The EU’s Plan Would Destroy Privacy Instead of Protecting Children

“It’s About the Children Until It’s Not”

​Denmark is encouraging the EU to scan its citizens’ private messages in order to root out sexual predators. The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains that, if enacted, the Chat Control initiative would “undermine the privacy promises of end-to-end encrypted communication tools.” In other words, writes Yaël Ossowski for Euronews: “It’s about the children until it’s not.”

Seemingly aware of how dangerous their own idea is, a leaked 2024 report revealed that multiple EU interior ministers sought carveouts for their own intelligence agencies, police, and military. Such exemptions “highlight the hypocrisy of lawmakers imposing surveillance they would not accept for themselves,” says Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

Indeed, this is a suspiciously curious exemption given that the ostensible purpose of the legislation is to fight online child sexual abuse. By definition, therefore, no one should be exempt. It is an unfortunate, even tragic, reality that such initiatives claim the mantle of noble causes like abuse prevention or national security, but do little to actually advance them.

What such sweeping “safety” initiatives do instead is fundamentally erode the foundations of digital privacy (and, perhaps, privacy itself).

“You cannot make society secure by making people insecure,” Buterin declared on X. “Blanket interception of digital communication,” he says, is no substitute for common-sense approaches to child abuse, (such as limiting the release of repeat offenders, raising public awareness, and fostering community engagement).

Undoing encryption (as the EU’s legislation demands) is the beginning of the end of digital privacy. It’s a misguided path, and one that the UK and others have stumbled down before. No goal, no matter how noble or well-intended, justifies the extinguishing of privacy. We must, writes Steve Loynes for Element, “learn from history” and remember that encryption backdoors are frequently the basis for exploitative attacks by bad actors.
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Because bad actors, in any arena, were never going to follow the rules anyway.

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