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The Right to Privacy should be Inviolable

The Right to Privacy should be Inviolable

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This petition has been created by M S. and may not represent the views of the Avaaz community.
M S.
started this petition to
The European Union
It has been the European Union's goal to ensure mass digital surveillance of all European Member State citizens since at least 2020. Internally it's called Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, or CSAR, however this provision is more widely known as "Chat Control" in public discourse. The buck to pass this legislation is passed to the next presidency every time it changes and now in 2025 Denmark was at first voted down, then the presidency rushed a different proposal which, on the surface, makes the proposal seem reasonable as it has removed all mandatory provisions and instead replaced it with voluntary ones.

The problem is that Article 4 and 6 uses deceptive language which would make voluntary participation moot entirely and it would in fact increase the reach of the surveilliance compared to the previous text. Essentially, the "voluntary" version mandates that chat and email providers, "high risk services", are compelled to use all available measures to keep the service "safe". This means that the EU can demand that services use Client Side Scanning regardless of whether they wish to voluntarily do it or not, making the voluntary part of this legislation meaningless and incredibly easy to exploit.

On top of that the new text also mandates that all people use digital age verification to login to all services meaning that people who work under anonymity like journalists, or whistleblowers who *need* to be able to report things unscathed, no longer can.

Find more detailed information here: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

The issue with all of this isn't that the EU wishes to protect children from harm by reducing the amount of CSAM that is passed around online. The real issue here is that this legislation will put all 450 million european citizens under constant 24/7 surveilliance and present a backdoor into every single device in the union because as previous experiences have shown us, it is not a matter of *if* someone who isn't supposed to have access finds a way into that system, it's a matter of *when*.

The EU is jeopardizing the security and privacy of ALL citizens, in ALL member states, despite extensive research, experts and organisations showing that this type of  surveilliance will have a chilling effect on free speech and expression, hamper protest and activist organising, give billions of false positives making authorities highly unlikely to actually find the needles in the haystack they are searching for and it's a ticking timebomb waiting to go off in terms of data leaks and hacker group attacks.

The right to privacy or private life is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 12), the European Convention of Human Rights (Article 8) and the European Charter of Fundamental Rights (Article 7). So how can it be that this sort of legislation can pass at all when it is greatly conflicting with the EU's own legislation?

We need to have it written in stone that the right to privacy is invioable. That if we wish to live in a free world then we must accept some risks otherwise they might as well come out and say the quiet part out loud.
This legislation should not be tolerated, this legislation should not be accepted and if the articles described above mean anything to the EU then this legislation is unenforceable and thus invalid.

Let's all stand together and tell the EU

#RespectOurPrivacy
Posted (Updated )