Critics say the EU’s plans would break encryption.
“Detection orders” would be issued by individual EU nations, and the Commission claims these would be “targeted and specified” to reduce privacy infringements. However, the regulation is not clear about how these orders would be targeted — whether they would be limited to individuals and groups, for example, or applied to much broader categories.Critics of the regulation say such detection orders could be used in a broad and invasive fashion to target large swaths of users.
“There’s no way to do what the EU proposal seeks to do, other than for governments to read and scan user messages on a massive scale,” Joe Mullin, senior policy analyst at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation,. “If it becomes law, the proposal would be a disaster for user privacy not just in the EU but throughout the world.”
In addition to problems with encryption, the Commission’s decision to target previously unknown examples of CSAM as well as “grooming” behavior has also been criticized. Finding this content would require the use of algorithmic scanners, which the Commission says would preserve the anonymity of targeted users. But experts say such tools are prone to error and would lead to innocent individuals being surveilled by their government.
“There was uproar when Apple was suggesting something similar for finding known [CSAM] content. But if you introduce ambiguity and these context-dependent scenarios, in which AI based tools which are notoriously unreliable, the challenges are much greater,” said EDRi’s Jakubowska. “You only have to look at how dodgy spam filters are.
Said Jakubowska, “This whole proposal is based around mandating technically infeasible — if not impossible — things.”Subscribe to get the best Verge-approved tech deals of the week.Please confirm your subscription to Verge Deals via the verification email we just sent you.