Von Der Leyen Dodges Signal Transparency Amid Chat Control 2.0 (reclaimthenet.org)

EU push for “Chat Control 2.0” — a proposal that would compel messaging platforms to scan private conversations — collided with a fresh transparency scandal as Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s office said it could not produce a Signal message from French President Emmanuel Macron because of Signal’s disappearing-messages setting. A journalist’s request under EU transparency rules was allegedly ignored for over a year, prompting European Ombudswoman Teresa Anjinho to open a formal inquiry and demand the Commission’s mobile messaging and retention policies. The episode echoes “Pfizergate,” where the Commission deleted texts with Pfizer’s CEO and subsequently lost a court battle after the European General Court ruled the deletion improperly withheld public-interest information. For the AI/ML community this matters beyond politics: Chat Control 2.0 would push automated content-scanning—potentially client-side scanning or other ML-based detection—into end-to-end encrypted ecosystems, raising hard trade-offs between detection accuracy, user privacy, and system integrity. The Commission’s use of auto-deleting messages undercuts its credibility to demand mass scanning and highlights practical enforcement gaps: provenance and retention policies, secure logging for audits, and the risks of backdoors or weakened encryption if platforms are forced to enable scanning. The case sharpens debates about how to design accountable, auditable ML surveillance systems that preserve civil liberties while meeting public-safety aims.