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Chat Control hasn't passed yet. But the Chat Control lobbyists are still lobbying for it behind the scenes, and are currently pushing for all phone calls in the EU to be covered.

Source:

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/861...

https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer


So what should be done about it? EU Commission issue a decree that it should never be spoken or debated again in public? Never proposed? Any other tyrannical idea?

Do you have a list of other things that shouldn't be brought in front of the elected parliament?


The EU Commission was caught breaking the law in order to lobby for Chat Control: https://noyb.eu/en/gdpr-complaint-against-x-twitter-over-ill...

The EU Commission also gave a foreign tech company called Thorn (they pretend to be a charity), special access to government officials: https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho...

I think both of those cases would be examples of lobbying and corruption.


The thing is that "The EU commission" is an entity composed os politicians, appointed by member states.

It's little coincidence that national governments want Chat Control (laundering that through EU), and the EU parliament is the entity that shots it down (coincidentally the entity that is most beholden to the public).

It would be nice to learn which comissioners are lobbying for it.


Neither examples are evidence of corruption. That doesn't mean they're not problematic, but there's no evidence here of a politician receiving a kickback for any of these actions.


https://fortune.com/europe/2023/09/26/thorn-ashton-kutcher-y...

$600K+ went to kickbacks, er… “lobbying”, and thorn was hit with some pretty nasty scandals involving sex crimes.


That's my point though, conflating lobbying and corruption doesn't help. Both are indeed problematic, but unlike actual corruption lobbying can be countered with activism.


Corruption does not necessarily mean a politician receiving a kickback. It can be a lot more indirect and subversive.


> having all your devices blacklisted. Private farms probably won't last long either as I'm sure Google logs everything and will correlate.

So basically Google can now ban your device from being able to access a huge portion of the internet, in addition to nuking any online presence connected to them.

You could wake up one day and find your device blacklisted from the internet, with no chance of ever reaching customer support. What a lovely future


If you reload the page it'll give you a non QR code captcha to do. Hopefully it stays that way or attestation captchas are removed entirely.


Your privacy has to be violated in order to receive the easily trackable ZKP tokens.


> Your privacy has to be violated

No.

> the easily trackable ZKP tokens

If it's easily trackable, it's not ZK.


Why the hell would they care who is buying it? They're getting paid either way.

The only reason they'd care is because they want to sell your personal information.


That is an incredibly long bow to draw from someone that obviously doesn’t know what they’re talking about and is willing to make massive jumps to conclusions. Do you know how ecommerce works? I agree that it is a bit absurd, but not nearly as absurd as your claim of “the only reason”.


People on this site don't really think deeply about what they type. They just say whatever is the most cynical in order to farm up votes


But none of those options are requirements to access the service.


They're requirements to access my website though! To prove you're not a bot, scan this QR code - with Discord.


And now you have people like New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez trying to ban Meta and other platforms from using encryption in the first place.


You should also write the Cabinet Ministers, including the heritage minister Marc Miller.


There is no such thing as privacy protecting or anonymous age verification. If you tell Canadian that such a thing is possible, they are guaranteed to harm privacy with any legislation they proposal. Just tell them no.


> There is no such thing as privacy protecting or anonymous age verification

There most definitely is privacy-protecting age verification. You go to a government office, you show your ID, they give you a piece of paper that officially says "over 18 years old". Now you have a piece of paper that says you're over 18 but doesn't say who you are, and the government won't know where you use it.

On the Internet, the idea is the same, but with cryptography.


There is, a dumb header flag sent by the browser that attests to the user being in an age group.

Fakeable? Sure. Fakeable by an average 13-16 year old on a parental locked device? No.


By privacy-preserving, we usually mean that you get some kind of cryptographic token from an entity that knows who you are (and can attest that you are above age), and that token is anonymous, so when you use it to access a random service, that service cannot extract information about you from the token, except that you are above age.

It is possible, it just had to be implemented properly. We could complain about politicians not understanding that, of course. But if you spend 5 minutes reading complaints about age verification, you will see that nobody cares about understanding... if the people doesn't care, why would the politicians?


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