The magic lies in the tracking that instant messaging providers apply to our communications for strictly commercial purposes. Although most of these platforms claim that our messages are end-to-end encrypted and only the sender and receiver can access this content, it is clear that our conversations are not as private as we think and even less so since the European Parliament approved the appearance of Chatcontrol in our lives.And if this happens in our personal communications, we can intuit that it works the same way in organisational environments where privacy and confidentiality are decisive factors when communicating with our teams and, especially, with our customers. It is clear that the content of these communications is of extraordinary value to our company and we have an obligation to protect it at all costs since the violation of this privacy could damage our reputation in an extraordinary way.
What is “Chatcontrol”?
In early July 2020 the European Parliament approved a new regulation dubbed "Chatcontrol" aimed at combating child pornography and child sexual abuse online, but according to members of the parliament who opposed this regulation facilitates mass surveillance and tracking of our communications in an automated way, including everything we send by private emails or encrypted applications such as Whatsapp or Signal.
The problem arises in how Chatcontrol is going to implement this surveillance in the different platforms and if it means opening a door to track all our information.
The European Parliament's new legislation on Chatcontrol allows messaging service providers to control and monitor our content with the aim of being able to alert countries' law enforcement agencies of suspicious activity. This is what the approved text states, but many privacy activists believe that it is nothing more than a 'Trojan horse' to legitimise the massive and automated surveillance of all kinds of applications.
There are key points such as that, at least for the time being, it will be voluntary to exercise this automated surveillance by providers or the insistence that it is an exceptional and temporary case. In addition, what the EU has just approved gives legal coverage to something that most providers have been doing for years.
How does Chatcontrol affect us?
According to lawyer David Maeztu the new regulation does nothing more than open the door to greater surveillance, in this case for greater protection of minors, and give legal cover to what the platforms already do on a voluntary basis. "Chatcontrol opens the door, or rather, validates the continuation of mass monitoring of communications, with the excuse of protecting minors. Theoretically the situation is limited in time, 3 years are given to this temporary measure, but we have already seen with other rules in this sense that end up being indeterminate in time." "What is intended is to validate something that providers already do on a voluntary basis, but they want to give it legal cover." This whole package of reforms pushes the platforms to a control of the content that is published on them by sacrificing the confidentiality of private electronic correspondence.
In a survey released in April 2021, conducted among more than 10,000 citizens in 10 European countries, it determined that 72% of the participants were against Chatcontrol and 18% of the respondents supported it. Although the purpose of the rule may not seem bad to anyone, since it is theoretically aimed at protecting our minors, it leaves instant messaging providers with an unlimited capacity to intrude on our privacy and they can misuse the rule by tracking our content and activity for other purposes. As this is a voluntary standard, ēllu does not apply it and we protect your communication so that only you and the recipient/s have access to your content, avoiding monitoring and safeguarding your privacy, which is one of the main pillars of our brand.
