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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Honestly this is an intersting idea. Albeit, it may be hatd to implement since some buildings have to be private for national security reasons (specifically regarding military strategy and such).
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.
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.
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).
I mean, GDPR is a fucking disaster. Nobody is getting it right, same with cookie consent. This is because the last time geriatric imbeciles at the European parliament seen a computer was back at 98.
Since all those people are using it, it kinda doesn't matter for them. As if not having their data harvested from every single click makes them not care about GDPR and the other bullshit. What a surprise.
You don’t need to worry about data retention when you own the server & you are the only user. It’s the servers you or someone you know & trust don’t own where you should actually worry about this.
It’s also more problematic with all systems built on eventual consistency models, so best to avoid those since you’ll never be able to get the data dropped. Chat being ephemeral is good.
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...
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.
The Netherlands only remains "neutral" because of the clause that forces companies to detect unknown CSAM and/or "grooming" material (last time I checked). It's only a matter of one or two countries that can make the difference, with most neutral countries probably having similarly "minor" objections.
Let me guess: You are an American with no clue about Geography / foreign politics?
Belarus isn't in the EU. Its position doesn't matter, independent from which side they are on.
Belarus is part of the big grey blob in the east of the map (alongside Ukraine and Russia). So the map doesn't state anything about Belarus' opinion on the topic.
In case you thought the dark green blob in central Europe is Belarus: those are Germany and Poland.
In case you haven't noticed, I said "At first glance"
Due to the map being zoomed in a little closer than usual, and because of the omissions of countries borders, it shifts visual appearance of countries towards right. A honest mistake if you ask me, and which I found to be funny, hence the comment.
Why so serious?
What being an American has to do with this? Anyway, I'll take that as a compliment for my English.
Governments have been trying to impose chat control for over a decade now but so far they haven't been able to get it through. That doesn't stop them from trying over and over again though and this time their chances are looking better than usual. Even if they fail once more they'll do it all over again soon afterwards. This topic will never get old.
Would there be any way to enshrine privacy/no chat control for the EU? Similar to constitutional amendments in the states, where it becomes exceptionally more difficult to revoke?