Why Nym is against Chat Control

4. At internet scale, "rare mistakes" become hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

A detector that's 99.9% accurate sounds impressive until you run billions of messages through it daily. Then the false positives arrive in the millions.

This isn't hypothetical: the Swiss federal police found that up to 80% of machine-generated reports weren't criminally relevant: holiday photos, kids at the beach, teenagers texting or sexting. Every false hit is a private moment pulled out and read by a stranger just to clear it. Chat control manufactures suspicion against the innocent at industrial scale.

5. "Upload moderation" is a rebrand, not a redesign.

As usual, watch the language. When "breaking encryption" drew too much fire, the proposal returned as "upload moderation," then as a "voluntary" scheme you "consent" to. Signal's president Meredith Whittaker cut through it: "We can call it a backdoor, a front door, or upload moderation. But whatever we call it, each one of these approaches creates a vulnerability."

The consent is, of course, a fiction. Refuse the scan and you're blocked from sending images or links at all. Preneel called the rebranding smoke and mirrors. It's not consent if you don't have a viable alternative.

6. A backdoor for the good guys is a backdoor for everyone.

There is no scanning system that reads only criminals' messages. Once the power to inspect private communications sits on billions of devices, it's available to anyone who can reach it: hostile governments, hackers, and future officials with new priorities. Encryption works for everyone or it's broken for everyone.

7. Once the scanner is installed, the target list can be changed silently.

The detector doesn't understand what it's hunting. It matches against a list or a trained model, and that list can be swapped with a remote update. The scientists' letter is explicit: nothing technical limits scanning to abuse material. The content depends on what political operators decide to feed it. Do you trust your politicians today even? What about the next batch that come along?

Add the fingerprint of a banned pamphlet, a protest flyer, or a leaked document, and the same machinery reports those instead. Because the list can't be inspected, no user can verify it looks only for what it claims to. A tool built for one purpose, on every phone, waiting for a configuration change: that is what the surveillance state looks like as hardware.

8. To enforce it, they have to come for the tools that protect journalists and dissidents.

Scanning only works if you can't opt out. So the encrypted apps that refuse to comply get pushed out, and the privacy tools people use to reclaim their communications get blocked. The same infrastructure that stops abuse material from being shared protects a journalist's source, an activist under an authoritarian government, and an ordinary person in a censored country. You can't dismantle private communication for the guilty without dismantling it for the people who need it most.

9. Signal and others will leave before they comply, and the courts are already skeptical.

Signal has said plainly it will leave the EU rather than weaken its encryption. So the law's first achievement could be to drive the most secure messenger off the continent while serious abusers move to tools beyond EU reach.

The legal ground is shifting too. In Podchasov v. Russia, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that weakening end-to-end encryption for everyone can't be justified. The EU would be mandating exactly what its own human-rights court says states may not do.

10. It keeps dying because Europe keeps rejecting it. It keeps coming back anyway.

Chat control has been voted down, postponed, and rebranded for four years. A blocking minority led by Germany killed the mandatory-scanning version in October 2025. The "voluntary" regime expired in April 2026. Parliament rejected its extension in March. Now it's back in July, through a trick designed to make rejection harder. This isn't democracy.

This is how surveillance law passes: not in one vote, but by returning until the public stops watching. The way to protect children is the way experts keep pointing to: funding investigators, prevention, and better platform design, not scanning half a billion people's messages. Nym is against chat control because privacy is not the enemy of safety. Mass surveillance is.

Nym opposes chat control for the same reason we build what we build: privacy has to be designed into the technology we use. Metadata – who you talk to, when, and from where – is as revealing as any message, and a system that scans your communications maps your life.

The alternative isn't "nothing." It's real end-to-end encryption, technology that proves what it needs to without exposing who you are, and resources aimed at the crime instead of the population. As Preneel keeps asking, it's unclear why governments reach for mass surveillance instead of preventing the abuse itself. Until they answer that, the scanning stays automated and pointed at you. We won't pretend that's protection.

Another type of internet is still possible.