Denmark reportedly withdraws Chat Control proposal following controversy (therecord.media)

Denmark’s justice minister has abandoned a push for an EU-wide “Chat Control” law that would have mandated scanning of electronic messages — including on end-to-end encrypted platforms — to detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The proposal, reintroduced during Denmark’s EU presidency, collapsed after key backers such as Germany withdrew support amid intense public and industry backlash. Minister Peter Hummelgaard said Denmark will now back voluntary CSAM detection by tech companies; the current voluntary regime expires in April, leaving the future of detection requirements uncertain. Critics including Signal’s Meredith Whittaker warned that compulsory scanning would amount to mass surveillance and could force privacy-focused services out of Europe. For the AI/ML community this is a pivotal moment: mandatory scanning of encrypted communications would have driven rapid adoption of client-side detection systems, hashing (e.g., PhotoDNA-style) and ML classifiers running on devices or pre-transmission, raising thorny trade-offs between detection accuracy, false positives, adversarial manipulation, and end-to-end encryption integrity. With voluntary measures favored for now, developers and platforms will likely invest in on-device ML, better robustness to adversarial inputs, privacy-preserving techniques (secure hashes, differential privacy, federated learning) and transparent governance. The decision postpones — but doesn’t resolve — a fundamental policy-technical debate about how to balance child protection with encryption and civil liberties.