Client-side scanning is so absurd, so dumb, so easily abused and bypassed by criminals, that the only practical targets that will fall under Chat Control are the masses of *casual users* who aren’t using encrypted services for anything nefarious.

[drahardja@sfba.social]

Client-side scanning is so absurd, so dumb, so easily abused and bypassed by criminals, that the only practical targets that will fall under Chat Control are the masses of *casual users* who aren’t using encrypted services for anything nefarious.

People sending illicit content will quickly wise up and avoid using endpoint software that perform monitoring, either by building their own clients with modified source code (after all, a server with published API can’t verify that their clients actually performed any kind of scanning), or by building another layer of encryption, so that data sent through the endpoint software are *already encrypted*, relying on a meta-client to do the actual encryption and decryption.

In short—like every attempt to bypass end-to-end encryption—#ChatControl isn’t crime control; it’s #surveillance.

Beware of people shouting “think of the children!” as they push surveillance on the masses, because they don’t actually care about the children at all.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/chat-control-back-menu-eu-it-still-must-be-stopped-0