Chat Control stumbles again as EU retreats from mandatory scanning

EU lawmakers stripped out mandatory client-side message scanning from the latest Chat Control draft, but invasive age checks and voluntary scanning remain.

European Union efforts to mandate scanning of private messages have been blocked again, marking another setback for the bloc’s proposed Chat Control legislation, and another win for digital rights activists.

German digital rights activist and Pirate Party Germany politician Patrick Breyer wrote in a Nov. 15 X post that a backdoor, which he said mandated client-side scanning of messages, had been removed from the latest draft of the “Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse” proposal, more commonly known as Chat Control. According to him, the addition of the following line under the Danish Presidency of the Council of the EU — which also saw the introduction of the backdoor clause — resolved the issue:

The draft used vague language referring to “all possible risk mitigation measures,” which, according to critics, would allow authorities to force service providers to implement chat scanning, especially since chat-scanning infrastructure is already in place for voluntary implementation.

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