Chat Control is a Ridiculous and Embarrassing Proposal

You have probably already heard about “chat control” in the news. It’s a term that’s been thrown around a lot lately, especially in discussions about online safety and privacy. But what exactly is chat control, and why are so many experts warning against it?

On paper, chat control sounds like common sense. Scan private messages for bad stuff. Catch predators. Protect kids. Stop criminals before they can do harm. And if you’re against it, well, what are you hiding? That pitch is incredibly powerful. It hits you right in the emotions. It’s designed to make you feel like a terrible person for even questioning it. But it’s complete bullshit.

What They’re Actually Proposing

Chat control isn’t about investigating specific suspects after there’s reason to believe they’re doing something wrong. It’s about scanning everyone’s private conversations, all the time, just in case someone somewhere might be doing something illegal.

Your private messages. Your encrypted chats. Photos you send. Voice notes. Everything gets scanned by automated systems looking for “harmful content.”

The promise is that these systems will catch bad stuff before it spreads. The reality is way more complicated and way more broken than they want you to know.

The Tech Doesn’t Actually Work

The thing about these automated scanning systems is however, is that they’re really not as smart as people think they are.

They work by matching patterns, comparing files against databases of known illegal content, using machine learning trained on stuff that’s already been identified. That only works for content that already exists in their databases, and even then it screws up constantly.

But here’s where it gets worse. Encryption completely breaks this whole idea.

To scan encrypted messages, you either have to break the encryption (which defeats the entire point) or scan the messages on your phone before they get encrypted and sent. Both options completely destroy what encryption is supposed to protect. Once you add scanning to the system, your messages aren’t just protected for you anymore. They’re also being read by the scanner, which means they’re being read by whoever controls the scanner.

And false positives? They’re everywhere. Family photos of your kids in the bath. Medical images. Stuff journalists are working on. Educational content about abuse prevention. All of it gets flagged incorrectly on a regular basis. Apple had to deal with this when they tried to implement a similar system for scanning iCloud photos. They had to pull back because the false positives were so bad that innocent people were getting flagged left and right.

When you’re scanning millions of people’s messages, even a 0.1% error rate means thousands and thousands of innocent people getting flagged, investigated, maybe having their accounts frozen or worse. The scale makes the errors massive.

Criminals Will Just Leave

This is the part that drives me nuts because it’s so obvious.

People who are actually doing horrible things aren’t going to keep using WhatsApp or Signal or whatever mainstream app once they know everything’s being scanned. They’ll switch to custom-built apps, modified versions of existing apps, or just go back to meeting in person and using encrypted USB drives. Sorry but how is that not obvious? If you’re a criminal, you don’t want to be caught. You don’t want to use a platform that scans your messages. So you just find another way to communicate that doesn’t have that scanning. It’s not rocket science.

We’ve seen this pattern over and over with every type of mass surveillance. The people it actually affects aren’t the criminals. They’re normal people who weren’t doing anything wrong in the first place.

So chat control ends up doing the exact opposite of what it claims. It completely trashes privacy for regular people while the actual bad actors just move somewhere else. Great job, everyone. Sorry, politicians.

Why Every Expert Says This Is Insane

Security researchers, cryptographers, privacy advocates… they’re basically all on the same page about this. That’s actually pretty rare. These people argue about everything, but on chat control they’re united.

And it’s not because they don’t care about protecting kids. It’s because they understand that what’s being proposed is technically impossible to do safely.

You cannot build a backdoor that only the good guys can use. That’s not how security works. Once you create a weakness, anyone who finds it can exploit it. Governments, hackers, foreign intelligence, criminals, whoever.

You cannot weaken encryption for one specific purpose without weakening it for everything. Encryption is either strong or it’s broken. There’s no “broken but only for child predators” setting.

You cannot scan everyone’s private conversations without creating a system that will absolutely be abused. Not might be. Will be.

History is crystal clear on this. Surveillance systems always, always expand beyond their original purpose. What starts as “protecting children” becomes copyright enforcement, then tracking protesters, then monitoring journalists, then political surveillance, then social control.

The infrastructure doesn’t forget what it was built to do. It just gets used for more and more things.

Why Politicians Keep Pushing This Garbage

Because it sounds like action. It’s easy to explain in a headline: “New Law Will Scan Messages to Catch Predators.” Done. Sounds great if you don’t think about it for more than five seconds.

It shifts responsibility away from actual police work and complex social problems onto technology that doesn’t exist yet and probably can’t exist.

And opposing it is political suicide. Nobody wants to be the person standing up saying “actually, we shouldn’t scan everyone’s messages to catch pedophiles” because that quote gets ripped out of context and you’re done. Your opponent runs ads about how you voted against protecting children.

So even politicians who understand why this is a bad idea might vote for it anyway because they’re scared.

And a lot of the people making these laws genuinely don’t understand the technology they’re regulating. They just don’t. They hear “AI will detect bad stuff” and think that sounds reasonable without understanding why it isn’t.

The Actual Damage This Does

Chat control doesn’t just threaten your privacy. That’s bad enough, but it’s not even the worst part.

It destroys trust in digital communication. If you can’t trust that your messages are actually private, the whole thing falls apart. People stop using these tools for sensitive conversations. Journalists can’t protect sources. Activists can’t organize safely. People in abusive relationships can’t reach out for help without their abuser potentially seeing it flagged.

It makes everyone less secure because it weakens the encryption that protects all of us from hackers, stalkers, abusive exes, identity thieves, foreign governments, and corporate surveillance.

It normalizes the idea that the government should be able to read your private conversations by default. That privacy is suspicious. That you need to justify wanting to have a private conversation.

And many major messaging platforms have already said they won’t implement this kind of scanning. Signal and WhatsApp have both said they won’t build in backdoors or scanning systems. They’re not going to break their own security for this. So if chat control becomes law, those platforms will just pull out of Europe rather than compromise their users’ privacy. That means people will lose access to secure communication tools, and the bad guys will just switch to other platforms that aren’t being scanned.

And honestly, I wish every messaging platform would pull out of Europe if this becomes law. It would be a powerful statement against this kind of mass surveillance. But it also means that regular people who just want to use WhatsApp to chat with their friends and family will lose access to it, while the criminals just switch to something else. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone except the politicians who get to say they “did something” about online safety.

Did i mention the chat control also do not apply to the people trying to pass this law? The politicians and their staff will still be able to use secure communication tools without being scanned. It’s just regular people who have to give up their privacy.

It’s embarrassing that this is even being seriously considered.

The Latest Twist: Chat Control 2.0

So here’s where things get even more frustrating. In November 2025, after years of pushback and multiple failed attempts to pass Chat Control, Denmark came up with what they’re calling a “compromise.”

They dropped the word “mandatory” from the scanning requirements. Politicians and media rushed to celebrate this as a big victory for privacy. “EU backs away from mass surveillance!” the headlines said. Except that’s not what actually happened.

The new Danish proposal, which passed the EU Council on November 26, 2025, is actually worse in some ways. Instead of requiring scanning directly, it forces platforms to take “all appropriate risk mitigation measures” to ensure safety. Sounds reasonable, right? But here’s the trick: what counts as “appropriate measures”? The text is vague enough that platforms will feel pressured to implement scanning anyway, just to avoid being blamed if something bad happens. It’s mandatory scanning without calling it mandatory. They’re trying to sneak it through the back door.

Former MEP Patrick Breyer, who’s been fighting this thing since 2022, said it perfectly: “Chat Control is not dead, it is just being privatized.” Instead of the government directly forcing scanning, they’re creating legal pressure that makes companies feel like they have no choice.

And there’s more bad news. The new version includes mandatory age verification for all messaging apps. That means you’d have to prove your age with an ID or face scan just to use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, or any chat app. Goodbye online anonymity. Goodbye protecting whistleblowers and journalists’ sources. Hello massive databases of everyone’s identity linked to their communication patterns. Oh, and they want to ban everyone under 16 from using messaging apps entirely. Because apparently the best way to protect teenagers is to cut them off from digital communication completely, forcing them to use VPNs and workarounds that are even less safe. The Danish Justice Minister, Peter Hummelgaard, actually said this out loud: “We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone’s civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services.”

Read that again. A government minister saying you don’t have a right to private communication. Just saying the quiet part out loud now. According to leaked documents, the Danish presidency even lied to other countries to pressure them into supporting this. They claimed the European Parliament would refuse to extend current scanning provisions unless governments agreed to Chat Control 2.0. That was completely false. Patrick Breyer confirmed there was no such decision, no discussion about it. They literally made up a crisis to manufacture urgency. Several countries that opposed earlier versions are now “undecided” on this one, even though it’s arguably more dangerous. Germany’s new government hasn’t taken a clear position against it. France said they’re “ready to support in principle.” The blocking minority that stopped previous versions is falling apart.

Big Tech companies like Google and Meta are totally fine with this version because they already scan everything anyway. They get to keep doing what they’re doing. It’s the smaller platforms that actually care about privacy, like Signal, that are getting screwed. And you know what Signal and other privacy-focused platforms have said? They’ll pull out of Europe entirely rather than implement this garbage. They’re not going to break their security just because politicians want to feel like they did something.

So if this passes, regular people lose access to actually secure messaging apps, while criminals just switch to custom apps that don’t follow EU law anyway. Meanwhile, everyone’s identity is now tied to their online communication, anonymity is dead, and teenagers are supposedly “protected” by being banned from the apps they’re going to use anyway with VPNs.

This is what happens when politicians don’t understand technology but want to look tough on crime. They create laws that sound good in press releases but are disasters in practice.

The fight isn’t over. The European Parliament still has to negotiate this thing, and they’ve been more protective of encryption than the Council. But the momentum is moving in the wrong direction, and that should worry everyone who uses the internet.