Chat application Signal will leave the European market if the European Union introduces chat monitoring, a controversial proposal to combat the distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
“If we were given the choice of either undermining the integrity of our encryption and our data protection guarantees or leaving Europe, we would unfortunately decide to leave the market,” Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker told German news agency DPA, according to local news outlets.
She reiterated her position by promising that Signal will never undermine the integrity of its end-to-end encryption.
“It guarantees the privacy of millions upon millions of people around the world, often in life-threatening situations as well. Unfortunately, politicians continue to fall prey to a kind of magical thinking that assumes you can create a backdoor that only the good have access to. But ultimately, we’d be leaving the market before having to comply with dangerous laws like these,” Whittaker adds.
The European Commission wants to introduce a law requiring chat services to monitor all messages sent by their users.
In the past three years, numerous proposals have been discussed, but as of yet, no consensus has been reached. This is because implementing client-side scanning requires weakening encryption. A majority of the EU Member States oppose this idea and insist that encryption remains intact.
The current proposal, devised by Denmark, calls for phones to be pre-installed with software to detect CSAM content before users send it. This would require scanning to take place on the phone itself. However, this proposal is unacceptable as well for most member states.
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“A uniform legal basis in the EU is urgently needed because the situation is worrisome. Private, confidential exchanges must continue to be private. At the same time, there is an obligation to counteract child abuse online. The aim is therefore to achieve a united stance between the departments,” a German representative of the Federal Ministry of the Interior said last month.
Denmark’s proposal on chat control is scheduled to be discussed on October 13th and 14th.
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