Chatcontrol Update: Blocking Minority Held but Denmark Is Moving Forward Anyway
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The ChatControl proposal, which aims to regulate online communication, is moving forward in Denmark despite opposition, sparking concerns about encryption, surveillance, and privacy.
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There's already a W3C browser standard in development - The Digital Credentials API. Apple is adding support for "Verify with Wallet on the Web" in iOS/macOS 26. Chrome is currently rolling out Origin Trials.
https://digitalcredentials.dev/
https://www.w3.org/TR/digital-credentials/
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/232/
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-or...
On the flip side, there's no anonymity. Welcome to the real Web 3.0 - an internet which has been finally put in a box, for better and worse. An internet which is finally forced to respect national laws, for better and worse. An internet where what you say online, will be treated with no difference than if you had said it in person.
> The privacy considerations for digital credentials are not static. They will evolve over time as the ecosystem matures, and may be informed by the behavior of other actors in the ecosystem, improvements in other layers of the stack, new threats to user privacy, as well as changing societal norms and regulations.
Boil the frog slowly and carefully, and look out for opportune moments that could help to speed up the process.
It's 1984. Surveillance in your home so you only speak the government speak. If you criticize the government or the genocides commited by them you're "doing hate speech/wrong think" and you'll receive the cops at your door to be disappeared without recourse
The populace will be told you were evil and no one dares question too much or they will be next.
Or we can tell them to fuck off and stop buying into every little crisis and fake right v left fight they try to sell.
That's kind of the worst case scenario, though, where bad politicians don't get removed from office. We can hope that most people will decide that enough is enough, or politicians will quietly back down when they realize they're dooming their own careers.
Note how Apple is already a bit like that, banning certain torrenting apps even from alternative app stores [0]. I’m just mentioning that as a demonstration of the feasibility of such closed and controlled ecosystems. Now restrict ISP network traffic to packets signed by approved hardware, and there aren’t that many practical loopholes left.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45098411
The days where you could run whatever OS you want on hardware you own will soon be over. And you know what? There's not a damn thing any of us can do, so may as well just buy Apple gear.
That's why you need to diversify software ecosystems now.
And of course, it will all be under the guise of safety and harm reduction, but the veil will keep getting thinner and the amount of things covered more comprehensive
First Porn, Now Skin Cream? ‘Age Verification’ Bills Are Out of Control (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/first-porn-now-skin-cr...)
Actually the California bill seems absurdly weak, and it seems to be enough to just ask if they're 18.
The Washington bill is stupid for restricting creatine supplements, which the evidence indicates provides physical and cognitive benefits with no real drawbacks. It's the one muscle building supplement that's actually known to work, and should be excluded like protein powder. But otherwise restricting people from selling dubious dietary supplements to children doesn't seem terribly wrong on its face.
[1] https://www.iltalehti.fi/kotimaa/a/6c9a65fe-f706-449e-b0d9-1...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Suomi/comments/1mv9usq
[1] - https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru...
[2] - https://freespeechunion.org/police-make-30-arrests-a-day-for...
I personally also think this should mostly not be a matter for the police to take care of, but then again do (should) dick picks and harassment really constitute the free speech you want to protect? I cannot speak for the UK, but Germany for example has had laws against gross insults since decades that have not threatened democracy; I would expect police to enforce laws, whether in real or virtual life just the same.
On the other hand, it gets murky with unwanted political opinions. Due to historic reasons, there are some things very specific things you're forbidden from voicing publicly here, because they're incompatible with our constitution, and thus don't enjoy the protection of that constitution. But in recent years, things unrelated to our fascist past have also seen litigation, which I find problematic, regardless of my personal opinions.
But given that Germany is probably the most strict European country when it comes to freedom of speech restrictions, I'm really opposed to announcing any kind of "free speech crisis in Europe".
They always say stuff like "violence doesn't belong in politics", "violence is always wrong". But look at the French revolution, they had to cut the dictator's ("king's") head off to stop him from trying to get back into power. Look at the US for for independence, how many redcoats had to get shot before the UK decided it's not longer economical to keep oppressing the colony. Look at the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, a public execution of a mass murderer.
And for now we're allowed to celebrate those events. Some are even national holidays. But we can not publicly discuss current events in the same manner. Those supporting recent assassinations or attempts usually get banned and many don't even dare voice their support. But there is some line where the fourth box of liberty _should_ come out. And I don't think we have enough freedom of speech currently to discuss where exactly the line lies. (Note to mods, I don't have an opinion on the recent shooting and this message is not related to it. I would have posted the exact same thing even if it didn't happen and have posted similar messages in the past.)
BTW this is funny: Brandon Herrera posted a video reconstructing the headshot by Gary Plauché where it's obvious both him and the commenters support the killing. He also reconstructed the, well, earshot by Thomas Matthew Crooks and denounced it. I wonder if he would support an assassination if it turned out Trump got, say, a massage with a happy ending from an underage girl trafficked by his friend. That would imply being a pedophile is worse than being a fascist[0] in his mind.
[0]: https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...
---
Anyway, violence should be used carefully as a last resort but people in power are afraid of it because ultimately, no matter how much power they have, they still need a continuous supply of oxygen to their brain, which can be interrupted in a number of ways and the probability of such an event increases proportionally to the number of people they exploit.
Maybe we should schedule a day in the future where everyone travels to Strasbourg/Brussels for a demonstration.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_revolution
A historian called Sarah Paine explained this nicely with examples of how the occupation of Afghanistan failed to create democracy but the occupation of post-WW2 Germany succeeded because Germany used to have a democracy whereas Afghanistan never did.
But I wish you were right.
Proven?! It's been 30 years. That's an almost unfathomably small speck in evolutionary scales.
Why would you expect different in the future?
The Internet met human nature, and human nature won. We hoped for better, but we didn't get it.
China is every wannabe dictator's digital wet dream.
It was trialed during covid and people absolutely cheered for this type of control.
Now it's only a matter of time unless people accept that it's never acceptable. Not even with "perceived threats". Covid passes and social scores to do activities where absolutely a wet dream for govs and corporations alike. The corporations that benefit from government mandated tools love getting free money and governments love control. They know the tools never spy on them, and that's why everytime they're the ones committing crimes or ignoring their rules it's "a mistake or nothing to see here".
Westerners always pointed fingers at China, North Korea and Russia, but in this case we are seemingly attempting to lap them.
So the endgame is that an anti-democratic government eventually wins an election and uses its new tools to crush dissent and make opposition parties impossible.
Boot stomping on a human face forever.
I would but be surprised that US is pressured some people there.
Who proposes it and drives it and lobbies for it? It doesn't come from nowhere.
Any shred of rights or privacy has reduces it's ability and/or increases the cost of it doing what it deems worth doing.
Western democracies have consistently installed and protected totalitarian regimes.
For the part that Denmark is playing, I think the answer is somewhat readily found in the current national politics of Denmark. We've just had a pretty prominent politician 7 years ago get convicted of being in possession of CSAM. I think that's very personally offensive to our current prime minister. That has to be viewed along with her personal view of herself as the "children's prime minister", to make it into a double whammy.
We've also been dealing an inability of the police to investigate some crime, and the investigative committee established to figure out what to do about it recommended an ability for police to more readily be able to investigate digital material. I imagine the current policymakers imagine Chat Control to play a part of enabling that at a national level.
It's very much NOT meme driven. We're generally very sensitive to child abuse in Denmark, and even singular cases are usually enough to establish pretty wide bureaucratic systems.
Originally, she launched the "branding" push when they were talking about schools and daycare, but like all branding it spills out into other avenues. I have no doubt she weighs her job around children particularly important.
It's not at all a stretch to me to say that she probably genuinely wanted her party colleague, and CSAM enjoyer, caught faster, and I don't doubt that she believes this is the best way to do that.
That's not a "meme". That's policy driven by observation and factual cases.
This is what the parent commenter meant by “meme-driven”: When singular cases can be turned into an idea that is shared and occupies a disproportionate amount of attention because it gets packaged into a simple idea that is easily shared and repeated.
Real life is not a meme.
If that's not a meme("bUt tHiNK oF THe cHilDRen!!11") I don't know what is.
I don't disagree with your overall thesis about Danish politics at the moment, but... I think it's interesting that politicians are exempt from these monitoring schemes. So it wouldn't have prevented that guy from doing what he did. IIRC, Law Enforcement is also exempt, and they never get up to any of that, no sirree...
ANY time any legislation comes with exemptions for the people in power (legislature and law enforcement) you know it's time for extreme skepticism.
EDIT: It's just the inanity of it that has me despairing. Lobbyism at its finest (see my other comment).
The only place I have found anything about that is some random blog from NextCloud (and I don't know why I'd care what Katrin Goethals, Content Marketer for NextCloud has to say about politics but I digress) and the argument is flimsy at best.
From document 11277/24 [1]. Unless it has changed more recently, the exemption is actually considerably broader, and presents the unusual argument that the system will be secure enough for any private personal communications, yet too insecure for any company's trade secrets (which, apparently, have the same weight as national security).
[1]: https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-11277-2024-...
I don't believe that's what people think of when they hear "law enforcement is excluded". Officials will still be subject to the law when interacting with anybody else. They will still be subject when interacting on public services. Crucially, everybody will be excluded from private messaging servers, also non law enforcement.
Do we have any reason to believe CSAM is being distributed on the internal EU communication networks?
That's...
Wow.
We had a number of cases in Denmark over the recent years which pushes this agenda:
In addition to the obvious child abuse, there have been a case where video of a high-school girls private sexual activities where spread wildly on asocial media, fake-porn of various public figures and several cases of organized crime using various end-to-end encrypted services.
None of the Danish politicians I have communicated with like the ChatControl proposal very much, but there is nothing else on the table, which isn't much worse in terms of privacy invasion, so their only choice is ChatControl or doing nothing.
My personal opinion:
No human right is absolute, not even the right to life itself.
The demands of upholding the civilized society limit all human rights, and this limitation has always included intrusions of privacy in order to solve crimes.
I far prefer Dan Geer's proposal (See his black-hat keynote):
Companies on the Internet get to choose one of these two business models:
A) Common-carrier. Handles all content as opaque data, makes no decisions about what users see. No responsibility for the legality of the content. (= how telephone companies and postal carriers are regulated)
B) Information provider: 100% responsible for all content, no matter where they got it from. (= how newspapers are regulated)
The current "the algorithm did it" excuse for making illegal material go viral, to maximize profits, is incompatible with a civilized society.
I've asked the politicians whey they do not do that and the answers is "We do not want to piss off USA", in recent months that concern seems to be fading.
> phkamp
Hey! A lot of my views are heavily informed by your writings. I tend to agree a lot with your view of these things.
I personally extend it further by positing that the current democratic crisis, most readily seen in America, is caused by the inability of democracy to solve certain important problems, which I then again posit is at least partially caused by cyberlibertarian obstructionism. That's all just conjecture though.
It's nice to see you around here :)
ChatControl is about non-criminal activity.
The EU ombudsman actually asked the EU Council to comply with a Freedom of Information request about who attended the meetings about this and all we got was a fully redacted PDF with a list of about 30-40 individuals/groups (literally blacked out in the PDF). It's absurd how non-transparently this is bought & paid for.
Following the money requires actually following money. Not imagined money.
Do we have evidence of these companies lobbying for CharControl?
The biggest issue is the lack of transparency about the people/groups involved in those meetings and why this ineffectual privacy-destroying idiocy gets pushed so hard.
Your comment makes 0 sense.
The truth is that Scandinavian societies are much more authoritarian and illiberal than they want people to believe.
Canada has a more important socialist component than the US, and it serves them well.
I wonder if you really did not understand my first post, or if it is just your take at flameware.
Have you watched the news lately? EU is a shitshow right now. France is going downhill really fast, Germany - I don’t even about them. And the rest is scrambling with their own issues.
Oh yes, Canadian free healthcare, right? Where a doctor might see you in 6-12 months. If you die in the meantime, tough luck.
No, socialism doesn’t work.
You know, everyone is a lefty until they start their own company, and then they quickly realize what a bunch of crap that ideology is.
So, here you are, people are pretty much happy with socialism, they are angry when you try to take it from them.
Also, I've read a lot a different version than yours: "ppl are righties up until they fell ill". Which happpens a lot more than creating a corporation. Ah and the result is quite life-and-death, which failing a startup is not (is common).
Ah and NO you won't have to wait in Canada if you have an emergency. And even an advanced cancer will be treated quickly, you won't have to wait months of course (or ppl would die of waiting, which the system avoids effectively).
Nice try, but no. They want the government to fix the deficit by not increasing their taxes or lowering their benefits. Which means the government needs to shrink.
Your take of it is, at best, delusioned.
French people, the ones shouting in the streets, don't care directly about that deficit. They care about being able to have decent lives with social welfare.
Fyi, the main hard points are currently: not wanting to push the retirement age, and not wanting to eliminate bank holidays.
One of the biggest components of the recent protests' organisers was LFI. If you do your homework, you'll understand easily that LFI does not push towards less social wellfare.
what the heck you place socialism as something towards <the overall happiness of the society, and not focusing on increasing material wealth>? first that socialism is a temporary state towards communism, that despite, it doesn't need to pursue communism. see China. second; WHY DO YOU WANT TO CENTRALIZE POWER TOWARDS A SELECTED GROUP OF PEOPLE? Karl Marx is fine, but it's a european guy who lived in 1800s. socialism and capitalism are essentially the same with the difference of the hope of donation of power coming from the public vs. the private... you need to be quite naive to believe the goverment will do the good without corruption. much more people with power allowing their goods to be taken. see our history before capitalism
Have you heard of SocDem, or "social democracy"?
It is everywhere. Even in ones of the most successful democracies on this planet.
They might have historically believed in gradual transition away from capitalism, but today they seem entirely happy with capitalism with a little corporatism in labor markets. Socialism is mostly branding.
This use of the word "socialist" (the use that is NOT meaning "communist dictatorship") is quite equivalent to "politically left".
For example, it correlates with free healthcare, free education.
This is not in opposition to "capitalism".
It is more, like, "maybe profit (financially) less, but care more"?
Seriously though, I realize that the American right calls welfare socialism, but that's just rhetorical slight of hand. There's also some actual American socialists who cynically label such things socialism to get more members, believing they'll be able to just slip in abolition of capitalism later in a bait and switch strategy - similar to the one attempted during the early American labor movement.
But welfare isn't socialism. If it was, that would mean that a fair chunk of the world has been socialist centuries before the term was coined - including American colonies where free public education was first instituted in the 17th century. It would render the entire socialist movement, for most of its existence, nonsensical.
And this is the other way around, "socialism" had the softer meaning of "welfare" way before the communist dictatorship even happened in History.
Here, in the "etymology" section of this WP page, you will read that all definitions (Émile Littré, Paul Janet, Émile Laveleye, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Adolf Held, Thomas Kirkup, Émile Durheim, August Bebel, and Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition of 1911), i.e. all definitions given before 1911 except one by Pierre Leroux, point to the general meaning of "improving society by better distributing wealth and caring more":
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_socialism
And that's why new terms were used for the subsequent authoritarian events: marxism, communism, etc. They exist because "socialist" was too ambiguous as it was already taken for the meaning of "with caring for society welfare".
But the whole point, on my side, is to emphasize that in some cases "socialist" means "authoritarian communist" (that's been only when the word is used by some Americans) and in some cases (the most of the time e.g. if you are dialoguing with somebody from Europe) it means something else. See my other comments for more.
Hm, you mean the government makes the laws? Shocking, revolting even
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/how-gang-viole...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teen-girls-hitwomen-sweden-orga...
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/agenda/briefing/2025-...
For others this is the last para of the first link:
> The Swedish government has proposed new legislation that would allow police to wiretap children under the age of 15 in an attempt to curb the violence, according to the BBC.
So, Chat Control is an attempt by a few politicians to give police some tools to prevent teenagers from shooting each other in gang wars. It's a real problem, it needs a real solution, this looks to be an honest attempt to come up with one - from someone who doesn't know what they are doing.
Interestingly, we've had an uptick in youth violence here in Australia too. It feels eerily similar. It's happening in the same demographic, it's happening while crime overall is dropping, and the authorities here too are struggling to control it. It's so serious it lead to a change of government at the last election. A right wing mob got in by beating the law and order drum with the slogan "Adult Crime, Adult Time". https://statements.qld.gov.au/statements/102316 If anything, that's less effective at stopping crime than Chat Control. Sigh.
How Australia's states and territories are grappling with youth crime
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-31/australian-state-and-...
Also: 'They've always been scapegoats': Behind Australia's crackdown on youth crime
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/australias-crackdown-on-...It's a dire state of affairs. Sweden is currently one of the most (if not the most?) violent country in Europe if you count gun shootings per capita [1]. The police is unprepared, has few legal means and resources. There are also few officers in general [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_Sweden [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/police-officers-per-1000-...
No that is not ChatControl, that is just some Swedish thing. Chat Control would make it mandatory for servive providers to scan every single message in the EU for offending material and notify the authorities if anything is detected. It's blatant mass surveillance under the guise of protecting the children.
This is an interesting comment and sounds correct. I'm curious though, what is the driver of increased socioeconomic distress in Sweden? I thought they were doing pretty well.
I did a bit of reading and it seems like Sweden has been seeing :
- increasing segregation, with low-income and immigrant populations concentrated in certain districts
- a youth unemployment problem
- housing price crunch
This literally doesn't matter. You can just use codewords, hide information via steganography, or even just communicate IRL in absence of encryption.
Using this as an argument to destroy privacy is like deciding we should cut out everyone's tongues because criminals are using them to communicate and surely they will be unable to find alternative methods of communication. Maybe let's ban literacy while we're at it?
Why does this seem unlikely to you?
Surely that is obvious?
It kinda is but I didn't want to make that assumption. That is what I had assumed, for what it's worth. (Actually, I figured it was either knowledge or resources.) It also helps for the reason to be given explicitly so others can weigh in with relevant arguments rather than one that refutes something you didn't mean.
All it will take is someone to make a fediverse chat that can be simply stuck on a Pi from a premade image, and automatically runs a script to update the DNS with their IP and the kids will do it.
They will not seriously investigate any white collar crime, so corruption is completely unpunished.
They focus on gangs and so on, or so they say. What they actually do is aggressively target non violent people who smoke weed and occasionally some small fish dealer. Remember that owning any amount (even trace amounts only detectable by a chemist) of THC is a crime. Yes they do spend resources to go after people who occasionally smoke weed.
Meanwhile if you're a 2nd generation immigrant you will be forever subject to daily discrimination, and getting a job that is not hemtjänst or cleaning is going to be very rare.
For reference of discussion in Sweden see https://chatcontrol.se/ (in Swedish). Social democrats and Christian democrats are the ones who seem to be more supportive of this law.
People there have had their freedom since the viking ages and probably earlier, it was never taken from them and therefore never scarred the culture. In other countries where peasants had to fight for their freedom their culture reflects that, but Swedes never had to do that.
So after millennia of governments letting its people be free why start distrusting the government today?
I think that trust in government comes from a mix of things, oppression was probably not a necessity, and centralised control was beneficial to most classes, but I see that there is also a very strong cultural element. Trust in authorities is taught in schools in very early ages, I see this with my children and I can compare to other systems (contrary to most Swedes). The folkhemmet ideology is still very strong in this country, it's almost a matter of national pride. To this add the tendency to conformism (jantelagen) and the avoidance of conflicts at all costs, which makes criticising others very badly seen.
Regardless where it comes from, I find that the uncritic, often blind trust in authorities in Sweden problematic because it hinders plurality and a sane discussion in society, like in the case of the Chatcontrol law. But individualism is also on the rise, very much so in fact, and the society is changing fast, and with it also trust.
If I were to ask what my relatives think of Chat Control I'm certain that an overwhelming majority would not have even heard about it. Hard to oppose something if you don't know about it. But even if they did oppose it - does the average European even know how to figure out how their chosen politician voted on the issue? Probably not.
Maybe it's a lack of journalism, I'm unsure, but I don't see any other reason for it. I also think that this is the factor in euroskepticism.
I think this is a fundamental difference between the countries that have fought for freedom (like England, France, USA), and the countries where the powers that be saw what happened and made minimal concessions to try to avoid unrest.
Doesn’t mean the state should be trusted to a naive degree of course
And law enforcement agencies.
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
How is it possible that after years of discussing plans like this, they still managed to not listen to anyone who knows anything about encryption and online safety?
Makes me really worried about the future. There is a lot going on in the world, and somehow they feel the need to focus on making our communications unsafe and basically getting rid of online privacy.
The goal they are trying to achieve is good, but the execution is just stupid and will make everyone, including and maybe especially the people they want to protect, less safe online.
The age verification thing is another example. All it does is send a lot of sensitive traffic over cheap or free VPN's (that might be controlled by foreign states). Great job, great win for safety!
For example, let's say I implemented a CSAM-scanning AI model in my chat app, which runs locally against your message, before communicating the message over an encrypted HTTPS channel. If the message is flagged, it can be sent over an encrypted HTTPS channel to authorities, on a secondary separate connection. At no point, did it leave the device, in unencrypted form.
Is that message encrypted? Yes.
The way that you want? No.
Governments have recognized this distinction, and have figured out they can have their cake and eat it too; the security of encryption with none of the privacy.
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