On 6th July 2021, European Parliament has approved the Eprivacy Derogation, which is allowing to monitor the email and messaging services of each citizen to check and report the suspected activity cases to the Police department. But European pirate parties have strongly condemned the surveillance against their citizens.
But the 537 members of the European parliament have been voted to approve the Chat control against the EU citizens.
As the announcement, the European Parliament committee has given the regulation to follow-up to make chat control mandatory to all email and messaging services providers. And already secured with end-to-end applications like WhatsApp and Signal application has been forced to install a backdoor. This is similar to the German Government spy which installed a backdoor called StateTrojan.
Messaging and Chat control
Europe wants to have control over all the private messages, e-mail, and messages to search the suspicious contents automatically and report the cases and take immediate actions. It also stated that to control and prosecute Child Pornography the real-mass surveillance has been applied to the citizens which will monitor the real-time time chats and messages and the end of the Privacy of Digital Correspondence.
How would this effect the citizens?
- All the chats conversations and emails will be automatically searched for suspicious contexts and even Private and intimate Photos shared online can be viewed by the staff and employees of international Corporations and police departments.
- Sexting and Flirting messages will also be monitored by the staff members because it says that text recognition filters looking for Child grooming which flags as intimate chats.
- There is a possibility of falsely being reported and investigated in case if you come across any material which is related to “Child Sexual exploitation material”.
- Hackers and Intelligence services may spy on private email and chat conversation, as this dangerous move to the citizens which allows a backdoor even for bad actors or attacker to easily compromise the victim’s device with less or not many difficulties.
What Citizens can do to stop this?
- It’s good to talk, tweet, and spread the information to others to let them know the dangers of chat control and privacy issues.
- Use Social media to get attention by using the hashtag #chatcontrol and #secrecyofcorrespondence to reach maximum and this could be the way against this Surveillance policy.
- It is better to avoid Gmail, Facebook messenger, outlook.com, WhatsApp where chat control is already taking control of it. And check with your messaging providers if they are already monitoring your private chats or if they are planning to do so in near future.
You can check here for more details on European Private party and Chat Control policies.