There is repeated criticism of the new EU draft law to combat sexual violence against children. After the responsible EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, had to answer questions from members of the European Parliament , the scientific services of the German Bundestag have now rejected the plans. An analysis states that the current version “disproportionately interferes” with the basic rights of the population.

New law: Messenger obliged to search for abusive material

In order to prevent the spread of depictions of sexual violence against children, the EU wants to introduce a new law. The point is that messengers such as WhatsApp should be obliged to search for consumables by official order.

There is no question that “protection against sexual abuse of minors on the Internet” is becoming increasingly important because “the Internet and messenger services are playing an increasingly important role in young people’s lives and the risk of such abuse is therefore increasing,” reports The standard. Nevertheless, the EU is rather skeptical about its accuracy.

Sharp criticism and skepticism

As the analysis of the current version shows, it is questionable whether the draft regulation “represents any added value for the intended project”. One could therefore not say with any certainty that messengers “played a major role in the distribution of child pornography files.”

Furthermore, it is doubtful that “fundamental monitoring of individual communication would stand up to the scrutiny of (European) fundamental rights.” This means that messengers are probably placing too high demands on the monitoring of chats, which means that many conversations are no longer the same Data could be encrypted.

Thanks to WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption, content cannot be read by anyone during transport. Therefore, the chat control would have to take place at the end of the transport route, i.e. on the recipient's smartphone. This is one reason why the German Bundestag put a stop to the draft law.

Data protection advocates warned some time ago about this “back door” in the software, which WhatsApp, for example, would have to install in order to monitor the chat processes on citizens' smartphones. 

Chat control method prone to errors

The messenger abuse material should be identified using so-called hashes. These are digital fingerprints that can be matched to known material. The problem is that existing detection systems only have a 90% hit rate. What initially sounds like a lot, but in 10% of cases - with millions of chats every day - leads to thousands of false reports of alleged abusive content, which in turn have to be sent to the specially set up EU authority for manual follow-up.

In addition, the “Hashes” method can be used to search for all kinds of content once the “fingerprints” have been implemented. This also poses a certain risk to privacy in chats. excessive and misguided surveillance method back in May .

Some members of the Bundestag now also share these concerns, which is why its scientific services do not agree with the current version of the draft law coming into force.

Sources

The standard
Netzpolitik.org
German Bundestag / “Chat control” – Analysis of the EU Commission’s draft regulation 2022/0155 (COD) (PDF)

Also read: EU wants to monitor all chats! In order to find child porn, all chats of all EU citizens should be monitored. However, these plans go too far for some. ( Continue reading )

Author: Nick L.


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