EU privacy regulators are concerned about law requiring child abuse scan

European privacy regulators warn against a European bill that will oblige tech companies to scan internet traffic for child abuse. In its current form, the law would be “more dangerous to the rights of citizens than to criminals.”

The letter comes from the European Data Protection Board, the association of national supervisors, and from the European Data Protection Supervisor, the regulator of European politics. The EDPB and EDPS warn about the consequences that can have a bill of the European Parliament. This law obliges companies to detect and remove child sexual abuse material or CSAM. The law applies to a wide number of companies, such as telecom providers, hosting providers and communication services. The bill is deliberately vague about the methods by which companies should detect CSAM. That is exactly what the privacy regulators denounce. “The lack of detail, clarity and accuracy for CSAM detection does not ensure that only targeted CSAM detection takes place,” they write. There would be a risk that the proposal could easily be expanded and generalized, forcing companies to scan for other content as well. This would put the law at odds with the privacy law. This states that a clear goal must be drawn up in advance for which data is collected.

The EDPB and EDPS also say that various proposals in the law are likely to cause false positives. For example, the law prescribes that ‘artificial intelligence’ must be used to find CSAM, but according to the regulators this would ‘probably lead to errors and cause a high degree of intrusiveness in the lives of citizens’.

Regulators also fear that the law will undermine end-to-end encryption. This undermines other fundamental freedoms, such as freedom of communication and freedom of expression, but also ‘innovation and growth in the digital economy’.

With such steps, the law would ultimately endanger Europeans’ rights more than criminals, regulators say. They are not calling on the European Commission to take the law off the table, but to amend it on many points.