Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Would be handy if they included a pre-written pdf to oppose this proposition + emails or forms to easily submit your opposition to each of the countries.
Instead it's a general "contact your government",
which 99% of normal people do not know how to do, me included.
from the linked website:
Ask you government to call on the European Commission to withdraw the chat control proposal. Point them to a joint letter that was recently sent by children’s rights and digital rights groups from across Europe. Click here to find the letter and more information.
one paragraph below that:
When reaching out to your government, the ministries of the interior (in the lead) of justice and of digitisation/telecommunications/economy are your best bet. You can additionally contact the permanent representation of your country with the EU.
the bold parts are clickable URLs in the original text.
Is there was such a pdf, your government already received it. You writing in your own words is unique
Not necessarily the best idea. My representative went on national television accusing bots of spamming her email, even though every single one of those probably was a person using some template that was provided. Those forms go straight into trash unfortunately. Best to use them as a guideline and write your personal concerns instead.
Alternatively, ChatGPT. No idea if it works, though.
They'll keep bringing this up again and again and again until it passes, huh.
Next Council deliberations and vote in October-December.
That's the thing. People have to keep voting forever to keep this from coming into effect, but they only need it to pass a vote once for it to be enacted for basically ever.
How I wish a chat privacy law could be passed to make more difficult to continue eroding our rights.
To quote the IRA, "We only need to get lucky once but you need to get lucky every time".
The real goal is to get the population to regret demanding things like gdpr.
Similar to the plastic industry's covert legislative push to ban plastic straw.
Irritate the public enough to stop them demanding more.
In this case it's a double whammy of also getting our sweet private data for their AI models.
If only in the same breath we would make all the politicians text messages public, guess they only want other chats to be controlled but not their own.
I keep mentioning this idea, hoping to someday make it seem less extreme: the government should be under total surveillance 24/7.
Like, anyone at any time can look through any of the tens of thousands of cameras saturating every government building.
Open source government, eh? Don't know if this would work completely but I like the direction.
Julian Assange tried to do that and he was nearly lynched for it.
And then blamed for ruining the 2016 American election.
Snowden showed the government was spying, had to flee, deemed a terrorist. Assange showed the government disobeys the laws it enforces on everyone else, deemed a terrorist. Manning showed that war crimes are constant, deemed a terrorist, subjected to inhumane torture.
Every time a whistleblower exposes corruption and violations of laws in every country, they are punished. China, Russia, America, England, they're all guilty of it.
Every time a whistleblower exposes corruption and violations of laws in every country, they are punished.
Typically by being accused of acting as foreign agents. Assange was a Radical Islamist under Bush, a nefarious Russia/China double agent under Obama, and an insidious Hispanic cartel boss under Trump.
Even if I deeply like the Idea, something like this could backfire if it's done constantly and not just once. But I would like to see a law that makes the usage of government communications mandatory for all government-related communication while storing everything revision-proof on their servers with different access rights. And a second law that makes it possible to access it by requiring petitions to be singled by a low number of people. Less extreme but still makes it harder to be corrupt.
Make no mistake, Germany isn't opposing this out of a principled stance. The German government too wants more ways to control people's activity.
Folks, this should inspire you to start self-hosting a federated, decentralized chat server with freely available source code by yourself or with a small community. Governments can coerce these big, usually-corpo centralized servers to give up data but good luck if there are hundreds of thousands (of millions?) of small servers with 1–10 users on it & clients not controlled by a single entity for distribution (easier now that y’all coerced Mommy Apple to let you sideload applications & use alternative package managers).
Can someone explain to an American what chat control is?
Basically scanning communications and breaking encryption, under the guise of predictably stopping child abuse
and technically, how would they achieve this?
Force all the big platforms to share their encrypted data. Banning end-to-end encryption. It's all very stupid and will never actually catch any bad guys.
Originally governments wanted backdoors into encryption protocols, but now they seem to want client side scanning (i.e. scanning messages on your phone before it's encrypted and sent out)
If I understand correctly, its what the NSA "allegedly" doesn't do to U.S. citizens already. Except, these countries are being public about it. This way they can actually follow through without the "secret getting out".
Relying on legislation to get passed or not get passed only gets us so far. Yes, absolutely, write your reps and vote, but also donate to your favorite decentralized, private tech project so they can improve the user experience and get more users. We need to make tyrannical censorship & surveillance not only technically impossible but politically unfeasible. The way we do that is by building better tech and getting more and more of the population to use it.
Honestly I just wish I could take the steps written in the article but it would most likely be of no use.
I have very few close relationships and am not widely liked or popular by any means, don't use social media because nobody sees my posts anyway, and the country I live in has a lot of media censorship, therefore the vast majority of the population is very conservative, uneducated and narrow-minded about most political topics.
I've been taking a lot of steps lately to reclaim my online privacy, and would hate to see it all thrown out the window by the EU, a union I thought was doing Europe justice before now...
That's a good move to re-share it! THX for the people 👍
My biggest takeaway from this infographic is that norway is not part of the EU, who would’ve thought
You can pry my fishing rights from my cold dead hands!
Norway just like Switzerland are too ~~rich~~ cool to join the club, we are still a part of the European Economic Area and Schengen though.
I understand that this has been a recent topic in the EU but I'd really like to see information on government positions on this in more areas of the world.
once upon a time freedom of speech was a thing
