The European Commission is pushing hard to extend Chat Control 1.0 - the regulation allowing technology companies to mass-scan private messages for child sexual abuse material without court orders - for another two years, according to digital rights advocates tracking the legislative process.
Let's translate from Brussels bureaucratese: The EU, which positions itself as the world's privacy champion and fined Meta billions for data protection violations, wants to keep letting tech companies read your private messages without judicial oversight. And it wants to do this for two more years while negotiating even broader surveillance powers under Chat Control 2.0.
The cognitive dissonance is spectacular.
Chat Control 1.0, formally known as the Interim Regulation on child sexual abuse material, was supposed to be temporary when it passed in 2021. The "interim" label meant it would expire once permanent legislation was negotiated. That permanent legislation - Chat Control 2.0 - has been stalled in the European Parliament and Council for over a year, blocked by a coalition of privacy advocates, tech industry groups, and member states including Germany and the Netherlands.
So the Commission wants to extend the "temporary" surveillance regime that was never supposed to last this long, while continuing to negotiate the permanent surveillance regime that civil liberties groups warn would be even worse.
The technical reality is this: Chat Control 1.0 allows platforms like Facebook Messenger and Instagram to scan the content of private messages using automated tools - primarily Microsoft's PhotoDNA and Google's content hashing technology. These systems create digital fingerprints of known child abuse images and flag matches for review by human moderators and law enforcement.
Privacy advocates acknowledge the genuine horror of child sexual abuse material online. Their objection isn't to the goal - it's to the method. Mass scanning of private communications without individualized court orders represents a fundamental shift in how democratic societies approach surveillance.
The precedent is what matters.
If the EU normalizes warrantless mass scanning for child abuse material - an objective no politician can oppose without career suicide - what prevents expanding it to terrorism? Drug trafficking? Copyright infringement? "Misinformation"?
Patrick Breyer, a German MEP and vocal critic of Chat Control, argues the regime violates fundamental privacy rights enshrined in the EU Charter. "You cannot protect children by destroying their privacy," Breyer told the European Digital Rights organization. "Mass surveillance of private communications is what we criticize in China and Russia, not what we should implement in Europe."
The Commission's counter-argument relies on the scale of the problem: platforms report millions of child abuse images annually through current scanning systems. Disable those systems, officials warn, and law enforcement loses a critical tool for identifying victims and prosecuting offenders.
But critics note an inconvenient fact: the current scanning regime produces massive numbers of false positives. Parents photographing their children for medical consultations get flagged. Teenagers sending legal images to romantic partners get reported to police. The automated systems can't distinguish between criminal abuse and lawful private photographs.
The broader EU hypocrisy is hard to ignore. Brussels just spent years crafting the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act to constrain Big Tech's power and protect user privacy. The Commission has positioned Europe as the global standard-bearer for digital rights against American surveillance capitalism.
Yet here is that same Commission arguing it needs to extend a regime that lets American tech companies - the very platforms Brussels claims to distrust - read European citizens' private messages without court orders.
Member states are split. France and Spain support extension and want even broader scanning powers under Chat Control 2.0. Germany's new coalition government opposes mass surveillance but hasn't built a blocking coalition. Poland and the Czech Republic are focused on other priorities.
The European Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee will likely vote on the extension this spring. If the Commission gets its two-year extension, expect Chat Control 1.0 to become permanent in practice even if "interim" in name - because temporary security measures in democracies almost never actually end.
Brussels decides more than you think. Right now it's deciding whether reading your private messages without a warrant is just something Europeans will have to accept. The privacy champion of the world is having second thoughts about privacy.
