You have probably seen the recent movement of governments to mass surveillance with the idea of “protecting children”. Since we still have the right to free speech I have my own take on it too.
More and more tracking
A few years ago -I am not talking about the 90s or even 2000s but instead the 2015-2020 era- the internet was a free place where you could chat, play games and discover things without compromising your anonymity at any point. Since the coronavirus pandemic, governments all around the world started tracking their people for the better or for the worse.
We reached a point where we would need to send an SMS to the government just to be able to go for a walk. Nevertheless we accepted this unnecessary tracking and we moved on. But since coronavirus ended governments lost the ability to track people…so, a new idea arose. Chat control and ID verification.
The European union started pushing for stricter tracking in the internet with the idea of “protecting children”. All this in a world where children can learn how to use the most random free VPN app on the appstore to bypass restrictions -and probably sell their data while doing so-.
Letting the government choose what’s appropriate and what’s not
With the new EU ideas for chat control and ID verification we are essentially allowing the government to become our “big brother” and decide what we should or should not see or type. As you can imagine these systems could either be exploited by malicious actors leaking millions if not billions of chat messages that can contain very sensitive information, or leak ID cards and passports making identity theft easier than ever. Apart from this, having access -and probably being able to control- the private messages of people can be used as a massive cyber weapon by governments to control people’s views on different matters. All this can be avoided by educating parents on how to safely monitor and protect their children online, something they should be doing themselves without relying on the government. If parents feel like they can’t control their children in the internet, they might as well not allow their children to access it until they are in the appropriate age of understanding how to protect themselves.
Developers are on their own when it comes to implementing monitoring systems
Even though the EU forces websites to comply and implement ID verification, they don’t provide a platform to handle the verification nor guides on how to properly handle user data. This means that every developer is forced to implement such system without any prior knowledge on how to do so, resulting in two outcomes. They will either implement their own system that will probably be insecure and leak thousands of identities (looking at you Tea) or they will trust a third party companies handling the verification that can and probably will get hacked leaking millions of identities. In the end it’s a loss for both the developers and the end users.
Apart from verification, the EU is planning to monitor every single message you send for what they think is malicious. We don’t yet know how and if they will implement this, but it will probably be the same situation as the above. The developer will be responsible of monitoring the messages and if he doesn’t, fines and more fines. This results in the same issue as above, one mistake by the developer and thousands of messages get leaked, one mistake from a third-party and millions of messages leaked. Apart from this, chat control will have to be implemented client side (since server side wouldn’t be possible with end to end encryption) meaning that every chat app will either have to get a shiny backdoor breaking any encryption or leave the EU market.
Democracy is not a thing anymore
Whether you like it or not, democracy is just not a thing anymore. It’s not about asking people their opinions on a subject, but crafting the subject in a way to trick them, just like chat control and the ID verification. The idea of protecting children online is convincing enough for enough parents to agree with mass surveillance. The worst part is that nobody is doing anything to stop it. In order for the EU to implement such idea they have to make it pass. Since there isn’t a limit on how many times they can “suggest” the same thing, they will keep pushing it with different names and slightly modified (to the worse) ideas. First we had chat control, now protect EU and probably some stupid name in the future until enough people are convinced to make it happen.
Final thoughts
Maybe in the future enough people will have understood how terrible this idea is and push the EU to revert it. Until then we will have to prepare because the internet will soon no longer be free.