I guess everyone has just decided the back half of 2025 needs to be 1984! Chat Control is the EUs proposed bill to make it mandatory to require ID or face scans for the internet as well as actively scanning all your messages, whether it be e-mail, message apps, forum posts, etc, for "suspicious" content which can then be flagged to authorities. Here's a website covering all the major details:
www.patrick-breyer.de

Chat Control: The EU's CSAM scanner proposal
🇫🇷 French: Traduction du dossier Chat Control 2.0 🇸🇪 Swedish: Chat Control 2.0🇳🇱 Dutch: Chatcontrole The End of the Privacy of Digital Correspondence Take action to stop Chat Control now! The Chat Control 2.0 proposal in detail Changes proposed by the European Parliament
Age verification:
- All of your chat conversations and emails will be automatically searched for suspicious content. Nothing remains confidential or secret. There is no requirement of a court order or an initial suspicion for searching your messages. It occurs always and automatically.
- If an algorithms classifies the content of a message as suspicious, your private or intimate photos may be viewed by staff and contractors of international corporations and police authorities. Also your private nude photos may be looked at by people not known to you, in whose hands your photos are not safe.
- Flirts and sexting may be read by staff and contractors of international corporations and police authorities, because text recognition filters looking for "child grooming" frequently falsely flag intimate chats.
- You can falsely be reported and investigated for allegedly disseminating child sexual exploitation material. Messaging and chat control algorithms are known to flag completely legal vacation photos of children on a beach, for example. According to Swiss federal police authorities, 80% of all machine-generated reports turn out to be without merit. Similarly in Ireland only 20% of NCMEC reports received in 2020 were confirmed as actual "child abuse material". Nearly 40% of all criminal investigation procedures initiated in Germany for "child pornography" target minors.
- On your next trip overseas, you can expect big problems. Machine-generated reports on your communications may have been passed on to other countries, such as the USA, where there is no data privacy – with incalculable results.
- Intelligence services and hackers may be able to spy on your private chats and emails. The door will be open for anyone with the technical means to read your messages if secure encryption is removed in order to be able to screen messages.
- This is only the beginning. Once the technology for messaging and chat control has been established, it becomes very easy to use them for other purposes. And who guarantees that these incrimination machines will not be used in the future on our smart phones and laptops?
- You can no longer set up anonymous e-mail or messenger accounts or chat anonymously without needing to present an ID or your face, making you identifiable and risking data leaks. This inhibits for instance sensitive chats related to sexuality, anonymous media communications with sources (e.g. whistleblowers) as well as political activity.
- If you are under 16, you will no longer be able to install the following apps from the app store (reason given: risk of grooming): Messenger apps such as Whatsapp, Snapchat, Telegram or Twitter, social media apps such as Instagram, TikTok or Facebook, games such as FIFA, Minecraft, GTA, Call of Duty, Roblox, dating apps, video conferencing apps such as Zoom, Skype, Facetime.
- If you don't use an appstore, compliance with the provider's minimum age will still be verified and enforced. If you are under the minimum age of 16 years you can no longer use Whatsapp due to the proposed age verification requirements; the same applies to the online functions of the game FIFA 23. If you are under 13 years old you'll no longer be able to use TikTok, Snapchat or Instagram.