of the population (half of the EU member governments, each elected by majority vote), but in this case they voted in favor, so it's as if they didn't exist and the decision lies with parliament, whose composition is determined by proportional representation. Excellent!
The interesting thing here is that the EU is accused of being undemocratic not because special interests killed a law with wide support among the populace, but because all the different bodies might actually agree and pass a law that privacy activists don't like. Legislation by agreement of multiple cross-cutting majorities must clearly be undemocratic!
They’re indirectly elected through national governments and parliament. That’s different from being directly elected by citizens. Being appointed by elected politicians doesn’t make someone directly accountable to voters. Citizens don’t vote for commissioners, and it’s much harder for voters to remove or reward them based on their policies.
The criticism is about accountability, not whether the system is democratic.
The UK pm and the POTUS are both ultimately accountable through elections. In the UK, a general election can change the government. In the US, people vote specifically for presidential electors, even if it’s through the Electoral College.
The EU commission is different. People don’t vote for commissioners or the president, and they can’t vote them out in the same direct way.
100%. This is why many of us have a problem with the EU. And world governments in general — the more power they have and the further away from the elections that keep them accountable, the more tyrannical they become.
Im having a hard time following what is making the US presidental system different from the EU commission?
the US president is appointed by politicians who are elected, and the only accountability mechanism for president is impeachment, which is again, indirect via elected politicians.
It has never happened, but if there once would be enough faithless electors to swing the election (choosing a different president than what people voted for) it would be a huge scandal and it would be widely condemned as undemocratic.
I mean, if the electoral college would have enough faithless electors to swing the result away from the president whom the majority of the electors had pledged to vote for.
There has been so far 5 elections where the electoral vote chose a different president than what the popular vote count would have chosen. But this is a different thing than what I was talking about.
In the US the President explicitly does not represent the people. It is the President of the States and only the States vote for President. Until the 20th century people weren't even involved in selecting who their State voted for.
Many people are confused by the fact that only States can vote for President. The most a person's vote can do is provide input into their State's votes for President.
The candidates for prime minister and similar positions tend to be front and center during an election.
From what I remember the head of the european commission was picked from a group of people that weren't even up for election after the official candidates that were paraded around during an EU wide election where dismissed.
The government will investigate the government and find that the government did nothing wrong. A subsequent government review of the government's investigation of the government will find no wrongdoing on the part of the government. Ain't democracy grand?
Not really - all of these have been happening in the past 5-6 years, since the surprisingly London-linked von Leyen and her cadres somehow ended up at the helm.
So it's not a surprise that whatever law the UK passes has been carried over to the Eu recently - the social media ban, digital ids, chat control and everything.
Do, because already there nuances (towards the better or worse) are revealed, which are not evident in journalism as we have it. The whole story needs more investigation than the stubs.
But the way they are managing it in the workflow does not seem too linear...
You should elaborate. And explain what you understood as "its intended purpose".
My understanding of the vote last Friday was about protracting the 2021 temporary compromise (scan voluntarily until we have a full law), which was suspended at the beginning of April. It is not clear how they proceeded that way. It seems some vertices imposed that they would not accept a legal vacuum there. So, it's not a "law". What ran for the past five years was an "exception to privacy laws" (I am not informed of the mandated guardrails).
I regret to inform you that a temporary exception to a law is also a law.
edit:
> It seems some vertices imposed that they would not accept a legal vacuum there.
I find this sentence unintelligible. Can you come up with another wording? And who are these "vertices" who have been given approval rights over EU legislation?
Apparently metsola, to some source. The eu parliament refused to renew the temporary licence to private message monitoring, which had the "speaker" complain that this would just leave the union with a normative vacuum - apparently insisting that one non-temporary regulation has to be decided. So I read.
The politicians voting for this are either thoroughly stupid or corrupt. From the linked site:
> The position adopted by the Council today paves the way for providers of Internet services to resume their efforts to detect and report material on child sexual abuse to the police.
- Jim O’Callaghan, Irish Minister of Justice, Interior and Migration
Except that many of those providers are not European. Good job handling all of your citizens' data to foreign entities, Jim. Way to go, champ.
I don't know how to put it nicely, but some members of the Council need to cease operations, or be ceased.
Im pretty sure it is illegal. In my understanding, it must be equally easy to reject and accept. And the website MUST continue working under either choice. Which is not the case here.
I think the lawmakers should have made all forms of tracking illegal instead. That would make law writing and following easier. And closer to the spirit of what they are trying to accomplish and what everyone wants (except you Silicon Valley O.o)
I hate the tracking too. But how to websites monetize free content otherwise? Advertising doesn’t work if you can’t price it. Without tracking, everything becomes a paywall.
It seems a lot of people are doing amazing things with Patreon. Share some things for free (free as in beer) then have a paid tier for those who want more. Convince us you’re worthy, then we’ll give you money willingly.
According to GDPR it’s illegal to condition content on tracking approval. This is VERY clear if you read the law. I can’t understand why this has become very popular to do just recently.
Personally I do agree, but enforcement is unfortunately behind DPAs and it's pretty clear that they are trying to avoid ruling on it.
In theory someone could directly sue some company which engages on this via Article 79, but this can be expensive and depending on jurisdiction the plaintiff can end up with personal liability on defendant's legal costs if court ends up finding that this is actually legal (e.g. Finland has "loser pays" rule in civil suits).
Additionally this does also touch ePD and in some countries there might be different agency which handles ePD complaints compared to GDPR, like in Finland Data Protection Ombudsman handles GDPR, but Transport and Communications Agency (Traficom) handles ePD. If there is something that touches both the Ombudsman usually lets Traficom take care of ePD aspects before they give any GDPR ruling. Both of these can take years.
> The EU's own government websites have these same cookie banners.
Most of them decidedly don't have the same cookie banners. E.g. in vast majority of cases they don't prevent you from seeing content, and have an easy opt-out mechanism without dark patterns.
The result matters, which is why regulations should be considered carefully. The whole cookie fiasco is exactly that: they created a whole industry of shitty compliance and the rules are complex enough that every engineering team is like "just use the off-the-shelf shitty thing". And here we are.
As a reminder "EU cookie banners" are not required if you use cookies for site functionality. They are only required if your site uses these to track users.
This needs repeating, it's a common misconception (deliberately spread by many, too) that the EU requires cookie banners for all cookies.
> This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out or facilitating the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order to provide an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user.
This is the reason why these are usually separated to "strictly necessary" and "functional" cookies. Functional cookies are things which enhance the functionality, but are not strictly necessary. These would generally include things like persistent cookie for language choice rather than just session one.
This gets repeated a lot, but is not my experience after having worked with both in-house and contracted lawyers to understand how functional cookies are handled. We end up wanting something more durable than session cookies to track user preferences so we can set them next time they visit. This is super standard light/dark mode, region, language type of stuff. But that's considered “tracking" in many of these discussions, which never made sense to me.
Just because it's criminal, it doesn't mean that every private entity has to help to prevent it at costs of your privacy.
If there are people that host parties in their homes to share CSAM, does that mean that it should be mandatory to install surveillance cameras in your house?
Also as if people that are seriously sharing CSAM, wouldn't encrypt the data before sharing it.
Wait until you see who's in charge of deciding who to prosecute! My first experience with German police was reporting a crime and then then discussing if they should arrest me for being involved with the crime, since I was there at the police station and therefore easier to arrest than the actual perpetrators.
In the UK, when I reported a crime, I had to pull out the book and read the verse what constitutes an assault for Police to record it, because they didn't know. That said, 3 weeks later case was closed because they couldn't find the perpetrator. That is despite me giving them video evidence and address of that person. Looks like our taxes are well spent.
There is no way to stop these so just lets get going. The sooner we have age and ID verification on every single website and app the sooner we will have a working decentralised internet that avoids it.
I doubt that. They cannot stop me from downloading movies and series. They cannot stop me from betting or using crypto. It's kinda hard to find a single thing they are able to stop me from doing online and I'm not even trying that hard.
What frightens me is, as usual, the assumption of conformism that may just remove people from services.
"Present a document" // "No, certainly not to you" // "Do without then"
The straight will say "no", but their lives will be extremely complicated, possibly in the unawareness of those that just take compliance to the absurd for granted - as the weak call survival paramount and cannot see that their modus is subjective. That we won't have it is something that they cannot even conceive. Adults are noise to them.
Sort of, if the EU were a country. But the council doesn't consist of separate senators to determine the weight of the vote. And there's also the Commission and Parliament, which are closer to the American government structure as it stands now. The three bodies have different procedures or different decisions and law making processes.
But generally, the council represents the governments currently ruling the EU member states. A council of member states pushing for laws the comission opposes makes for a very interesting but confusing situation, where the EU is opposed to this legislation but the individual member states are not.
There have been a few incidents that make me think Snapchat private chats are monitored. The one with the guy joking to his friends about blowing up a plane or something is the first that comes to mind.
Tell me how private messaging gets you taken off a plane otherwise. It’s not private. Big tech has put a camera and microphone in everyone’s pocket and they’re monitoring everything.
The government and big (American) tech are very likely lying to us IMO. How will anyone protest when mass surveillance becomes the law if it’s already in place and you can be labeled a bad actor that gets your life ruined if you dissent?
> How will anyone protest when mass surveillance becomes the law if it’s already in place and you can be labeled a bad actor that gets your life ruined if you dissent
With the pure awareness that Men do not act out of convenience, and that this whole situation of declining societies was born out of already-fascist-material that acted out of convenience, with complacency.
I used to think Varoufakis' critique of the EU being a structurally anti-democratic union was just coming from the angle of an edgy leftist that was forced by the Troika to do austerity.
Day in and day out, the EU proves Varoufakis right.
The problem is /what/ will pass. What is this clothing limit? Pink, shocking, lime? Long sleeves, above the wrist or below? In the city center, in the suburbs, where?
The issue is all in the details.
And in the decision process, before that, of course.
The main argument for this seems to be that they catch many pedos by using image recognition tech on facebook etc.
Thus, discontinuing the permit to use these techniques did have enforcement numbers of those crimes found drop significantly.
I'm wondering if they've given up real policing of these crimes completely?!
Spreading pedo content on Facebook, those people have to be the dumbest of the dumb? Everyone spending even a single critical thought on their crimes won't be caught by this.
And they say enforcement numbers drop significantly? Meaning they don't catch many other people? What the fuck are they even doing? Did they completely give up trying to find the real criminals, and instead fall back on sugar-coated figures to conceal that failure?
These pro-surveillance narratives don't even attempt to look plausible, they are aimed at the average Joe/Mohammed/whoever with attention span of 10ms and IQ of a guppy.
This would be illegal in Germany. I wonder why law enforcement is not looking into this. It is similar to having abusive husband control wife's communication - just at scale and for ideological reason. This is a violent act against whole population, applied indiscriminately. It fulfils updated definition of terrorism in Germany and it is exploiting legislative apparatus of the EU to enact this violent act. German people should report this and these people behind it should be investigated and presumably arrested.
Just saying I would buy a chat control legislation calendar, where each month of the calendar has significant meeting days of deliberation bodies, elections/nominations of people to relevant boards, as well as historical dates of previous attempts to pass chat control.
Does that ###, which seems to have the most simplistic ideas about the world, also have arguments to defend its position?
I mean: has it ever heard, for example about the 2nd Amendment to the USA constitution, arguing that people must be able to defend from governments themselves?
Is it not aware that data is not accessed "just by the good guys"? ?!
Isn't this natural for any "Social" ideologies? They imply a system of centralized redistribution, which implies a powerful repressive apparatus and an omnipresent surveillance system.
It is a bit strange why EU countries allow their own credibility and legitimacy get steadily dragged down, bit by bit, by all these thousands of dubious statements, tricks, manoeuvres, and so on.
Do they just not care about weakening their own societies?
Much the same reasons why the UK, US etc. do much the same. It is slowed down a bit in some countries with strong constitutions or resistance to it, but the governments all want it.
> "You have to understand that times have changed, it's not like before... Now we have children, the children, the children, children, children and the t-word."
~~ keir starmer
(I'll see if I can still find the source. If anybody beats me to it, appreciated.)
I guess I'm not sure what's dubious here. The article says they're circumventing "democratic control bodies", but I don't know what that means (perhaps it's a more common phrase in German?), and it sounds like the European Parliament can still vote to reject Chat Control if they don't want it. The article strongly implies there's something dubious going on here, but to me what would be dubious is a procedure that prevents the parliament from voting on Chat Control.
The simple fact is that a law that existed since 2011 and expired in April is now back in effect. So we are back where we were on February.
I don't remember moving from an anti-democratic hell scape to serene democratic beauty back in April so it's probably a nothing-burger.
I often see news articles that trade on the fact the general populace aren't professional bureaucrats and so frame anything happening in unpopular ways.
But why should we think EU democracy is in decline in the first place? Is there some evidence that EU citizens oppose CSAM scanning and political institutions aren't responsive to that? I'm not an expert, but my understanding from polls and such is that CSAM scanning generally has popular support, and the only reason it's controversial is the passionate advocacy and lobbying of privacy groups. (Of course, that's not necessarily anti-democratic, if the privacy groups have important information about Chat Control they think the general public might not have realized.)
They hold all the cards, and have means - above-board or questionable, but effective nonetheless - to enact their will. Do you remember the Treaty of Lisbon referendumS, plural? Just keep asking the question until the plebs answer correctly.
Governments don’t work for people. Yet they use terms like democracy all the time. The repeated attempts at chat control are so blatantly anti civil rights but also disrespectful of democratic principles. Why do EU citizens tolerate this? Are they okay being made a fool of or is this just not an issue for them after all?
The power of the European Commission to propose legislation needs to be curbed or removed entirely. Executive agencies shouldn’t be writing legislation. It’s far to easy for them to propose laws that benefit the the European Commission, rather than benefiting Europeans.
You're blaming the wrong people and making this worse.
The article is literally about the EU Council, the elected heads of states of all the EU nations. The elected leaders of the EU nations really, really want chat control. The Commission has nothing to do with this.
How do you suggest people be intolerant? Essentially all the parties work toward these goals, so voting is ineffective. Speech is (more-or-less) allowed until it turns into strident protest, at which point the water cannons are brought out and a few token agitators are prosecuted for their instigation. I wouldn't want to call this tyranny, because I might get a knock on the door.
Why not emphasize the issue of civil rights and make it disqualifying as a single issue for any politician? At least online it feels like people care about chat control a lot but when it comes to voting, the type of dystopian control EU bureaucrats are building isn’t in anyone’s mind. So politicians can get away with supporting those policies since there isn’t a consequence for them.
"Online people" who care about this sort of thing are a microscopic subset of the voting base and do not represent what most people are aware of, understand, or care about. I live in Ireland, and you know what everyone in town and around my area talks about? Donald Trump. When I try and raise issues of national or European politics, I get whatabouted into more American politics. The bread is sweeter (it's the corn syrup) and the circuses more outrageous.
I wonder if they would still be for it if they weren't lied to. No one would be for this if they would clearly state they want to scan all of your messages, but they say "We want to protect the children" instead.
Because they don't understand this is mass surveillance. I bet not even some of the politicians do, or they don't grasp the full consequence. They see the child narrative and fall for it.
> Although the Council emphasizes that the *scans will be limited to the absolutely necessary extent* and that no general, indiscriminate surveillance will take place
I'm 100% sure that this is the case and about the good intentions of the proposers.
The same as every other fascist control measure. Voted down. Voted down. Voted down. Then forced through through some obscure mechanism bypassing the will of the people and becoming law forever.
This means the council has systematically overridden the will of both EU parliaments and states' objections in pushing this legislation. TLDR: there are, roughly and not 100% accurately speaking, 4 ways to make legislation at the EU level
1) commission + parliament (meaning the EU commission has initiative (veto rights over any law, like the US president), and parliament can only "propose amendments", which pass with 50% of votes, or deny). This is what normally happens.
Parliament denied the law. Twice.
Member states vetoed the legislation at least 3 times (it doesn't technically work like this but member states can force the commission to veto legislation, and Belgium, Hungary and Denmark have done so) (technically member states can force the EU commission not to introduce legislation and because nobody else can do so either, this is normally effectively a veto)
2) council + parliament. This is where we are. If the executives of the member states (NOT parliaments) want to push through a vote, they can use this path. The difference is that only 2/3 majority of parliament can stop the law from passing or put in amendments.
Technically, this is meant for bypassing the EU commission. But of course, in reality it is for getting past the Danish and potential Belgian and Hungarian and other's vetoes. The commission really wants this.
3) council + commission. This completely overrides any legislative involvement in ... well, legislation. They have already threatened to do this.
4) the council can just force legislation through without anyone's approval
Normally "democracy" in the EU means that legislation requires BOTH a majority of Europeans to agree (Parliament) AND no executive government. Both have already been bypassed.
This refers to "Chat Control 1.0", allowing facebook and other messaging providers to scan chats for harmful content (which they had been temporarily allowed to do by a recently expired law). It means current scanning is illegal.
Just so we're clear, this basically means that all messengers (not any specific one) will have to intercept everyone's messages, scan for specific words, and if found report the whole chat history to the police.
Of course, it already turned out "BTW carrousel" (an illegal tax avoidance strategy) is one of the sentences they scan for to "protect the children".
The article itself also contains evidence against the idea that this protects children (that child protection investigations keep increasing despite the scanning not taking place anymore)
>Technically, this is meant for bypassing the EU commission. But of course, in reality it is for getting past the Danish and potential Belgian and Hungarian and other's vetoes. The commission really wants this.
Excuse me? That is quite an assertion. You're saying the EU Commission, the civil servants appointed by the EU Council, are somehow controlling the EU Council to push this agenda?
I don't believe that is true. Please provide evidence.
In the article, it talks explicitly about this being driven by the heads of state.
> The member states want to reactivate the transitional regulation for voluntary monitoring of messages by technology groups, which expired on April 3, in an expedited procedure. The Council adopted a corresponding position for a “new” regulation on Thursday via written procedure to close a looming legal loophole and increase pressure on MEPs.
This is the EU Council pushing it. The elected heads of state of the member nations. The Commission just do their bidding.
This is completely wrong. Under the ordinary legislative procedure (used for Chat Control 1.0 & 2.0) the Commission proposes an act, then the Council and Parliament can approve it, reject it or amend it.
The act can be approved only if and when the Council and Parliament approve the exact same text
You are talking about the "ordinary legislative procedure", and that's how that works, indeed. Where you're wrong is that you're assuming it's the only procedure ... so here are the "special legislative procedures":
Consent procedure: where we are now. Technically this bypasses the EU commission, and only partially the EU parliament (and, the part not said out loud, due to bypassing the EU commission makes country vetos null and void, which is important in this case, because reasons)
Consultation procedure: 2 variants, one with and one without the EU commission.
And this is not yet even diving into "tricks" territory. This is all relatively above board, open for all to see and you don't have to puzzle things together. It gets worse, of course, you see, in order to join the EU you have to agree to a particular rule: that international trade treaties take precedence over a country's laws (and due to how EU legislation works, that means over EU legislation too). Do I really have to explain how that can be abused?
If need be, the council can proceed entirely on it's own and force laws onto the entire EU.
In both cases you can read "Acting in accordance with the ordinary legislative procedure", and it's not possible to adopt a different one, since it depends solely on the appropriate legal basis for the act.
In fact, both are based on Article 114 TFEU, which reads:
"The European Parliament and the Council shall, acting in accordance with the ordinary legislative procedure and after consulting the Economic and Social Committee, adopt the measures for the approximation of the provisions laid down by law, regulation or administrative action in Member States which have as their object the establishment and functioning of the internal market."
> and, the part not said out loud, due to bypassing the EU commission makes country vetos null
The Commission is not an intergovernmental institution. The "veto rule" exists in areas where the Council - not the Commission - acts by unanimity, which is not the case for article 114 TFEU (and all acts under the ordinary legislative procedure, unanimity is present in (most) SLPs only).
Hn is a goofy place. It feels like on odd days we see posts like this, about the EU creating this legal framework for the destruction of privacy. On even days we see posts about quitting American saas in favor of Europeans on the basis of privacy. Somehow the dots never connect.
Doesn't the mere fact that the EU is trying to pass laws to erode privacy indicate that there is privacy to erode? The US doesn't need to pass such laws because there are no protections.
> The US doesn't need to pass such laws because there are no protections.
The US desperately needs fundamental definitions and protections in regard to privacy, but the fact that it is extremely common for European countries to prosecute illegal speech and associations is a big difference. Americans are trying to defend themselves against the secondary effects of surveillance. Europeans can just jail you for saying magic words, or associating with organizations that have been proscribed.
Also, as of a day or two ago, Europeans can be prosecuted for sharing any RT (Russia Today) content, even in private, regardless of content. These are things that the Bill of Rights makes unthinkable in the US. We can bring assault rifles to anti-government protests; if they're seized we can sue to get them back, and to be compensated for being bothered.
The constitutional documents of European countries and supranational institutions might have been largely cribbed from the US's set, but anything like the Bill of Rights in them is virtually never written as an absolute right. It's stuff like Citizens are guaranteed freedom of expression except in cases where it is necessary to prevent expression to maintain safety or the public order.
> Citizens are guaranteed freedom of expression except in cases where it is necessary to prevent expression to maintain safety or the public order.
in practice thats how the US ends up working as well - with fenced in protest corners and the like, and police declaring protests to be riots and then moving in to stop the expression
EU has stronger protections against large private entities. Some people care more about that than they do about government (FWIW I think those people are wrong and the end result is the same, but it's a complicated subject).
> Also, as of a day or two ago, Europeans can be prosecuted for sharing any RT (Russia Today) content, even in private, regardless of content.
If you mean the July, 2 ruling of EU CoJ, I don't see anything there about "even in private". What they said is that if you have a website and put RT videos on it, it's "broadcasting" regardless of whether the website is freely accessible and/or run by a non-profit. Which sounds reasonable to me. The original ban on RT is still silly but that's a separate story.
For context, this refers to "Chat Control 1.0", allowing facebook and other messaging providers to scan chats for harmful content (which they had been temporarily allowed to do by a recently expired law).
This is still problematic, but the far more dangerous Chat Control 2.0 that would weaken end-to-end-encrypted messengers like Signal is not being discussed here.
Not to diminish the gravity of the new development, but the defeatist "no way to prevent this" narratives that are already popping up here are getting old -- when in fact it looks like 2.0 is off the table for good because protest against it has proven effective.
Isn't this something they already do?
I would be utterly shocked if facebook et al. were not scanning all of your messages (either in transit or at terminus to get around 'E2E' claims).
Yes, this had been temporarily permitted until recently, and AFAIK they continue doing so illegally at the moment.
Why is it currently illegal? If I have a service that let's users communicate, why is it illegal to look through those communications? (especially after they've signed my 400 page EULA). It would make moderation impossible otherwise.
Or are we saying this is being used for something specific that happens to be illegal?
Because the EU passed a law making it illegal and the temporary exemption recently expired.
Why should you have any right to look through everyone's private communications? Nobody really has any choice to reject your EULA if they want to stay in contact with someone on your service. I could force you to sign a ToS that includes "By using our service you owe us $10 million and agree to donate your kidney to our CEO" in order to reach your overseas grandma, but that doesn't mean it's actually enforceable or legal...
the opposite question - why is it legal and was made legal?
it's unconstitutional in most places to read letters - same thing should be applied to other form of communication as well
You're most likely replying to a professional Overton window mover.
you getting downvoted means you're right
> It would make moderation impossible otherwise.
Why would you need to moderate private messages between users?
Protect the kids bla bla bla...
Always the same political excuse
People sending unwanted DMs is an obvious reason. At the very least, users should be able to report DMs and then that should allow for moderation.
It's very common in some spaces to get people who send unwanted (spam/harassment/etc) DMs to tons of people. Just expecting everyone to block those people makes for a horrible user experience, because it means new users might be suddenly met by a bunch of unwanted DMs from aggressive randos that remain unbanned. You really need to be able to ban these people (and that means being able to verify that they did what they're accused of).
Reporting features on apps often send a copy of the message to the central gatekeeper.
This is not the same as scanning all messages (which makes E2EE moot).
Are there any commonly-used platforms that _don't_ make a distinction between unsolicited messages and established conversations?
Moderation is when others remove publicly posted content because you don't want to see it. (Censorship is when others remove publicly posted content because they don't want you to see it.) You don't need moderation for your private communication.
> Why is it currently illegal? If I have a service that let's users communicate, why is it illegal to look through those communications?
Not all services should be treated equally. We've figured this out earlier about letters, it's typically illegal, even for postal services, to open and read your letters without your consent, because there is an expectation about privacy.
Fast forward some years since then, and now basically IMs are the new letters, and sadly we have few big actors (yet again) controlling the transportation of our communication. People generally still want privacy in their communications, so regulations were made that companies cannot open your messages ("letters") without your consent, so we humans still have more or less the same protections as before, just tailored to the new specific implementation.
> If I have a service that let's users communicate, why is it illegal to look through those communications?
Because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence
It guarantees that the content of sealed letters is never revealed, and that letters in transit are not opened by government officials, or any other third party. The right of privacy to one's own letters is the main legal basis for the assumption of privacy of correspondence. The principle has been naturally extended to other forms of communication, including telephony and electronic communications on the Internet, as the constitutional guarantees are generally thought to also cover these forms of communication
Those narratives pop up from users that have a clear anti-EU bias (and I suspect they might not even be from the EU considering how ignorant they seem to be about how it works, its function ans structure, etc.
Call it what it is: Propaganda designed to stir anti-EU sentiment from groups that would benefit from being able to divide and conquer Europe.
The EU already has in place, apparently, a Digital Services Act that basically stops access to some part of the web. That the slope may bring to enlarged web inaccessibility - and an unlivable eu ("What do you mean you have no internet, no web access?! We take it for granted").
That some actors may ride it, is not their stain, but the eu's.
The DSA doesn't stop access to any part of the web. This is precisely the misinformation I mentioned earlier.
Kindly explain why some platforms have issued notice that access would be restricted pending age verification. To my inquiries, that is owing to the DSA. Was I fed wrong information? Where, in which part?
And, about «precisely the misinformation I mentioned earlier»: you think this infomess was caused by foreign agents, instead of internal european lack of clarity?
You see an article about how the EU tries to force a law after it got struck down by forcing it through with a legal trick and all you can think of is how any comment that critizes this is propaganda? Get a grip
EU doesn't tries to force a law. Some politicians does. EU is just a group of institutions.
It's strongly connected to the structure of the EU though, and the weak control that voters have over appointments to the commission, and every level of indirection is one at which the appointer can be influenced.
If EU institutions are used to push this sort of thing, we must treat that as what they are for. Systems do not get a pass because someone external is 'using them', but must be treated holistically.
EU institutions are the ones blocking it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48797761
Its not "the EU" that tries to force the law, it's the Council.
You know what the Council consists of? The heads of national governments.
You know who they're having to force it through against? The EU parliament, an actual EU-level institution.
The more accurate read would thus be "national governments are trying to force this against the will of the EU".
The fact that you come away with the exact opposite read is a good demonstration of said propaganda's effectiveness.
It is an interesting take on it. I think there is a lack of understanding on how politics work among many.
Even if it is foreign propaganda, the problems it exploits are real. Either you're solving the problems, or you're pushing people into the arms of said propaganda.
Are you implying Denmark and other governments supporting it are pushing Chat Control as some sort of false flag operation to undermine the EU?
No that the critique of chat control is, I guess?
It is quite disturbing that more and more ofent critique of policy or a political system like the EU is framed as some convinient boogey man's propaganda.
>users that have a clear anti-EU bias
If a government body wants to interfere in your privacy and take it away, isn't it normal to be against that government body pushing that policy?
It's not a bias, it's just a normal common sense reaction to tyrannical behavior, and pushing against that government body is the only way to enact the positive change you want to see.
Otherwise if you just bend over and take it all the time, just so randos on the internet don't accuse you of being "anti-EU", then nothing will change and you'll see more and more of your rights taken away. And even if it were "EU bias" it's my right as an EU citizen and taxpayer to have it if I want to.
Alos BTW, what's with this defensive attitude of treating the EU like some sacred cow that's somehow beyond reproach HN? Are they paying you guys to AstroTurf or what?
In that case you're against the people currently in government, not the body itself, i.e. some people against Chat Control ask for the dissolution of the EU, but would they ask for the dissolution of their national state if a similar law was passed in their national parliament? I think no
I've never seen anyone ask for the dissolution of the EU in chat control threads, and I read every one of them.
What I see people (Europeans) lamenting is how undemocratic the EU is. As much as I think von der Leyen should be imprisoned, the issue is not the people in the government, but the institution itself. The Commission and the Council are the ones pushing these things, every time.
The people in government are bad, and there's no reason whatsoever to think that'll improve amy time soon: what prevents bad people from doing bad things is the regulatory apparatus of checks and balances, which the EU very much lacks (in parts, granted). Worse, it has introduced US style corruption (or "lobbying") into countries that historically lacked it.
If Chat Control 2.0 passes, given the general direction this would be showing, I'd very much understand people wanting to exit from the EU and cut the amount of undemocratic bullshit they have to contend with.
But to return to your point, when something people strongly reject happens in their country, they do, rightfully, advocate for the dissolution of that government. Much harder to do with unelected bureaucrats sheltering in another country.
Something particularly ironic is that much of the EU's undemocratic nature comes from features designed specifically to prevent the EU from subsuming its member states. The best path to making Europe democratic again... would be a federal EU, with all the protections for individual member states stripped out, because member states are not a protected class.
The Euroskeptics want to go about this backwards. They correctly see the anti-democratic nature of the current EU structure and conclude that this is the only way European integration could happen, ergo we should not integrate Europe. The problem with this is that, even as 27 individual sovereigns, the former EU member states would still need to form agreements with one another and with other countries. Except this negotiation process is completely outside the democratic process even more than the EU currently is.
The underlying problem is that democracies do not stack or sum. Two democracies negotiating with one another become a dictatorship of whoever is doing the negotiating. The only way to preserve democracy is to give the people of both countries equal control over the matters assigned to the whole. The people must rule as one or they cease to rule at all.
I can entertain that this idea could be a solution IF done well, but what would be the path to democratic decision-making in this integrated EU? I strongly believe in people organising against the government, I think this is what can lead to change, or at least maintain the fighting spirit going.
The EU is handicapped by its very diversity on this. Imagine the situation where the EU is integrated, and the government wants to pass Chat Control 2.0, or some equally unsavoury measure. Imagine that some people or orgs manage to whip up the people of the Netherlands into protesting in the streets against it: it's extremely unlikely that Poles or Spaniards would be able to build a protest movement on top of that, if they were even aware of it, because of language and national sentiment ("it's just some people over there being angry about whatever, and mainstream media says there's nothing to see there, or that they're evil terrorists, and I don't understand their funny language enough to check").
There are some promising moves towards a EU-wide party in Mera25 for example (if I understand it correctly), but it's ultimately a party for English-speaking, basically well-off, educated, currently left-leaning, young people, which is nothing that one can build a deep movement on.
>The EU is handicapped by its very diversity on this.
Thousands of years of cultural heritage can't be bulldozed over and turned into a faceless economic zone similar to the US, just because the business class elites see it as a disadvantage to advancing their WEF globalist agenda where every person on the planet is to be an identical blank slate in an excel sheet and there's no borders, no religion, no identity, and no intellectual, educational, cultural and behavioral differences and all everyone just compete to be cattle in a race to the bottom for their corporate and real estate empires. This will always get pushback, mostly via voting far right.
If you want to convince people to freely give up their culture and identity in the name of EU economic advancement, you need to give them an incentive, a big economic one, and the EU sucks at this, and ambitious people looking for money go to the US, Dubai, etc. Money in the EU is still gatekept based on where you live and what nationality you have. EU will never go anywhere if still keeps this caste system where western/northern europeans are the noble gentry and eastern/southern europe the cheap labor peasants without any skin the game as they just become mercenaries who will sell their talent to US, China, etc anyone how will pay them better than Europeans.
>it's ultimately a party for English-speaking, basically well-off, educated, currently left-leaning, young people, which is nothing that one can build a deep movement on
Out-of-touch theater kids from upper class families who never did any hard labor jobs and spent their lives in an eternal Erasmus travel and party program, aren't gonna be popular with anyone but their own bubble as nobody who's struggling to pay bills, deal with unemployment from layoffs or lack of safety in public spaces due to migration, will ever empathize with them. It's the same posh European nobility cohort the hugely unpopular and equally out of touch Ursula von der Leyen comes from, where she grew up living abroad, traveling, partying and studying surrounded by private security, and then lectures the working class on "difficult decisions". We would guillotine people like that for less.
> but would they ask for the dissolution of their national state if a similar law was passed in their national parliament? I think no
?! Yes. Well, to some of us maybe not yet chat control given some proper well conceived legislation. But age verification, yes, may be one of the reasons to ask for dissolution.
A system is responsible for anything that happens when it is permitted to operate.
You can't separate the EU from what people use it to do.
Wow. Talk about ragebait.
That exemption had an expiration date for a reason. That they failed to consolidate that practice into a better law does not make forcefully overriding that expiration any more democratic.
Also, another key fact to bring up here once again:
The institution that forced this through is the EU Council, the body that represents national governments and is composed of heads of government.
The reason they have to force it through and couldn't do 2.0 is because the EU Parliament stopped them.
In other words, it's the nation states that want this and the EU institutions that are blocking it, not the other way around as often framed online.
If not for the EU, a much worse version of this would already be law in the nation states.
You can see this play out in real-time in the UK, which has gone real dystopian ever since Brexit.
"If not for the EU, a much worse version of this would already be law in the nation states."
In some, in some not. Not everyone is the UK. Many nations which had a totalitarian government in the 20th century are more wary about this sort of sweeping surveillance power.
The "charm" of pushing this through the circuitous path via Brussels is that few people and even few media outlets are paying attention to what happens in Brussels. Everyone is still obsessed with their national politics.
Exactly. As demonstrated by several countries pronouncing themselves against it every time this comes up.
If the government of Denmark really wants to implement this, let them, but the idea that a tiny country's officials, elected by a population of 6M that their media managed to convince of the utopia to come when privacy doesn't exist, manages to make another 450M in 26 countries comply to their will (not to call it delusion) is frightening.
They are face-saving. Again, if the country didn't want this, their Council representative would have voted against it.
Sure, you are right, but that does not mean that the EU as such is totally innocent in this.
Most liberal constitutions of Europe operate on the principle that their governments cannot be fully trusted in execution of their power and need a lot of oversight from the people. This is a result of hundreds of years of bad experience with politicans who had too much power.
The EU is somewhat more idealistically built and thus easier to abuse as a loophole for pushing things that would domestically hit a lot of counter-wind - by the same governments that are domestically limited by their constitutional order, but nevertheless still full of power-hungry people who are seeking ways to increase their power.
Frankly, for me that means that the EU should be reformed to make that less easy, but a colossus of 28, soon-to-be-more countries is approximately as amendable as the US Constitution - theoretically, yes, practically, the hurdles are extremely high.
I don't think we can fundamentally solve the problem that politics attracts psychopaths. We can only limit their power, and that, as of now, works better on the national level than on the continental one.
If the majority of national governments didn't want this, the Council wouldn't push for it. That's literally who the Council is composed of.
I think a good step for transparency would be forcing Council votes to be open so the ire could be redirected at the appropriate national governments instead of letting them EU-wash their unpopular ideas.
That would definitely help a bit.
That's a completely backward way of seeing it. "Nations" want nothing. The EU council is obviously an EU institution, the institution least accountable to the people of the EU. They want it and force it through as best they can. The parliament, the EU institution most accountable to the people of the EU (not that it's saying much) tried to stop it.
Of course Nations want this.
Who is in the Council? You are saying "nuh-uh", but not addressing any of the substance of my comment.
The Council represents state governments, not nations. A nation consists of all the people in it, not just those who appointed themselves to speak on its behalf.
... appoint themselves? You are aware how governments are chosen in all member states? Are you calling into question the democratic processes of national governments?
Either way, your issue is with national governments and not the EU, which curbs their excesses.
Yes, that's correct. I am calling into question the democratic processes of any so-called "representative democracy".
I see. Thank you for sharing your views with us. I think they speak for themselves.
Far from it. This is a classic example that national governments use EU to launder unpopular policy at home. "We have to, it's a EU requirement". It's hard to think it's not by design, that indeed EU is made to "curb the excesses" of popular accountability. UK played that game for decades, and it went as it had to go.
I think the problem is really that law enforcement have got used to outsourcing this kind of policing to private operated platforms (at least here in Germany). I was actually at the local police station because I notified them via an online mechanism about sth that looked very CSAM to me in a random forum tracking some gossip/Internet meme (actually I did not really look further than a title because that can be already illegal). Just dropping the link (which I thought would be just auto scanned and sent into some central pool), led to the fact that I had to go there in person, wait and had to listen to a speech about the fact that it can be easily illegal to be in certain places in the Internet and that I should be careful because I had a daughter in the age. It was almost that they are threatening me. They told me that all the CSAM stuff anyways comes through the provider and that they would do raids if needed. They cannot do much anyhow on the state level if they do not get the local ISP and IP delivered. It felt rather absurd and somewhat scary/dystopian that there are Internet companies that sent cops out to do raids based on some IP. According to the police officer it seemed very effective.
You wouldn't be the first person to try reporting a crime and then discover that police care about arresting people a lot more than they care about arresting the right people, as they threaten you with arrest yourself. That was my first experience with police too. I was under investigation for a year before they dropped the charges.
IIRC they used to catch a lot of child groomers by scanning messages.
Would be interested in seeing your sources for this. I've yet to see evidence that this has the significant upsides that would, definitely not justify, but at least explain, the push towards limiting fundamental freedoms.
There's a reason "who will think of the children" is ridiculed: there's no evidence that this is the intent or that there are outcomes. Everything I've read to date shows that surveillance is not effective in curbing CSAM, that the people (and especially organised crime) that engage into such activity are not using plain text and twitter to talk to each other, that those solutions that are known to have outcomes are not being invested in or enforced, etc.
If any of this was about protecting children, that Epstein thing wouldn't have been buried and forgotten already.
The whole Epstein sage is very closely tied to the current US administration, I haven't seen much of it being tied to anything about the EU Council. I think you might confuse the government ties Epstein had, at least the ones we knew about.
You think the European wealthy are innocent of pedophilia? What about Prince Andrew? This goes far beyond just the current US administration.
> You think the European wealthy are innocent of pedophilia?
You think children should be executed in the streets? Neither of us said any such thing, why ask that as a question even?
My only point being that Epstein himself doesn't seem related to EU Council, based on facts, while he was very close friend of the current sitting US president, and the whole thing is still being actively swept under the rug by the US Justice Department. Two governments located on two different continents...
If you don't think the EU and European governments are sweeping the same shit under the rug, I have a bridge to sell you.
Without evidence, I don't think anything at all, hence the clarity about the US administration and the clarity about the EU Council.
Ahh, to be that naive again. Those were the times. One definitely sleeps better.
If you haven't done any digging, don't make such claims. This is a network that goes way beyond the current US administration. I'm sorry you're still trusting whatever media you consume.
(I'm not gonna debate this. It's not that difficult to find some investigative research on this.)
> If you haven't done any digging
I have, that's why I am claiming things.
> I'm not gonna debate this
Same! Gonna go outside and enjoy my Monday, I suggest you do the same friend :)
No they didn't
Thanks for clarifying this!
Indeed, reusing "Chat Control" and giving it a new meaning is a surefire way to cause confusion.
And the underhanded way of trying to get something as controversial as this to pass, says a lot about the politicians pushing this agenda.
Chat Control is about allowing mass surveillance and removing privacy, no should be the obvious answer here.
I think you're misunderstanding something here. "Chat Control" is a term invented and popularized by privacy groups who oppose any scanning of private chats for any purpose; any confusion caused by having the same term refer to different things has to be laid at their feet, although they argue it's appropriate because any kind of scanning is abusable in basically the same ways. The people who support scanning private chats don't use the term "Chat Control".
The central bank, council, and commission have to get thoroughly investigated. The amount of questionable decisions coming from those three in the recent (15) years is extremely unsettling. The parliament and courts are practically the only institutions preventing things from hitting the fan at this point, and struggling to do so, it seems.
they dont investigate themselves, I hope you understand those details some day.
They do, albeit it's a slow process:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/eu-secret-gr...
Ironically, those are two separate cases of one high-profile EU politician (in fact, the very head of the same parliament that pushes for mass scanning of private messages) BOTH involving secret text messages that the mentioned politician refuses to reveal.
I’m convinced of widespread corruption here. We need to follow the money. Who is funding and pushing this agenda to blanket spy on all Europeans? I guess my question is rhetorical.
>Who is funding and pushing this agenda to blanket spy on all Europeans?
Why are we ignoring the other side of the transaction? The side responsible for taking the money.
Giving bribes for lobbying is bad, but that would not be an issue if those found taking the bribes would be guillotined or hanged.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy or corruption. It’s just design by committee bureaucracy. It always fails into that state.
And no committee, no bureaucracy, no regulations, just let corporations do whatever they want, works great right!? It's not like it immediately collapses to despotism as the slightly bigger fish gobbles up everything in a positive feedback process.
With an egalitarian government, corruption is a problem, its bad, its something we try to fight and there are mechanisms to do so. Having no government is just giving up and going straight to 100% corruption.
I’m not suggesting that at all. I am simply suggesting that bureaucracies have their own specific failure models.
I am very pro regulation.
Ok, theres defo a lot of idiots on HN and in USA who disagree with you.
Still, kinda weird to complain about bureaucracy and regulations in this context cus its the only solution to these problems of egality and corruption which humanity has been struggling with ever since the dawn of civilisation.
Tho, It's kind of a solved problem too. We should all just try to be like Denmark, they at the top or near the top of practially every metric. Happiness, corruption index, Gini, Quality of life, healthcare, education, carbon. They have a massive powerful bureaucracy, lots of strong regulation, extremely high taxes, low corruption.
The solution to any eco-geo-political issue is just "be more like Denmark". Once everyone gets to that level we can think about further improvement.
> We should all just try to be like Denmark
Wait, but doesn't Denmark have the strictest immigration policies in the entire EU?
> they at the top or near the top of practially every metric. Happiness, corruption index, Gini, Quality of life, healthcare, education, carbon.
I don't understand. Are you suggesting deporting all migrants to improve the statistics to Denmark's level? But that's impossible in our legal system. We've been actively importing culturally incompatible foreigners for decades now, and many already have citizenship. You can't just strip people of their citizenship in an attempt to improve the statistics.
Is that the same Denmark that tried to push Chat Control 2.0 in the EU?
Yes that one thing, pushing chat control, negates their amazing metrics and makes the country entirely shit. Excellent debating style bro! I must bow to your logic.
Denmark seem to be the ones pushing chat control the hardest.
Denmark has half the population of just the Los Angeles Metropolitan area and is 85% white. Most countries cannot be like Denmark.
Why is race relevant?
It’s just design by committee bureaucracy and its members attend Bohemian Grove
I genuinely don’t think such folk have as much influence and power as everyone thinks. In my (direct) experience it’s just a complete mess and they’re reacting naively to every problem.
They’re fighting a battle against the real problem which is the paid up influence campaigns that give them problems to defend. Start at the press, the social media companies and the think tanks.
They form these groups to network and do favors for each other and provide cover for each other. After a while you are asked to do increasingly compromising things to yourself to do deeper into/stay part of the club such as blood rituals. Bohemian Grove high priest Henry Kissinger led simulated animal sacrifice rituals attended by many others in the "inner circles" of the top strata of decision makers and wallet holders. They do this because engaging in a common taboo unites the group extremely strongly, and these behaviors are the ultimate taboo.
> They do this because engaging in a common taboo unites the group extremely strongly, and these behaviors are the ultimate taboo.
This last sentence immediately made me think of Epstein’s island and the “ultimate taboo” they were engaging in there.
> They do this because engaging in a common taboo unites the group extremely strongly
Nothing unites the scum stronger than a guaranteed scorching pan in hell for all of them.
Gerhard Schröder would like to have a word.
> I’m convinced of widespread corruption here.
I might not be corruption, it might be worse.
I was told by Brussels insiders a few decades ago the Commission people are not really corruptible. They are guaranteed a very comfortable life and the sanctions are harsh. That might have change, I don't know.
What I was explained is the system is designed for lobbying. The main input is by the lobbies, not the people.
Most of us assume the EU is designed like the US system or individual countries like Germany, Italy or France but it is not. The power of the Parliament is very limited, but we see here that little power has become too much of an inconvenience for the people in power.
For anyone daring to look into the boring design of that thing will come to the conclusion it is absolutely not democratic.
>The central bank, council, and commission have to get thoroughly investigated.
By WHO?! They are THE (unelected) ruling elite. Who's gonna prosecute them?
OLAF I would assume.
They are not unelected. The EU Council is made up of the head of government of each member state. They are all elected.
The commissioners are picked by the heads of state (elected) and the EU parliament (also elected).
This does not absolve them from wrongdoing, but you should understand where your complaints should be directed at.
>They are not unelected.
After how many layers does the democratic part get watered down and is just members of the elite picking other elites?
I live in a country where the prime minister is picked by the parliament. I don't directly vote for him.
By your own ridiculous standards, I don't live in a democracy. I fact, any paliamentarism would not be democratic based on that.
>I live in a country where the prime minister is picked by the parliament. I don't directly vote for him.
That's kind of whataboutism. If that works for your country and the people are happy with the arrangement and the results of this system, I don't see an issue.
>By your own ridiculous standards
I don't think direct accountability to the citizens is a ridiculous concept. If you're unhappy with a MEP, your prime minister, you can vote them out or protest till they quit. But the head of the EC, Ursula, is impossible to dethrone by the people via democratic vote or protest. You're stuck taking up the ass from someone you never voted for and don't support.
> the head of the EC, Ursula, is impossible to dethrone by the people via democratic vote or protest
The Commission can be dismissed by the Parliament, with a majority of its members and 2/3 of votes cast
Not the parent, but chill with the aggressive tone.
When you vote in your elections, you almost certainly know who's going to lead the country.
Not so with the EU: look up Spitzenkandidat method and the deviations from it, including von der Leyen in 2019 being parachuted into her post not based on any vote.
No, I would rather people in this thread chilled with misinformation.
My tone is appropriate.
I think those people are largely in your imagination. You seem to be assuming a whole lot of dark motives or unsavoury opinions in reaction to people simply saying the EU is not perfect.
Unrelated to this chat, but I wonder what your political leaning is, just to understand where this aggressive defense of the EU is coming from. I assume you're not left or right, not radical in any direction. Would you describe yourself as moderate/centrist/Starmer's Labour/Macronite?
> I think those people are largely in your imagination.
Nope, they are in this very thread, complaining about "unelected" officials.
Initially I dismissed this as a product of ignorance, but they keep repeating the same bullshit after being corrected. It is clearly bad faith.
> You seem to be assuming a whole lot of dark motives or unsavoury opinions in reaction to people simply saying the EU is not perfect.
That is not the argument. The EU is far from perfect, and if that's the discussion, I wouls have a lot of things to say about it.
> but I wonder what your political leaning is, just to understand where this aggressive defense of the EU is coming from.
I tend to see myself as left of center, although I did drift further to the left over time.
I am not from the UK to describe myself in in the UK political spectrum, although looking from the outside I have the impression Labour is largely ineffective and Starmer is (was?) running the government pretty much as the tories would have.
I am also not French. My understanding is that for French standards Macron is center-right?
Not sure if this answered your question.
Those are primarily figureheads with limited power. The EU is not a presidential system. Which is good, because a single person can never well-represent an entire population, directly elected or not.
The council is more problematic, since a blocking majority might only represent 25% of the population (half of the EU member governments, each elected by majority vote), but in this case they voted in favor, so it's as if they didn't exist and the decision lies with parliament, whose composition is determined by proportional representation. Excellent!
The interesting thing here is that the EU is accused of being undemocratic not because special interests killed a law with wide support among the populace, but because all the different bodies might actually agree and pass a law that privacy activists don't like. Legislation by agreement of multiple cross-cutting majorities must clearly be undemocratic!
By this standard there are no democracies in the world. Stop being ridiculous and repeating dumb russian propaganda.
They’re indirectly elected through national governments and parliament. That’s different from being directly elected by citizens. Being appointed by elected politicians doesn’t make someone directly accountable to voters. Citizens don’t vote for commissioners, and it’s much harder for voters to remove or reward them based on their policies.
So is the US president (Electoral College), the UK PM (Parliament) etc etc, yet you never hear complaints here from the same types.
Their opposition is ideological, democracy is just an excuse because their true views would be too unsavory to say out loud.
The criticism is about accountability, not whether the system is democratic.
The UK pm and the POTUS are both ultimately accountable through elections. In the UK, a general election can change the government. In the US, people vote specifically for presidential electors, even if it’s through the Electoral College.
The EU commission is different. People don’t vote for commissioners or the president, and they can’t vote them out in the same direct way.
100%. This is why many of us have a problem with the EU. And world governments in general — the more power they have and the further away from the elections that keep them accountable, the more tyrannical they become.
Again, it is the member states governments pushing for the thing you are calling "tyrannical". It is the EU parliament constantly blocking it.
If anything, the EU is curtailing the undemocratic tendencies of member states.
The EU Commission does the bidding of the elected EU Council. The Commission is sort of a civil service.
Im having a hard time following what is making the US presidental system different from the EU commission?
the US president is appointed by politicians who are elected, and the only accountability mechanism for president is impeachment, which is again, indirect via elected politicians.
> So is the US president (Electoral College)
It has never happened, but if there once would be enough faithless electors to swing the election (choosing a different president than what people voted for) it would be a huge scandal and it would be widely condemned as undemocratic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector
(Did this not happen in 2016? I understood the absolute aggregate count in the popular vote and the majority of the electoral college differed.)
I mean, if the electoral college would have enough faithless electors to swing the result away from the president whom the majority of the electors had pledged to vote for.
There has been so far 5 elections where the electoral vote chose a different president than what the popular vote count would have chosen. But this is a different thing than what I was talking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
In the US the President explicitly does not represent the people. It is the President of the States and only the States vote for President. Until the 20th century people weren't even involved in selecting who their State voted for.
Many people are confused by the fact that only States can vote for President. The most a person's vote can do is provide input into their State's votes for President.
And the EU Council represents the governments.
Ao is the prime minister in any country that adopts parliamentarism.
I am still to see as many people getting riled up about how those countries are not democratic.
Again, not a single word I’ve posted says “it’s un-democratic”
Ao?
Straw man... voters in parliamentary democracies generally are fully aware of whom the prime minister is going to be if the party wins.
Nobody really knows or cares who is going to be appointed to the commission since domestic issues always completely over shadow it.
The EU Council is composed of heads of government of each member state.
Are you really trying to imply that voters don't know who the fuck their heads of government are?
I mean, this is a rhetorical question. I don't really expect people who keep repeating misinformation about EU to be arguing in good faith.
The candidates for prime minister and similar positions tend to be front and center during an election.
From what I remember the head of the european commission was picked from a group of people that weren't even up for election after the official candidates that were paraded around during an EU wide election where dismissed.
If you water down democracy 2-3 times, it's no longer democracy.
By WHOM!!
The government will investigate the government and find that the government did nothing wrong. A subsequent government review of the government's investigation of the government will find no wrongdoing on the part of the government. Ain't democracy grand?
Then blame Russia. Rinse and repeat.
> recent (15) years
Not really - all of these have been happening in the past 5-6 years, since the surprisingly London-linked von Leyen and her cadres somehow ended up at the helm.
So it's not a surprise that whatever law the UK passes has been carried over to the Eu recently - the social media ban, digital ids, chat control and everything.
Do also see:
# Italy warns against Chat Control mass surveillance, but votes in favour of it (digitalcourage.social)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48783340
Do, because already there nuances (towards the better or worse) are revealed, which are not evident in journalism as we have it. The whole story needs more investigation than the stubs.
But the way they are managing it in the workflow does not seem too linear...
"We are in favour of this law, so long as it is not used for its intended purpose."
You should elaborate. And explain what you understood as "its intended purpose".
My understanding of the vote last Friday was about protracting the 2021 temporary compromise (scan voluntarily until we have a full law), which was suspended at the beginning of April. It is not clear how they proceeded that way. It seems some vertices imposed that they would not accept a legal vacuum there. So, it's not a "law". What ran for the past five years was an "exception to privacy laws" (I am not informed of the mandated guardrails).
I regret to inform you that a temporary exception to a law is also a law.
edit:
> It seems some vertices imposed that they would not accept a legal vacuum there.
I find this sentence unintelligible. Can you come up with another wording? And who are these "vertices" who have been given approval rights over EU legislation?
> to inform you that
What would that entail.
> who are these "vertices"
Apparently metsola, to some source. The eu parliament refused to renew the temporary licence to private message monitoring, which had the "speaker" complain that this would just leave the union with a normative vacuum - apparently insisting that one non-temporary regulation has to be decided. So I read.
The politicians voting for this are either thoroughly stupid or corrupt. From the linked site:
> The position adopted by the Council today paves the way for providers of Internet services to resume their efforts to detect and report material on child sexual abuse to the police.
- Jim O’Callaghan, Irish Minister of Justice, Interior and Migration
Except that many of those providers are not European. Good job handling all of your citizens' data to foreign entities, Jim. Way to go, champ.
I don't know how to put it nicely, but some members of the Council need to cease operations, or be ceased.
Am I crazy or is this website not allowing me to opt out of cookie tracking unless I sign up for a subscription?
I know the EU cookie banners have basically ruined the internet, but this seems like a whole 'nother level of obnoxious.
Wow, yeah, that seems... illegal, no?
Im pretty sure it is illegal. In my understanding, it must be equally easy to reject and accept. And the website MUST continue working under either choice. Which is not the case here.
I think the lawmakers should have made all forms of tracking illegal instead. That would make law writing and following easier. And closer to the spirit of what they are trying to accomplish and what everyone wants (except you Silicon Valley O.o)
I hate the tracking too. But how to websites monetize free content otherwise? Advertising doesn’t work if you can’t price it. Without tracking, everything becomes a paywall.
It seems a lot of people are doing amazing things with Patreon. Share some things for free (free as in beer) then have a paid tier for those who want more. Convince us you’re worthy, then we’ll give you money willingly.
Nope, completely legal.
You Reject the undesirable ones (all!) and click Agree to Selected.
On these you usually can't reject them. It says
> Data processing by advertising providers including personalised advertising with profiling (Consent required for free use)
doesn't work, they don't let you unselect anything. you have to accept everything or pay.
very frustrating because especially a tech magazine like heise should really know better
It's called "pay-or-okay" (or "consent-or-pay") and there hasn't been many decisions on it yet which has led noyb to sue German DPAs: https://noyb.eu/en/years-inactivity-pay-or-ok-cases-noyb-sue...
There is one case where DPA ruled in favor of the company, but it's currently being appealed: https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-ok-der-spiegel-noyb-sues-hamburg-d...
Another one ruled against company and court agreed: https://noyb.eu/en/court-decides-pay-or-okay-derstandardat-i...
According to GDPR it’s illegal to condition content on tracking approval. This is VERY clear if you read the law. I can’t understand why this has become very popular to do just recently.
Personally I do agree, but enforcement is unfortunately behind DPAs and it's pretty clear that they are trying to avoid ruling on it.
In theory someone could directly sue some company which engages on this via Article 79, but this can be expensive and depending on jurisdiction the plaintiff can end up with personal liability on defendant's legal costs if court ends up finding that this is actually legal (e.g. Finland has "loser pays" rule in civil suits).
Additionally this does also touch ePD and in some countries there might be different agency which handles ePD complaints compared to GDPR, like in Finland Data Protection Ombudsman handles GDPR, but Transport and Communications Agency (Traficom) handles ePD. If there is something that touches both the Ombudsman usually lets Traficom take care of ePD aspects before they give any GDPR ruling. Both of these can take years.
When they force that, it's an invitation for me to open it in an incognito window. Track all you want, assholes!
Try the demo on this site: https://fingerprint.com/demo
Both in incognito and normal modes. I bet you'll get the same fingerprinting ID in both.
So yes, they can track you in incognito mode, too.
This is what made me disable JavaScript by default in 2018. I didn't even get this banner.
You are correct. Reader mode on Firefox shows the full article though.
Very common on EU news websites.
Workarounds include:
- reader mode
- "behind the overlay" extension (and others like it)
- archive.is
- probably many others
I have conditioned my left first finger and pinky to just hammer F5 and Esc until the page loading stops at the right moment...
It's not EU cookie banners that have ruined the internet, it's malicious compliance and dark pattens on behalf of those that want to track you.
The EU's own government websites have these same cookie banners. Are they maliciously compliant with their own regulations?
EU made bad laws that have encouraged this kind of behavior. And now we're all suffering.
Look at the CCPA in California for legislation that accomplishes largely the same goals, but doesn't break the web due to "malicious compliance".
> The EU's own government websites have these same cookie banners.
Most of them decidedly don't have the same cookie banners. E.g. in vast majority of cases they don't prevent you from seeing content, and have an easy opt-out mechanism without dark patterns.
Yes, the EU also wants to track you.
No. The cookie banners have ruined the internet. The banners haven’t fixed anything. Business as usual, just click here.
The result matters, which is why regulations should be considered carefully. The whole cookie fiasco is exactly that: they created a whole industry of shitty compliance and the rules are complex enough that every engineering team is like "just use the off-the-shelf shitty thing". And here we are.
As a reminder "EU cookie banners" are not required if you use cookies for site functionality. They are only required if your site uses these to track users.
This needs repeating, it's a common misconception (deliberately spread by many, too) that the EU requires cookie banners for all cookies.
Yet every website still has them.
Not quite.
> This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out or facilitating the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order to provide an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user.
This is the reason why these are usually separated to "strictly necessary" and "functional" cookies. Functional cookies are things which enhance the functionality, but are not strictly necessary. These would generally include things like persistent cookie for language choice rather than just session one.
Next to the language chooser, write that this chooser sets a cookie. Don't need a banner.
This gets repeated a lot, but is not my experience after having worked with both in-house and contracted lawyers to understand how functional cookies are handled. We end up wanting something more durable than session cookies to track user preferences so we can set them next time they visit. This is super standard light/dark mode, region, language type of stuff. But that's considered “tracking" in many of these discussions, which never made sense to me.
As a reminder, legislative bodies have responsibility for (supposed) unintended consequences too.
> Am I crazy or is this website not allowing me to opt out of cookie tracking unless I sign up for a subscription?
Extremely common practice for newspapers websites, unfortunately.
They're not going to stop, are they?
It certainly seems like they'll stop after they pass it.
Who is they?
These pithy remarks don't really extend the debate or have any nuance - they just sound conspiratorial.
There are plenty of reasons to "scan" communications.
There are plenty of reasons to have limits on communication "scanning".
What part of the spectrum do you fall on?
no there is no reason to scan communications.
The most obvious answer: to stop CSAM being shared on large platforms. Cloudflare has a tool that does it for some of their services.
Just because it's criminal, it doesn't mean that every private entity has to help to prevent it at costs of your privacy.
If there are people that host parties in their homes to share CSAM, does that mean that it should be mandatory to install surveillance cameras in your house?
Also as if people that are seriously sharing CSAM, wouldn't encrypt the data before sharing it.
Law enforcement should stop them. In countries like Germany this is very likely illegal and amounts to preparation of terrorist act.
Wait until you see who's in charge of deciding who to prosecute! My first experience with German police was reporting a crime and then then discussing if they should arrest me for being involved with the crime, since I was there at the police station and therefore easier to arrest than the actual perpetrators.
In the UK, when I reported a crime, I had to pull out the book and read the verse what constitutes an assault for Police to record it, because they didn't know. That said, 3 weeks later case was closed because they couldn't find the perpetrator. That is despite me giving them video evidence and address of that person. Looks like our taxes are well spent.
They're well spent on different priorities than we have. The police are extremely effective at suppressing dissent.
There is no way to stop these so just lets get going. The sooner we have age and ID verification on every single website and app the sooner we will have a working decentralised internet that avoids it.
It's a strong signal to start building such an Internet and slowly withdraw from using anything centralized.
governments can (and will) shut down or fine the detractors.
I doubt that. They cannot stop me from downloading movies and series. They cannot stop me from betting or using crypto. It's kinda hard to find a single thing they are able to stop me from doing online and I'm not even trying that hard.
> There is no way to stop these so just lets get going.
Except for the times they've tried before and public outrage stopped it. So this defeatist attitude works against us.
What frightens me is, as usual, the assumption of conformism that may just remove people from services.
"Present a document" // "No, certainly not to you" // "Do without then"
The straight will say "no", but their lives will be extremely complicated, possibly in the unawareness of those that just take compliance to the absurd for granted - as the weak call survival paramount and cannot see that their modus is subjective. That we won't have it is something that they cannot even conceive. Adults are noise to them.
EU council is 27 individual governments each elected by their members. It’s like the US senate pre 17th ammendemnt.
Sort of, if the EU were a country. But the council doesn't consist of separate senators to determine the weight of the vote. And there's also the Commission and Parliament, which are closer to the American government structure as it stands now. The three bodies have different procedures or different decisions and law making processes.
But generally, the council represents the governments currently ruling the EU member states. A council of member states pushing for laws the comission opposes makes for a very interesting but confusing situation, where the EU is opposed to this legislation but the individual member states are not.
So what platforms will this apply too? What platforms Dow sit already apply too? All SMS, large email providers (Gmail?), WhatsApp, Apple services?
There have been a few incidents that make me think Snapchat private chats are monitored. The one with the guy joking to his friends about blowing up a plane or something is the first that comes to mind.
Tell me how private messaging gets you taken off a plane otherwise. It’s not private. Big tech has put a camera and microphone in everyone’s pocket and they’re monitoring everything.
The government and big (American) tech are very likely lying to us IMO. How will anyone protest when mass surveillance becomes the law if it’s already in place and you can be labeled a bad actor that gets your life ruined if you dissent?
> How will anyone protest when mass surveillance becomes the law if it’s already in place and you can be labeled a bad actor that gets your life ruined if you dissent
With the pure awareness that Men do not act out of convenience, and that this whole situation of declining societies was born out of already-fascist-material that acted out of convenience, with complacency.
I used to think Varoufakis' critique of the EU being a structurally anti-democratic union was just coming from the angle of an edgy leftist that was forced by the Troika to do austerity.
Day in and day out, the EU proves Varoufakis right.
The Troika is a pet name for the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.
Calling it the Troika makes it sound like it's some separate thing.
Please email your members of parliament: https://fightchatcontrol.eu
it will %100 pass at some point. no way around it.
The problem is /what/ will pass. What is this clothing limit? Pink, shocking, lime? Long sleeves, above the wrist or below? In the city center, in the suburbs, where?
The issue is all in the details.
And in the decision process, before that, of course.
The main argument for this seems to be that they catch many pedos by using image recognition tech on facebook etc.
Thus, discontinuing the permit to use these techniques did have enforcement numbers of those crimes found drop significantly.
I'm wondering if they've given up real policing of these crimes completely?!
Spreading pedo content on Facebook, those people have to be the dumbest of the dumb? Everyone spending even a single critical thought on their crimes won't be caught by this.
And they say enforcement numbers drop significantly? Meaning they don't catch many other people? What the fuck are they even doing? Did they completely give up trying to find the real criminals, and instead fall back on sugar-coated figures to conceal that failure?
These pro-surveillance narratives don't even attempt to look plausible, they are aimed at the average Joe/Mohammed/whoever with attention span of 10ms and IQ of a guppy.
How many pedos does Facebook catch by scanning DMs?
Less than it could by scanning Epstein files.
This would be illegal in Germany. I wonder why law enforcement is not looking into this. It is similar to having abusive husband control wife's communication - just at scale and for ideological reason. This is a violent act against whole population, applied indiscriminately. It fulfils updated definition of terrorism in Germany and it is exploiting legislative apparatus of the EU to enact this violent act. German people should report this and these people behind it should be investigated and presumably arrested.
Don't you also have it in the Constitution? In your case, it could probably construed as part of Article 1 (I may be confused).
For others, it is explicit in the Articles.
> these people behind it should be investigated and presumably arrested
Are you talking about the eu organs? (Because it does seem linear, but paradoxical, and surely not outside a thought legal framework.)
Whoever is responsible for it.
i thought apple is already doing this on all it's devices?
Just saying I would buy a chat control legislation calendar, where each month of the calendar has significant meeting days of deliberation bodies, elections/nominations of people to relevant boards, as well as historical dates of previous attempts to pass chat control.
Just so the cycle is easily knowable.
This is illegal in Spain.
This is democracy manifest. What a joke.
We have been enjoying a succulent Chinese meal.
Yeah and Peter Hummelgaard is about to touch you on the penis.
> "We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services,"
What an arsehole.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/danish-justice...
Does that ###, which seems to have the most simplistic ideas about the world, also have arguments to defend its position?
I mean: has it ever heard, for example about the 2nd Amendment to the USA constitution, arguing that people must be able to defend from governments themselves?
Is it not aware that data is not accessed "just by the good guys"? ?!
What is it with Danish Social Democrats and wanting to enact mass surveillance at any cost?
Isn't this natural for any "Social" ideologies? They imply a system of centralized redistribution, which implies a powerful repressive apparatus and an omnipresent surveillance system.
No, it is not, and no, they do not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
It is a bit strange why EU countries allow their own credibility and legitimacy get steadily dragged down, bit by bit, by all these thousands of dubious statements, tricks, manoeuvres, and so on.
Do they just not care about weakening their own societies?
The govs consist of people who have their own agendas. Mass surveillance is something they all are aligned on.
Much the same reasons why the UK, US etc. do much the same. It is slowed down a bit in some countries with strong constitutions or resistance to it, but the governments all want it.
> "You have to understand that times have changed, it's not like before... Now we have children, the children, the children, children, children and the t-word."
~~ keir starmer
(I'll see if I can still find the source. If anybody beats me to it, appreciated.)
I guess I'm not sure what's dubious here. The article says they're circumventing "democratic control bodies", but I don't know what that means (perhaps it's a more common phrase in German?), and it sounds like the European Parliament can still vote to reject Chat Control if they don't want it. The article strongly implies there's something dubious going on here, but to me what would be dubious is a procedure that prevents the parliament from voting on Chat Control.
Perhaps the article is biased.
The simple fact is that a law that existed since 2011 and expired in April is now back in effect. So we are back where we were on February.
I don't remember moving from an anti-democratic hell scape to serene democratic beauty back in April so it's probably a nothing-burger.
I often see news articles that trade on the fact the general populace aren't professional bureaucrats and so frame anything happening in unpopular ways.
Perhaps your democracy has been in decline for some time now?
But why should we think EU democracy is in decline in the first place? Is there some evidence that EU citizens oppose CSAM scanning and political institutions aren't responsive to that? I'm not an expert, but my understanding from polls and such is that CSAM scanning generally has popular support, and the only reason it's controversial is the passionate advocacy and lobbying of privacy groups. (Of course, that's not necessarily anti-democratic, if the privacy groups have important information about Chat Control they think the general public might not have realized.)
They hold all the cards, and have means - above-board or questionable, but effective nonetheless - to enact their will. Do you remember the Treaty of Lisbon referendumS, plural? Just keep asking the question until the plebs answer correctly.
Governments don’t work for people. Yet they use terms like democracy all the time. The repeated attempts at chat control are so blatantly anti civil rights but also disrespectful of democratic principles. Why do EU citizens tolerate this? Are they okay being made a fool of or is this just not an issue for them after all?
Well, we don't tolerate it, that's why it hasn't passed yet. They keep trying, though.
The power of the European Commission to propose legislation needs to be curbed or removed entirely. Executive agencies shouldn’t be writing legislation. It’s far to easy for them to propose laws that benefit the the European Commission, rather than benefiting Europeans.
You're blaming the wrong people and making this worse.
The article is literally about the EU Council, the elected heads of states of all the EU nations. The elected leaders of the EU nations really, really want chat control. The Commission has nothing to do with this.
The Council might be involved, but it’s the commission that drafts legislation, and they’re unelected.
Either way, drafting legislation should be the responsibility of the legislature (i.e the parliament), not the commission or the council.
How do you suggest people be intolerant? Essentially all the parties work toward these goals, so voting is ineffective. Speech is (more-or-less) allowed until it turns into strident protest, at which point the water cannons are brought out and a few token agitators are prosecuted for their instigation. I wouldn't want to call this tyranny, because I might get a knock on the door.
Why not emphasize the issue of civil rights and make it disqualifying as a single issue for any politician? At least online it feels like people care about chat control a lot but when it comes to voting, the type of dystopian control EU bureaucrats are building isn’t in anyone’s mind. So politicians can get away with supporting those policies since there isn’t a consequence for them.
"Online people" who care about this sort of thing are a microscopic subset of the voting base and do not represent what most people are aware of, understand, or care about. I live in Ireland, and you know what everyone in town and around my area talks about? Donald Trump. When I try and raise issues of national or European politics, I get whatabouted into more American politics. The bread is sweeter (it's the corn syrup) and the circuses more outrageous.
> Why do EU citizens tolerate this?
Some EU citizens want it? You'd be surprised on the views of some people.
I wonder if they would still be for it if they weren't lied to. No one would be for this if they would clearly state they want to scan all of your messages, but they say "We want to protect the children" instead.
Because they don't understand this is mass surveillance. I bet not even some of the politicians do, or they don't grasp the full consequence. They see the child narrative and fall for it.
As always the EU does not disappoint regarding it's stance on privacy. What a joke.
> Although the Council emphasizes that the *scans will be limited to the absolutely necessary extent* and that no general, indiscriminate surveillance will take place
I'm 100% sure that this is the case and about the good intentions of the proposers.
/s
The same as every other fascist control measure. Voted down. Voted down. Voted down. Then forced through through some obscure mechanism bypassing the will of the people and becoming law forever.
> Then forced through through some obscure mechanism bypassing
It was extending a recently expired law that has existed since 2011.
I don't think your comment is reflecting on what has actually happened. "Chat Control" as people know it has not passed into law.
This means the council has systematically overridden the will of both EU parliaments and states' objections in pushing this legislation. TLDR: there are, roughly and not 100% accurately speaking, 4 ways to make legislation at the EU level
1) commission + parliament (meaning the EU commission has initiative (veto rights over any law, like the US president), and parliament can only "propose amendments", which pass with 50% of votes, or deny). This is what normally happens.
Parliament denied the law. Twice.
Member states vetoed the legislation at least 3 times (it doesn't technically work like this but member states can force the commission to veto legislation, and Belgium, Hungary and Denmark have done so) (technically member states can force the EU commission not to introduce legislation and because nobody else can do so either, this is normally effectively a veto)
2) council + parliament. This is where we are. If the executives of the member states (NOT parliaments) want to push through a vote, they can use this path. The difference is that only 2/3 majority of parliament can stop the law from passing or put in amendments.
Technically, this is meant for bypassing the EU commission. But of course, in reality it is for getting past the Danish and potential Belgian and Hungarian and other's vetoes. The commission really wants this.
3) council + commission. This completely overrides any legislative involvement in ... well, legislation. They have already threatened to do this.
4) the council can just force legislation through without anyone's approval
Normally "democracy" in the EU means that legislation requires BOTH a majority of Europeans to agree (Parliament) AND no executive government. Both have already been bypassed.
This refers to "Chat Control 1.0", allowing facebook and other messaging providers to scan chats for harmful content (which they had been temporarily allowed to do by a recently expired law). It means current scanning is illegal.
Just so we're clear, this basically means that all messengers (not any specific one) will have to intercept everyone's messages, scan for specific words, and if found report the whole chat history to the police.
Of course, it already turned out "BTW carrousel" (an illegal tax avoidance strategy) is one of the sentences they scan for to "protect the children".
The article itself also contains evidence against the idea that this protects children (that child protection investigations keep increasing despite the scanning not taking place anymore)
>Technically, this is meant for bypassing the EU commission. But of course, in reality it is for getting past the Danish and potential Belgian and Hungarian and other's vetoes. The commission really wants this.
Excuse me? That is quite an assertion. You're saying the EU Commission, the civil servants appointed by the EU Council, are somehow controlling the EU Council to push this agenda?
I don't believe that is true. Please provide evidence.
In the article, it talks explicitly about this being driven by the heads of state.
Yes, in EU the Commission proposes legislation: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-making-process/planning...
> In the article, it talks explicitly about this being driven by the heads of state.
Did you miss that the article talks explicitly about it being in the second reading already?
You didn't address my point at all.
> The member states want to reactivate the transitional regulation for voluntary monitoring of messages by technology groups, which expired on April 3, in an expedited procedure. The Council adopted a corresponding position for a “new” regulation on Thursday via written procedure to close a looming legal loophole and increase pressure on MEPs.
This is the EU Council pushing it. The elected heads of state of the member nations. The Commission just do their bidding.
This is completely wrong. Under the ordinary legislative procedure (used for Chat Control 1.0 & 2.0) the Commission proposes an act, then the Council and Parliament can approve it, reject it or amend it.
The act can be approved only if and when the Council and Parliament approve the exact same text
You are talking about the "ordinary legislative procedure", and that's how that works, indeed. Where you're wrong is that you're assuming it's the only procedure ... so here are the "special legislative procedures":
Consent procedure: where we are now. Technically this bypasses the EU commission, and only partially the EU parliament (and, the part not said out loud, due to bypassing the EU commission makes country vetos null and void, which is important in this case, because reasons)
Consultation procedure: 2 variants, one with and one without the EU commission.
And this is not yet even diving into "tricks" territory. This is all relatively above board, open for all to see and you don't have to puzzle things together. It gets worse, of course, you see, in order to join the EU you have to agree to a particular rule: that international trade treaties take precedence over a country's laws (and due to how EU legislation works, that means over EU legislation too). Do I really have to explain how that can be abused?
If need be, the council can proceed entirely on it's own and force laws onto the entire EU.
Start here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/special-...
The ordinary legislative procedure applies to both:
- Chat Control 1.0 (now expired): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
- Chat Control 2.0: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:52...
In both cases you can read "Acting in accordance with the ordinary legislative procedure", and it's not possible to adopt a different one, since it depends solely on the appropriate legal basis for the act.
In fact, both are based on Article 114 TFEU, which reads: "The European Parliament and the Council shall, acting in accordance with the ordinary legislative procedure and after consulting the Economic and Social Committee, adopt the measures for the approximation of the provisions laid down by law, regulation or administrative action in Member States which have as their object the establishment and functioning of the internal market."
> and, the part not said out loud, due to bypassing the EU commission makes country vetos null
The Commission is not an intergovernmental institution. The "veto rule" exists in areas where the Council - not the Commission - acts by unanimity, which is not the case for article 114 TFEU (and all acts under the ordinary legislative procedure, unanimity is present in (most) SLPs only).
At that point it has become clear to most Europe is not a democracy anymore. It has lost any legitimacy.
At the end of the day, regimes do not depend on legitimacy but on force.
Talk about overreacting.
Many of us judge that the authoritativeness of most states and organizations is at a staggeringly low point.
The reaction may not be tied to a single event.
What percentage of people support Chat Control?
Far less than a majority. I believe that is the whole point
Hn is a goofy place. It feels like on odd days we see posts like this, about the EU creating this legal framework for the destruction of privacy. On even days we see posts about quitting American saas in favor of Europeans on the basis of privacy. Somehow the dots never connect.
The dots connect very normally, politicians make mistakes. People need to protest against it.
As you might have learned from life, things are not binary.
Doesn't the mere fact that the EU is trying to pass laws to erode privacy indicate that there is privacy to erode? The US doesn't need to pass such laws because there are no protections.
> The US doesn't need to pass such laws because there are no protections.
The US desperately needs fundamental definitions and protections in regard to privacy, but the fact that it is extremely common for European countries to prosecute illegal speech and associations is a big difference. Americans are trying to defend themselves against the secondary effects of surveillance. Europeans can just jail you for saying magic words, or associating with organizations that have been proscribed.
Also, as of a day or two ago, Europeans can be prosecuted for sharing any RT (Russia Today) content, even in private, regardless of content. These are things that the Bill of Rights makes unthinkable in the US. We can bring assault rifles to anti-government protests; if they're seized we can sue to get them back, and to be compensated for being bothered.
The constitutional documents of European countries and supranational institutions might have been largely cribbed from the US's set, but anything like the Bill of Rights in them is virtually never written as an absolute right. It's stuff like Citizens are guaranteed freedom of expression except in cases where it is necessary to prevent expression to maintain safety or the public order.
https://atlantablackstar.com/2025/10/15/man-who-posted-meme-...
> Europeans can be prosecuted for sharing any
Could you provide more details?
> Citizens are guaranteed freedom of expression except in cases where it is necessary to prevent expression to maintain safety or the public order.
in practice thats how the US ends up working as well - with fenced in protest corners and the like, and police declaring protests to be riots and then moving in to stop the expression
EU has stronger protections against large private entities. Some people care more about that than they do about government (FWIW I think those people are wrong and the end result is the same, but it's a complicated subject).
> Also, as of a day or two ago, Europeans can be prosecuted for sharing any RT (Russia Today) content, even in private, regardless of content.
If you mean the July, 2 ruling of EU CoJ, I don't see anything there about "even in private". What they said is that if you have a website and put RT videos on it, it's "broadcasting" regardless of whether the website is freely accessible and/or run by a non-profit. Which sounds reasonable to me. The original ban on RT is still silly but that's a separate story.
Doesn't the USA also prosecute people for illegal speech and associations?
A rational person could argue both against EU surveillance laws and in favour of more EU digital independence.