Chat Control, privacy and the privatisation of rights
European legislation authorises the scanning of private messages to combat child pornography, but paves the way for widespread surveillance and the privatisation of fundamental rights
by Stefano Epifani
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To Albert Camus, what is happening in Brussels would sound familiar: the welfare of the people, he said, has always been the alibi of tyrants. And the pretext, in this case, is an issue that no one can dispute: the fight against child pornography. Which, according to the drafters of the legislation known as Chat Control, is achieved by allowing platforms to indiscriminately scan citizens’ private messages. The European Parliament tried to reject it, with the ‘no’ votes narrowly outnumbering the ‘yes’ votes. However, under Brussels’ procedures, a relative majority in the chamber was not enough. An absolute majority is required in the second vote, and many MEPs were already relaxing under their beach umbrellas.
The result is that we are faced with two problems: the first concerns what the law permits us to do. The second concerns what the law makes normal.
As regards the measure itself, this is perhaps the most severe attack on privacy in recent years. The European Data Protection Supervisor has highlighted its fragile legal basis. Technologists have pointed out that probabilistic systems generate false positives which expose perfectly lawful content. Civil rights campaigners have pointed out that a private conversation, a medical report or a family photograph risks being exposed by mistake. The damage caused by this goes deeper than any single error: simply knowing that one’s communications might be read is enough to change one’s behaviour. This is known as the chilling effect and it reminds us that reducing privacy does not make citizens safer, but merely imposes a more or less conscious constraint on the behaviour of law-abiding citizens. Because those intent on committing crimes will have no trouble circumventing surveillance.
But the economic consequences will also be felt. We treat privacy as an individual concern, when in the digital economy it is one of the foundational pillars of trust: negotiations, industrial strategies and health data may all travel via the very same channels monitored by Chat Control, and every scanning mechanism adds a layer of risk. Trust is not a feeling: it is the condition that makes the exchange of information possible and, therefore, the very functioning of the digital economy.
And the attack on privacy, peddled as a fight against child pornography – which suits certain platforms and governments with authoritarian tendencies – is just the first of the deceptions.
