On Thursday October 26th, MEPs in the European Parliament held press conferences outlining the compromises reached within the EU Parliament negotiators on the controversial Chat Control proposal.
Thankfully it appears that progress is being made in the fight to preserve privacy. According to MEPs, Parliamentarians have agreed to remove the clauses that would give law enforcement the power to demand end-to-end encrypted platforms hand over users messages, emails, and files as part of criminal investigations.
While this is good news, the fight for privacy in the digital age will never end. They will continue to take small bites until they have the entire pie. Unfortunately we never (or rarely) regain any digital right to privacy that has been taken in the past. The best we can do is halt the further erosion of our digital privacy through vigilance, education and protest.
Personally I see it as an arms race. As they take away privacy I ramp up my use of privacy protection.
Whether that’s by using encrypted comms, VPNs, browser plugins or settings.
For example I regularly use Mullvad. I recently installed Adguard Home on my OpenWRT router to block trackers. I have uBlock on my browser and may be switching to Firefox soon too.
those are all things only ubernerds are doing.
we need deeper protections than that because they dont even have to make privacy impossible, just annoying for 99% of normies.
Also, when everyone else in your life isn’t private, neither are you.
What about the latest thing they’ve snuck in, where they want to have member state governments control website certificate authentication?
Sure. Until the next bill where they try the same thing.
Mixed emotions here. News like this is great to see, and at the same time the fact that since Brexit Britain is going in the opposite direction depresses the hell out of me.
Which clues us in on why Britain wanted to leave. Those in power want more power over their domain, and that includes privacy invasive regulations and laws.
Some good news for once. :)
EU is doing a lot of good work to protect the privacy of citizens against corporate surveillance, but continues to propose regulation that would increase government surveillance. News such as this is good, as it seems to show that there are protection measures within the EU to stop such legislation from being effectuated. Another example is the Data Retention Directive, which was first passed back in 2006, but then later declared invalid by the European Court of Justice in 2014. However, while the intent when it comes to corporate surveillance seems aligned with the public interest, the intent when it comes to government surveillance is not. Such privacy violating proposals will continue to be proposed.
I certainly do not have a good overview over all of this. We are completely beholden to the great work of pro-privacy organizations and corporations to keep exerting pressure and making these pieces of legislation known and understandable to the public. But unfortunately, most people can’t even begin to consider the implications of such overreach, which is why the “protect the children”-rhetoric is so effective - “I am not doing anything illegal and thus have nothing to hide, so if we can protect the children from abuse by removing encryption which is only something criminals use anyway, I’m fine with that”. I am clueless to how I can best contribute here, but I am luckily seeing a shift among friends and family in the awareness on these topics.
Would be nice to have some recognition of internet privacy rights in the US also.
