EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance (reclaimthenet.org)

The EU Council quietly approved a new negotiating mandate for the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation — the revived “Chat Control” agenda — on Nov. 26. While the text removes an explicit legal duty to scan all private messages, it creates a de facto coercive regime by rewarding or penalizing providers that refuse so‑called “voluntary” scanning, risk assessments and authority‑approved “mitigation measures.” The move was brokered largely through Danish mediation and reinstates many original principles: providers must evaluate their risk of child‑abuse content and adopt measures that, in practice, will pressure major platforms to deploy content‑scanning tools. Several member states and privacy advocates have condemned the plan and negotiations with the European Parliament are slated to start, aiming for a final deal before April 2026. Technically, the mandate preserves the core dangers critics warned about: expansion of automated scanning into encrypted and unencrypted communications via vendor‑deployed detectors and “black‑box” AI, widespread age‑verification (likely ID or face scans) that undermines anonymous speech, and systems that generate large volumes of false positives — Germany’s federal police have reported roughly half of alerts from earlier regimes were baseless. Experts warn age estimation cannot be done in a privacy‑preserving way and that persistent incentives for scanning will institutionalize mass surveillance, risk discriminatory outcomes, and digitally exclude minors and vulnerable users (journalists, activists) who rely on anonymity.