The EU wanted to oblige messaging apps to scan their chats for abusive material.
The proposed draft regulation on preventing and combating the sexual abuse of children
(CSAR - Child Sexual Abuse Regulation) is also known as chat control.
Messenger services such as WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram would have been obliged to search
and analyze content locally on private devices.
This would circumvent the encryption that previously ensured that only the sender and recipient could read a message.
The draft was met with fierce criticism and mandatory scanning was stopped by Germany, among others.
Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig formulated the government's position very clearly: "Unprovoked chat
control must be taboo in a constitutional state."
The Data Protection Conference - an association of data protection authorities in Germany - also explicitly
called on the German government to reject the chat control.
The EU Parliament is now set to vote on a negotiating mandate for a new CSAR Directive in June 2026.
In a speech to the EU Parliament, German MEP Christine Anderson warned against this,
that social media bans for under-16s are merely a pretext for linking online activities to a digital identity:
"The EU wants to scan private messages sent from your cell phone.
Ostensibly it's about illegal material on the internet, but in practice it means scanning everything people say.
This would inevitably require the identification of each individual user by means of
a digital ID. This is called surveillance.
And the surveillance of one's own citizens is a practice known above all from totalitarian regimes."
See also the program: Resistance now! The digital ID and its terrible consequences!