If you live in Europe, your days of enjoying anything like personal privacy are quickly counting down to zero. This is thanks to Denmark, the last EU member state to make bestiality illegal, currently fighting to pass new ‘Chat Control’ laws. Specifically, laws that will make it obligatory for privacy and security-focused messaging services like WhatsApp to weaken their encryption to allow an EU AI to scan all sent messages for evidence of child abuse.
Yes, while just 10 years ago it was perfectly legal to waltz into a Danish brothel and shag an Alsatian, Danish authorities are now rebranding themselves as Europe’s ultimate protector of innocence.
What is Chat Control?
First proposed but prevented from passing in 2022, Chat Control is a law that will allow the EU to mandate the scanning of all messages sent by encrypted messaging apps like Signal.
Scanning will take place to allow authorities to identify instances where Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) is shared by app users. EU technocrats subsequently promote Chat Control as an integral future tool to prevent the abuse of minors.
Despite failing to become law in 2022, Denmark is currently using its position as holder of the EU Presidency to push for Chat Control to become law once again. If this move is successful, the EU will force hosts of encryption-centric messaging services like Signal to begin scanning all messages sent by such apps by as early as late October 2025.
Chat Control Is Solely About Control, Nothing Else
If you believe that Chat Control will in any way protect children and is not just a branding exercise for mass state surveillance, you are mistaken.
The vast majority of child sexual abuse material is neither found nor circulated on the regular internet. Nor do all but the least cautious criminals use apps like WhatsApp to communicate online. Rather, it is a simple fact that the sharing of indecent images of children, as well as other illicit activities, takes place predominantly on the dark web.
To demonstrate, in 2021, an encrypted messaging app called Sky Global was taken down by European, United States, and Turkish authorities. This was thanks to Sky Global being the go-to app for several illicit criminal groups operating in the EU and beyond. Most regular netizens, however, were never aware of the existence of the Sky Global app. Likewise, Sky Global’s servers were in Canada. This means that even if laws like Chat Control, which mandate scanning of encrypted communications, were available for the EU to use in 2021, they still wouldn’t have been effective against Sky Global or its parent company, Sky ECC.
Sky Global was also just one of several encryption-centric messaging apps known to be favored by criminal entities. Several others still exist today. However, these will not be found on any app store. All will also still be just as untouchable by the EU, even if Chat Control is made law. All that will happen when Chat Control is made law, will be the instant insistence by the EU that all common consumer apps like Signal start making the contents of regular citizens’ encrypted messages available to EU authorities.
Proof That Chat Control Is About Control Only
In Denmark, the Danes are aware that Chat Control is something of a hard sell. This is why one of the first things the Danes did when reintroducing Chat Control to the EU parliament was exempt EU officials, members of law enforcement, and members of the military from the new law. Bizarrely, this means that members of the EU parliament can share child abuse images over the likes of WhatsApp without worry – at least in theory.
Denmark has also made an attempt to soften the impact of Chat Control by inferring that the actual text contents of messages will not be scanned by whatever AI Europe decides to use to check for CSAM content. Rather, Chat Control will only scan images and media that people share by apps like WhatsApp.
The EU has gone further to make Chat Control seem less scary by proposing the use of ‘client-side scanning’ to detect CSAM content. This will be where software on user devices scans media before it is sent via apps like WhatsApp to detect indecent images. There is just one problem.
During the same time that Denmark has gone to lengths to reintroduce Chat Control, Google has already begun installing client-side scanning on all EU Android mobile phones. If you are an Android phone or tablet user, you can find Google’s current client-side scanning app by searching for “Android Safety Core” in your installed app lists.
Officially, this software exists to scan only Google messages for so-called “Not Safe For Work” content, meaning media like accidentally shared explicit selfies. However, the timing of Android Safety Core’s arrival on Android and the ease with which Safety Core could be altered to become a de facto client-side scanning app for all media disseminated from any Android device is telling.
It’s Your Texts That Chat Control Is Really After
Remember EU officials like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the IMF, who lost his position to Christine Lagarde thanks to various sexual allegations? Well, under Chat Control (if it passes), contemporaries of people like Strauss-Kahn who are part of Europe’s politburo would be exempt from client-side scanning. The same exemption to Chat Control would apply to the 28-year-old Danish politician Mike Villa Fonseca, who in 2023 was found to be in a relationship with a 15-year-old girl, bizarrely, with the consent of said girl’s parents.
Denmark has also muddied the waters significantly by flip-flopping when it comes to what exactly client-side scanning means. One day, client-side scanning pertains only to images shared from devices. The next day, despite promising otherwise, Denmark wants all text in messages scanned too.
It is almost as if the EU has a PR department telling them what to say Chat Control will ultimately manifest as, right until Chat Control becomes law. This being the case, and given that Google is already building the foundation for client-side scanning into Android, Chat Control laws will likely soon pass. Moreover, when they do, they will signal the end of end-to-end encrypted messaging as we know it.
The good news? The fact that the last civilized country in Europe to outlaw bestiality is now trying to say that it wants to do everything possible to protect children is ludicrous. Should Chat Control laws pass, EU netizens will, therefore, likely find an easy way around them if they want to.