longer.blue

Hello, I have received many questions about this law (thousands), so I will take the liberty of sending you the same answer as to others. If you still have specific questions that you feel remain unanswered, please let me know. In this mandate, I am the shadow Rapporteur for the proposal; in the previous mandate, it was my German colleague Patrick Breyer, who actually coined the term “ChatControl”. And I’m glad that the term lives on. The news has been circulating already. After a surprising U-turn, the Danes decided to give up on mandatory detection orders, which were the core issue of the proposal. Now, the Council has agreed on a new mandate where the Danes set a few principles: an indefinite extension of the current voluntary regime, voluntary detection as part of mitigation measures and age verification that could lead to the exclusion of young people from core apps such as social media, chat apps, games etc. I was part of the MEPs who fiercely opposed the current ChatControl regime of untargeted voluntary scanning of private communications which is broad in its scope as it includes many types of content (metadata, URLs, text, images, etc.). It is not only disproportionate and inefficient but also dystopian. I will keep opposing any indiscriminate surveillance attempts, mandatory or not. Regarding age verification, I have been working on this topic also in other contexts. And I can tell that I remain firmly against any generalisation of age verification that would effectively prevent young people from accessing core internet services but also indiscriminately lead to the identification of anyone using these services. There is a glimpse of hope: the negotiations are now starting and the Council will need to negotiate with us in the European Parliament. The Parliament’s mandate is very targeted and protects encryption, ensuring that our fundamental rights are safe. I will do my best to secure key safeguards if the negotiations happen, making sure that my colleagues in the Parliament stick to their principles. Nevertheless, I appreciate your message and that you care about and are concerned about privacy. Please, keep being interested. These proposals are thrown out the door and keep coming back through the window. Only thanks to people’s resistance can this still be stopped. Best, Markéta Gregorová