Danish Presidency backs away from Chat Control (www.euractiv.com)

Denmark’s Council presidency has stepped back from pushing mandatory detection orders in the EU’s contested proposal to combat online child sexual abuse material (CSAM) — a move that could remove the most controversial “chat control” element that would have required platforms, including end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) services, to implement forced scanning. Danish Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard said the presidency will now support keeping CSAM detection voluntary and has circulated a discussion paper to EU member states to seek a compromise, driven in part by opposition from several countries (notably Germany) and long-running Council deadlock. The change matters for AI/ML and security communities because mandatory detection raises hard technical and privacy trade-offs: enforcing platform-side or client-side scanning on E2EE services would likely require weakening encryption, deploying trained matching/classification models on user devices, or creating backdoors — all of which increase attack surface, risk false positives, and conflict with EU data-protection norms. Stripping mandatory orders could preserve encryption and voluntary tooling (and avoid large-scale surveillance risks), but Denmark warns that without a new agreement voluntary scanning mechanisms might lapse when the current legal basis expires in April 2026. If a compromise is found, the draft could finally move to trilogue talks with the European Parliament.