Proportionaliteit EU regelgeving materiaal misbruik kinderen - Bert Hubert's writings
a day ago
- The EU proposal mandates scanning of all interpersonal communications (WhatsApp, etc.) for known and unknown child abuse material and grooming, affecting 500 million Europeans without exceptions for journalists, doctors, lawyers, or clergy.
- Proportionality analysis requires balancing the potential prevention of child abuse against the harms from false positives, privacy intrusions, and cybersecurity risks.
- Scanners are imperfect, leading to many false alarms; false positives can trigger police investigations that are highly damaging, as seen in the Dutch childcare benefits scandal.
- Even scanning only known material via fingerprints poses risks: databases may contain innocuous images, fingerprints can be manipulated, and the technology is opaque.
- The proposal violates recent privacy jurisprudence treating phones as private spaces, and bulk surveillance of non-suspects is likely unlawful.
- The scanner creates new attack surfaces for spyware like Pegasus and Predator, and EU bureaucracy could slow security updates, while data leaks from EU databases could devastate individuals.
- The proposal is disproportionate, likely to lose in court, and risks creating a new scandal similar to the Dutch childcare benefits affair.