The EU’s proposed “ChatControl” legislation, if passed, would invade digital living spaces where we talk, share and collaborate just as we do in our physical homes. ChatControl would impact the private digital lives of 450 million+ EU citizens. It is the equivalent of peering into millions of homes across the continent.
In this article, Benjamin Schilz, CEO of Wire, argues that this approach treats digital space as inherently corrupt and unworthy of privacy while doing little to stop the criminals it claims to target.
In modern business, it has been common to refer to the digital workspace as the new reality, because so much of actual work happens online today. We message each other 1:1 and in groups and channels. We call each other and hold videoconferences online instead of meeting strictly in physical rooms. We share files, emojis, images, videos, and collaborate on documents online. This isn’t just about remote work. Even people sitting next to each other in an open-plan office interact online as much as in person, because that’s what work has become.
That notion of digital space is no less true for everyone’s personal lives. Billions of people spend a significant portion of their time in an extended digital living space. We chat and message with our friends and relatives. We call and videoconference together. We share files, images, videos, and even collaborate on joint projects online. We play games together, watch videos together, and do so many collaborative things online.
In essence, our phones, computers, and apps are now a digital version of our private living space. We have the exact same kinds of conversations online with friends and family as we would in our dining rooms, our living rooms, and yes, even our bedrooms.
Cameras and Microphones In Your Home?
Nobody would make the argument that in order to prevent crimes, the government should be allowed to install cameras and microphones in our dining rooms, living rooms, and bedrooms.
Remember that many bad things happen inside people’s homes. Many illegal forms of abuse that include but go far beyond crimes committed against children occur in private homes: domestic battery, illegal drug use, suicides, and murders. Yet the idea that people could be non-stop surveilled in their homes to prevent crime is anathema not only because privacy is a fundamental human right, but because the vast majority of what happens in homes is normal and good. In theory, you could focus a tremendous amount of money and effort via blanket surveillance to eliminate crime inside homes, but that society would not be worth living in. We reject such a notion out of hand, for good reason.
Yet, this is exactly what ChatControl is proposing to do in the digital equivalent of our private physical spaces. Mass surveillance of everything said or shared. The assumption is that unlike our physical homes, our private digital living space is unworthy of privacy. Further, there is a dark implied assumption that digital space is inherently corrupt in its nature and deserving of far greater suspicion, even though just like our physical homes, the vast majority of what happens in these spaces is normal and good. Yet, a double standard is applied.
There is no way that a society that values privacy should accept such intrusion into private living spaces, whether physical or digital.
A Cheap Charade of Real Action Against Criminal Content
The sad thing about ChatControl is that it is a massive cop out in the fight against the production and sharing of criminally exploitative content about children. This fight is legitimate and valuable. Yet why, we ask, is there not energy being applied to go after the source materials rather than perform mass digital home invasion?
The reason is that it takes real effort to surveil the online sources and producers of this illicit content and take it down, both in the open and in the dark net. Instead of going after the most egregious “bad guys”, ChatControl substitutes the charade of action by breaking a fundamental right to privacy and harming all the “good guys”; the vast majority of normal, everyday people doing normal, everyday things in their digital living spaces.
The logic to this is deeply broken. It is similar to the notion within certain societies (against a massive trove of global crime evidence) that controlling access to firearms has nothing to do with crimes committed with firearms. ChatControl is similar in its misdirection, because it targets and abuses the rights of the whole public–who are the victims of such abusive crimes, rather than going after the core abusers–the producers and publishers of such content.
The Sin of Sloth and Beyond
Sloth is classically one of the seven deadly sins. ChatControl is a lazy, low-effort, ineffective way to “fight” crime. But that’s not its only sin. By unjustifiably taking away fundamental rights to privacy and invading and sucking up the contents of people’s personal living spaces, it also commits another deadly sin: greed. And can we really expect that over time, there will not be the further deadly sin of gluttony as the grounds for surveillance spread beyond the narrow knife-point being used today to pierce privacy rights, and expand to many other categories of surveillance, spurred by the lust for greater power and control? Given human nature, should ChatControl pass into EU law, all of us will likely become gluttons for our own punishment.