Luxembourg positions itself in the battle for EU chat control

The EU Commission made waves in May 2022. Its proposal, submitted under the unwieldy name "Regulation of the Europan Parlament and of the Council laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse"(CSAR), quickly became known more succinctly as the "Chat Control Act". The proposal, which was put on the agenda of the Council by the Belgian Presidency, received a lot of backlash not only from civil society and the tech industry, but also from the European Parliament.

After all, the nickname is well deserved. CSAR envisaged that all digital communication between EU citizens would be automatically scanned to detect material containing sexualised violence against children. This should also include encrypted messages, such as those currently offered by WhatsApp or Signal.

Technically, this would only be possible with so-called "client-side scanning", i.e. the automatic recording and analysis of every single message, every photo, every video and every other file on any device itself before it is encrypted. In other words, providers of chat applications, social media, cloud services such as Apple Cloud or Google Drive, as well as email or video platforms – all service providers that send data – would be forced to analyse all files, from private individuals and companies alike, using an algorithm. If these programmes flag a file as potential CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material), it would be forwarded to the planned "EU Centre for Preventing and Combating Child Sexual Abuse", where suspected cases would be examined individually.