In a decisive week for the future of digital Europe, the European Parliament was the scene of a sensational turnaround in the fight against the so-called Chat Control. In a historic vote, MEPs, contrary to the recent decision of the Portuguese Parliament, decided to put an end to the controversial mass surveillance of citizens’ private communications. It has been established that any monitoring of private communications must be strictly limited to individual users or groups of users under suspicion, subject to judicial authorization.
The decision represents a resounding victory for the millions of citizens who mobilized in defense of their privacy. At the center of the controversy has always been the requirement to break end-to-end encryption in services such as WhatsApp and Signal, a practice that critics considered to be a state surveillance system disguised as protecting minors.
The argument of the “legal vacuum” and chaos in police investigations, insistently propagated by large technology companies, ended up being dismantled. The truth is that the mass surveillance model has proven to be a resounding failure, as around 99% of all reports of chat sent to police in Europe come from Meta, which owns Facebook, and almost half of the reports are criminally irrelevant false positives, burdening authorities with digital junk instead of helping them find real predators.
A few days later, the technical credibility of the main tool for detecting illegal content was called into question. A groundbreaking study by Belgian researchers at the universities of Ghent and Leuven has revealed fundamental vulnerabilities in the PhotoDNA algorithm, the technology widely used by the technology industry to detect Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM).
Researchers have demonstrated that it is possible to generate exact collisions between completely different images, produce false positives with great ease, and even recover the approximate shape of the original image from its hash. The study concludes that PhotoDNA is unreliable for detecting illicit content on a large scale, as it is possible to incriminate someone by sending them false content with a hash close to illegal content, as well as avoiding detection of illegal material with minimal modifications to the image. In an era where Artificial Intelligence and generative models are within the reach of any citizen, these weaknesses are even more disturbing.
Meanwhile, the debate on European digital identity has also heated up. An open letter from digital rights and consumer protection organizations addressed to the European Commission raises serious concerns about the fourth batch of acts implementing the eIDAS regulationwhich establishes the rules for the European Digital Identity Card (EUDI Wallet). The organizations warn that the current proposal is weakening essential protections enshrined in the regulation itself.
Central concerns include the need to make registration certificates mandatory for services that use the Wallet (to avoid “over-ordering” personal data), safeguarding the right of citizens to use pseudonyms when legal identification is not required by law, and opposition to the mandatory inclusion of a facial image in the Wallet’s minimum set of identification data. The organizations emphasize that the European Digital Identity Wallet will only gain public trust if privacy and user control are built into its technical and legal architecture from the outset.
Thus, in a single week, we witnessed three moments that reveal the complexity of the moment that digital Europe is going through. If, on the one hand, a resounding victory for privacy and against mass surveillance is celebrated, on the other hand, scientific evidence is emerging that automatic detection technologies are fallible and easily manipulated, at the same time that the architecture of the future European digital identity is being discussed, with the risk of normalizing intrusive and surveillance practices for seemingly innocuous reasons.
The path to a truly digital Europe that respects fundamental rights is far from being paved. The coming months, with the negotiations of the Chat Controlwill be absolutely decisive and the battle for privacy, freedom and accountability in the digital age is just beginning.
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