Post by Augustine Chiagozie (@pabloexchange)

🇪🇺 EU Parliament extends 'chat control' until 2028

The controversial law dubbed "chat control" by critics is back in play. EU lawmakers have voted to extend temporary regulations that allow tech giants to scan users' private messages to combat the spread of child sexual abuse material.

The previous legal framework expired back in April, but the largest political group in Parliament pushed through a vote using an urgent procedure. Before it is officially enacted, the legislation must still be approved by the Council of the EU, while full-scale negotiations for the permanent and much stricter version ("Chat Control 2.0") are set to resume in September.

Key takeaways for us:

- Message scanning has been approved until 2028, but thanks to amendments put forward by the Pirate Party, end-to-end encryption was completely shielded from the fallout. Messages secured by End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) are exempted from being scanned.
- This is a local win for privacy in messengers like Signal, WhatsApp, or Telegram (in chats utilizing E2EE). There will be no mandatory mass backdoors built into encryption for now.
- Platforms are still allowed to conduct voluntary mass scanning of unencrypted communications.

For now, this is just an intermediate round. The real political battle for total control will kick off this autumn, but the current level of resistance within the Parliament shows that tightening the screws completely won't be that easy for censors.

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