Either way politicians prefer to push unpopular stuff like this via the EU because the responsibility gets muddied - "we didn't want it, the EU regulation requires us to spy on you!".

You defeat them one day, but they're still there, and they keep trying, day after day after day.

Authorities and banks avalanche everyone within their reach over all available communication channels with "warnings" about scams and frauds.

What direction are they aiming with this total control?

It rewards or penalizes online services depending on whether they agree to carry out “voluntary” scanning, effectively making intrusive monitoring a business expectation rather than a legal requirement.

> Czech MEP Markéta Gregorová called the Council’s position “a disappointment…Chat Control…opens the way to blanket scanning of our messages.”

From this translation:

https://reclaimthenet.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/CnZOD1F...

Then you're being dishonest. Your intention is to cause a stir instead of to inform (a word related to the word information). Because you are leaving out what she wrote about EP; the EP is, according to her, clearly against this. Why leave that out? What is your agenda? You just disqualified your entire article.

Yes, I know Brexit was a failure and the UK is no better in terms of privacy but there has to be some sort sort of political repercussion for the people who made this possible.

Since there seems to be nothing else to do, then voting to leave is better than the status quo.

Also it is not just in Europe — digital ID is coming in USA starting January. State by state. Thanks to the Republican-dominated supreme court, and of course it is also done in the name of protecting the children:

https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2025/07/dangerous-us-su...

This “papers, please” is now happening quickly all around the world. Here we maintain the updates:

https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...

This is why people will increasingly need open source alternatives, not owned by large corporations, but it needs to be far better than Mastodon and Matrix. People expect the convenience of Instagram and Telegram, and open source will have to match it. That’s why I have spent about $1 million to quietly build https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

It is time to start rolling it out. This is supposed to be the People’s Platform. Anyone who is interested to get involved, find my profile on HN and get in touch by email. Put “hacker news” in the subject, so I can find it among all the bulk email. I would love to hear from people who want to join forces and contribute to something that’s already had about $1M and 10 years of work behind it, something By the People, for the People.

We are welcoming anyone who has skills, some free time, and is looking to actually do something meaningful to help liberate people from what’s coming. Whether you are a developer, want to contact journalists, or just want to promote this in a community. (And to the HN people who like to downvote this kind of stuff… just this once consider that we need to actually _cooperate_ on producing free, open-source alternatives to Big Tech, not do the weird infighting thing.)

- Sanctions against Russia backfired (from the EU at least)

- Trump-Vance slapping the EU around in a humiliating fashion (re: that guy that cried at the Munich security council, EU being forced to adopt unfair trade deals with the US)

- look at the body language from Macron, VDL and Xi’s meeting a couple years ago, VDL is being sidelined on purpose, meanwhile Macron given royal treatment

Liberalism is dead, and these career bureaucrats are clinging to any remaining feeling of control:

- they can’t do the antitrust thing because Trump is wagging his finger at them

- they can’t project power externally

- they can’t engage with China (idk why, maybe due to their feeling of superiority)

… so they resort to projecting power internally

Nobody wants this, including they themselves, which is why they specifically exempt themselves from it.

  * Each user gets a key to sign a message, there's also one for decryption like E2EE
  * The platform owners get a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
  * The feds get a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
  * A watchdog organization also gets a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
  * If the feds want to decrypt something for actual anti-terrorism/anti-CSAM purposes, they convince both the platform owners and the watchdog org that they need keys for specific messages
  * The watchdog automatically publishes data like: "Law enforcement agency X accessed message Y decryption key for internal case number Z" (maybe with a bit of delay)
  * That way the users who have their messages decrypted can find that out what was accessed eventually
  * If the feds are snooping for no good reason or political bullshit reasons, they can get sued
  * If the feds are snooping too much (mass surveillance), it'd become obvious too cause you'd see that they're accessing millions of messages and maybe a few percent lead to actual arrests and convictions
  * This kinda rests on the assumption that courts would be fair and wouldn't protect corrupt feds

Do you think Meta, Google and them are not scanning every bit of data hosted on their servers to ensure they're not hosting things they don't want to?

Do you think they don't cooperate with governments to share those findings?

I don't disagree that this push is silly, ineffective, and bad for democracy. We should fight it and fight for the right to privacy.

However, people are acting like we have privacy right now. What evidence is there for that?