EU Tries To Justify Support For Scanning Private Messages With Manipulative Public Poll Results

If you’re tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Recent findings from a poll conducted by the EU Department of the Interior DG Home via the Eurobarometer platform have drawn criticism for their alleged manipulation of public opinion in favor of total chat control. Advocates for privacy, such as European MEP Patrick Breyer, claim that the presented results do not truly represent the desires of the EU populace. The crux of the controversy revolves around the nature of the questions posed to the respondents. The poll primarily inquired whether automatic detection of online child sexual abuse content should be mandatory—a proposition that a large majority of respondents endorsed. However, privacy proponents argue that these queries were misleading, as respondents weren’t clearly informed that the proposed measures included the universal scrutiny of private messages via fallible algorithms, and effectively end privacy for all. One key question revolved around whether service providers should identify child sexual abuse material and grooming conversations when there’s a significant risk of such occurrences on a given platform. The phrasing of this query was criticized for subtly insinuating that such detection could be perfectly accurate, devoid of any false positives. In reality, as much as 80% of machine-flagged private messages and images are found to be non-incriminating, thus revealing the misleading nature of the question. This manipulation was further exposed when, in an independent survey, respondents were explicitly asked whether they would endorse their private messages being examined unsolicitedly for…EU Tries To Justify Support For Scanning Private Messages With Manipulative Public Poll Results