Total surveillance is the slogan of protecting children: the European Parliament passed Chat Control 1.0

The European Parliament actually missed Chat Control 1.0: platforms are allowed again voluntarily scan unencrypted private messages until 2028.

The EU has once again opened the door to Chat Control 1.0: The European Parliament failed to block the extension of a temporary regime allowing online platforms to voluntarily scan unencrypted private messages to look for child sexual abuse material.

Formally, we are talking about a temporary exception to the ePrivacy rules, which allows services to identify, report and remove child sexual abuse materials on the Internet. According to ReutersThe European Parliament supported the restoration of such temporary rules, previously in force from 2021 and expired in April 2026.

Opponents call this scheme Chat Control 1.0. The essence of the claim is simple: under the noble slogan of protecting children EU again legalizes automatic scanning of private correspondence on the platforms of Google, Meta, Microsoft, Snap and other companies. And, as usual, it all starts with the most impeccable goal, so that arguing is morally inconvenient. Who would dare to speak out “against the protection of children”? It is precisely these phrases that digital control is usually built on.

How did the voting go?

According to former MEP and digital rights activist Patrick Breuer, the majority of MPs who voted actually opposed the extension: 314 – against, 276 – for, 17 abstained. But an absolute majority was required for rejection. 361 votesso the proposal was not blocked. Patrick Breyer: EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0.

That is, the arithmetic turned out to be almost mocking: more deputies voted against than for, but due to the procedural threshold, the result was in favor of the extension. Democracy, as it turns out, knows how to lose even when it has more votes. A very European focus, with a folder, a stamp and a sad lawyer’s face.

Earlier, on July 7, the European Parliament agreed to consider the issue under an urgent procedure. The Greens/EFA group warned that precisely because of the second reading, the text could only be rejected or amended by an absolute majority of deputies, that is, 361 votes. Greens/EFA: urgent procedure on Chat Control.

What exactly is allowed

The temporary regime is an exception to the rules of confidentiality of electronic communications. As explained EU Councilit allows online providers to voluntarily identify, report and remove child sexual abuse material.

The key word is “voluntary.” But this is precisely what raises the main question. When the largest platforms gain the politically sanctioned right to scan private messages, the line between voluntary moderation, corporate surveillance and future mandatory duty becomes very thin. Today it is “possible”. It’s “expected” tomorrow. The day after tomorrow – “why haven’t you implemented it yet?”

According to Reuters, services with end-to-end encryption, such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal, are excluded from the extended mode. This is important: The European Parliament has not approved direct enforcement of end-to-end encryption scanning under this temporary scheme. But messages that are not encrypted or accessible to the provider again fall into the automatic scanning zone.

What didn’t pass

An amendment that would have limited such control to individuals identified as suspects and only by court order failed to pass, European politicians and digital activists said. This is what makes the dispute fundamental.

In normal legal logic, first there is suspicion, then court sanction, then verification of a specific person. In the Chat Control logic, the mass flow of communications is first checked, and only then the algorithm or platform decides whether there is anything suspicious there. The difference is huge. It’s the difference between an investigation and a net thrown at everyone at once.

Yes, the stated goal is as difficult and important as possible – the fight against sexual abuse of children. But these are the types of topics that are most often used to expand the powers of surveillance, because it is more difficult to object to the method when the goal is morally uncontroversial. The problem is that rights are usually lost not under the slogan “let’s violate rights”, but under the slogan “let’s protect someone vulnerable.”

Big Tech Takes on the Role of Private Investigator Again

In a practical sense, this means that American platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, Xbox, Gmail, iCloud and other services, if they do not use end-to-end encryption that is not available to the provider, can again use automatic tools to search for prohibited content in personal communications.

Without it, advocates say, companies won’t be able to effectively find child sexual abuse material, detect grooming and report information to law enforcement. Since the expiration of the previous regime in April 2026, Google, Meta, Snap and Microsoft have criticized the legal vacuum, arguing that it is hampering the fight against online crimes against children. Wrote about this The Guardian.

Opponents answer: private companies cannot be turned into automatic screeners of millions of people’s correspondence. Moreover, such systems can make mistakes, give false positives, create databases of suspicious messages and normalize the idea that personal communication must first pass through a corporate filter.

Athens News has previously written about how quickly digital control technologies are moving beyond their initial promises. The use of mobile phone data extraction systems has already been discussed in Greece ΕΛ.ΑΣ. And ΑΑΔΕ. Is your phone no longer yours? Surveillance of citizens is legalized in Greece.

End-to-end encryption holds up for now

The main limitation of the current solution is the exception for end-to-end encryption. If the service truly does not have access to the content of the correspondence, as in Signal or a correctly implemented WhatsApp, then the temporary mode does not force it to break the encryption.

But this is not the end of the dispute. A permanent bill to combat child sexual abuse material, dubbed Chat Control 2.0 by critics, remains the subject of negotiations. This is where the issue of client scanning – checking the content on the user’s device before or during sending – can arise again. This is no longer just “the platform checks what it sees”, but a potential scanner inside the phone.

Cryptographers and security experts have long warned that client scanning creates an infrastructure that can then be extended from one content category to another. Today they are looking for materials of sexual abuse of children. Tomorrow they can search for “extremism”, “disinformation”, “sanctions violations”, “dangerous political materials” and everything that the next majority will consider a threat. State imagination in such matters, unfortunately, never suffers from modesty.

Why does this concern Greece?

For Greece, this topic is especially sensitive after the Predator scandal. Athens News previously wrote that victims of illegal surveillance through Predator filed a civil lawsuit against €7.6 million against Intellexa and a number of individuals. Predator returns to court: eight victims demand €7.6 million in compensation.

After this experience, talk of “voluntary scanning” of personal messages sounds less like a technical measure and more like a political signal. Citizens are asked to trust that access to correspondence will be used strictly for its intended purpose, carefully, transparently and only for the sake of good. In much the same way as they were promised transparency in other stories of digital surveillance, after which it turned out that the phones of journalists, politicians and officials for some reason became objects of special interest.

Athens News also wrote about Paragon’s Graphite system, which allows you to create digital user profiles and track activity in popular instant messengers and social networks. Paragon exposed a system of global surveillance of social network users.

Child protection should not become a universal password

No one argues that child sexual abuse material should be identified, removed, and the perpetrators caught and punished. The question is: is it possible to make mass scanning of private correspondence the norm for this purpose?

If the answer is yes, then this changes the very architecture of digital privacy. Personal correspondence ceases to be a closed space and becomes conditionally private: until the algorithm, platform and state decide otherwise. This is not a police search with a warrant. This is a constant automatic check at the entrance to your personal life.

That is why critics are not talking about protecting criminals, but about defending the principle that mass control should not become a common tool. Otherwise, a judicial sanction turns into a decorative relic of the old world, where the state still had to explain why it wanted to look into other people’s communications.

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