채팅 통제: EU 의회는 거대 기술 기업의 채팅 대량 감시를 거부했습니다.

Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more. You are now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful UPDATE: On March 16, the EU Parliament and the Council failed to reach an agreement on the interim extension for voluntary CSAM detection. This is likely to leave a legal vacuum from April 4 if an accord cannot be found during the next plenary vote scheduled for March 26. Untargeted mass scanning of your private chats. That's what Big Tech has been allowed to do since 2021 on a voluntary basis — until now. What's been dubbed Chat Control 1.0 is the interim law that gives the green light for messaging services and social media providers to scan our communications in the lookout for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Article continues belowThe law, which was meant to be a temporary measure to fill the legal vacuum until permanent legislation passes, has been in place since 2021. It expires on April 3, with lawmakers needing to extend it once again. This time, though, they have listened to tech experts and digital rights advocates, and tightened the rules in favor of user privacy. On Wednesday (March 11), an overwhelming majority of the European Parliament (458 in favour, 103 against, and 63 abstentions) endorsed the temporary extension until August 2027, but with some significant conditions. CSAM scanning will now need to be “proportional and targeted”, and end-to-end encrypted communications, such as WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram, for example, are out of scope Long-time Chat Control critic, the former MEP for the German Pirate Party and digital rights jurist, Patrick Breyer, welcomed the news as "a sensational victory" and historic vote. "Just as with our physical mail, the warrantless screening of our digital communications must remain taboo," he said. While this is very much a battle won for the digital rights-conscious citizens of Europe, it’s still just an interim measure. With the EU Council, Commission, and Parliament still debating the details of the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR) Bill – what critics have labelled Chat Control 2.0 – the privacy war rages on. Are these legislative bodies prepared to double down on their rejection of mass surveillance, or will the pendulum swing back in favor of Big Tech? What’s wrong with untargeted CSAM scanning The problem with untargeted CSAM scanning lies in its potential for mass surveillance and the inherent technical and legal flaws. Prior to the Wednesday vote, Chat Control 1.0 — officially interim ePrivacy derogation 2025/0429(COD) — enabled internet service providers to automatically check all users' private messages in the lookout for illegal material. Chats were scanned, and suspicious images and videos compared with databases of known CSAM. This practice, however, is legally problematic — the confidentiality of electronic communications is a fundamental principle of the ePrivacy Directive. 🗳️@Europarl_en has endorsed extending a current ePrivacy derogation so that service providers can voluntarily detect child sexual abuse material- support for extension until 3 Aug 2027- MEPs want to keep encrypted communications out of scopeNext: talks w/@EUCouncil 1/2 pic.twitter.com/etUSugWObxMarch 11, 2026 Privacy experts have long warned that mass, untargeted scanning, even when voluntary (i.e. even when the companies are not forced to do it), still harms security and privacy. What’s more, the last five years of open CSAM scanning have uncovered mostly legal shortcomings and false positives, and very little actual prevention of CSAM. In fact, as digital rights experts at Netzpolitik noted, the latest CSAM scanning evaluation published by the EU Commission in November still "fails to provide sufficient facts and statistics to judge the proportionality of voluntary chat monitoring." On February 16, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) — an independent supervisory authority with responsibility for monitoring the processing of personal data by EU bodies — also published its opinion, arguing that the Chat Control 1.0 extension “must address shortcomings and prevent indiscriminate scanning." Finally, a coalition of 50+ civil society organizations, cryptographers, computer scientists, and other digital rights experts signed an open letter to urge lawmakers to vote against the extension, arguing that the interim law would "allow Big Tech companies to continue to scan billions of private messages (chats), emails and social media posts of people across the EU, and report them to a US center in case they suspect abuse material is being shared." In the end, it seems, it was enough to make legislators think twice, at least for now. How the new rules look like At Wednesday’s plenary vote, lawmakers agreed to limit the scope of the scanning. They have inserted a new clause which states that data processing must be targeted, specified, and limited to individual users or specific groups (such as subscribers to a specific channel). Addi