Denmark Pushing Chat Control 2.0 with Mandatory Message Scanning (old.reddit.com)

Denmark is advancing a "Chat Control 2.0" push that would require messaging platforms to scan private communications for illegal content, effectively mandating automated inspection of user messages. The proposal revives the contentious debate over balancing child protection and public safety with user privacy: requiring platforms to detect disallowed material (images, links, or text) in one-to-one and group chats could force providers to implement client- or server-side scanning systems, disrupt end-to-end encryption guarantees, or adopt hashed fingerprinting and ML-based classifiers to flag content for human review. Technically this has big implications for the AI/ML community. Detection at scale relies on image-hash databases (photo-DNA), NLP models for semantic detection, and risky client-side scanning techniques that embed ML models on devices or run in secure enclaves — all of which raise accuracy, adversarial-resilience, and privacy trade-offs. False positives, model bias, and the potential for mission creep are central concerns: models trained to find illegal material often generalize poorly and can be repurposed for broader surveillance. For developers and startups, compliance will increase engineering and governance burdens; for researchers, the move could reshape priorities toward lightweight, verifiable privacy-preserving detection methods or push users to alternative encrypted or decentralized platforms.