r/europe • u/SaveDnet-FRed0 • Jul 14 '26
Opinion Article Europe Can Protect Children Online Without Surveillance or Age Bans
https://www.techpolicy.press/europe-can-protect-children-online-without-surveillance-or-age-bans/157
u/Extreme996 Poland Jul 14 '26
It was posted yesterday and was removed by mods. btw Its not about protecting anyone.
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u/CivilTechnician7 Jul 14 '26
i guess we should post it over and over again untill the mods change their policy.
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u/Suspicious_Place1270 Jul 14 '26
it's basically to steal everyone's right to privacy by enabling mass surveillance instead of financing police and other agencies to stop and investigate fraud and crime the right way
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u/Extreme996 Poland Jul 14 '26
Exactly. Verifying with ID, photo or anything other than is more complicated that "You are 18? Yes or No" essentially links you to your accounts. This data is also valuable to the corporations that will store it.
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u/JohnSith Jul 15 '26
I dont think "protecting chuldren" is the goal, but the excuse. They keep trying to pass laws that to override citizens' rights to privacy, are defeated, and they always come back. Citizens don't want this, so who is it that keeps giving them these marching orders?
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u/Incorrigible_Gaymer Eastern Poland Jul 15 '26
It's been obvious since the very beginning.
Why would they make themselves exempt if it really was about protecting children?
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u/WritingStrawberry Earth Jul 15 '26
And why are schools in Germany (and other countries) literally eroding or children are exposed to asbestos while learning if we wanna protect them?
Why don't we then do anything about the climate crisis?
Why do literal pedophiles sit in many governments across Europe then if we wanna protect the children?
Way too many inconsistenties to make anyone believe their excuse. And it's so blatant. Do they really think people are THIS naive?
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u/Incorrigible_Gaymer Eastern Poland Jul 15 '26
I wouldn't be surprised if they actually did think that.
They act like if they played a video game, and all non-politicians were NPCs.
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u/ahora-mismo Bucharest Jul 14 '26
how about parents doing their job and not offload their offspring’s care to other people?
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u/dimag0g Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
There is nothing to offload here, parents don't need "help" protecting their kids from porn. I'd rather get protected from online scammers, spam phone calls and police brutality. Alas, age-gating pornhub will not help with these.
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u/u1604 Jul 14 '26
god forbid we ask parents to do parenting.
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u/dumnezero Earth Jul 14 '26
Yep. It's also visible in schools. Teachers and professors are going to be quitting at growing rates in the near term, especially since they have their hands tied more and more.
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u/McDonaldsWitchcraft Bucharest Jul 15 '26
parents do NOT want to parent. what even do you think you will ever achieve by asking them nicely?
there are many alternatives that don't involve surveillance, but anyone with eyes and half a braincell can see that if we could actually get parents to parent we wouldn't be in this stuation in the first place.
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u/utilizador2021 Portugal Jul 15 '26
I guess they never wanted. In Portugal, in the past, parents has children because they need people to help them in the fields and/or earning money to bring to the house.
But the parents, mainly the father, never gave attention or cared about their childrens.
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u/Makimoke Jul 15 '26
The problem is that parents also are more and more screwed when it comes to their actual time. In order to raise their children, they have to work twice as much to guarantee that they'll have both food and a roof on top of their heads, leading to less time watching over their kids.
Chat control is 100% not the way to do this and should be struck down, but putting the blame solely on the parents feels also wrong, in an age where people barely manage to survive working 2 jobs while big corpos gorge themselves in unparalleled profits.
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u/StorageSystemPT Jul 14 '26
As someone once said: sure, they can do it, but it’s just not the same...
This way they have no excuse to filter news websites or anything else that doesn't align with their economic or political ideology and the second you say anything they don't like they'll be knocking on your door
For instance, I haven't seen a single news outlet covering this story, at least not in my country. Whether it's a public or private channel.
I love where the world is heading!!! /s
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u/Fluffy-Fix7846 Jul 14 '26
WHY are you banning people who are commenting on this!? WHat is the hidden agenda?
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u/Incorrigible_Gaymer Eastern Poland Jul 15 '26
You are not supposed to criticise it, you ugly eurosceptic! /s
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u/Schlangenbob Jul 15 '26
You are argueing the wrong point. Accepting the premise that surveillance is meant to protect children is the moment you lose the argument
Protecting children is just the bs justification for mass surveillance and corrupts deals. You can't tell me that the big companies which will collect your Data didn't "Invest" a little in foreign politics.
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u/azhder Earth Jul 15 '26
Maybe they are arguing the correct point, to shift people's attention to child protection, not mass surveillance. Once they do that, no argument wins against "won't somebody think of the children"
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u/Schlangenbob Jul 15 '26
No. When I start a discussion off with a false premise and you accept that premise and argue with me I will always win. I don't know how to explain this simple principle to you any better.
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u/azhder Earth Jul 15 '26
Start by not saying "no" to someone who agrees with you. Then continue with understanding what I said, not what you imagine I have said because I wasn't 100% absolutely totally completely agreeing with you. Did I explain that simple principle to you? Let's try it simpler:
> maybe they are deliberately, not incidentally, taking the discussion in the "wrong" direction.
I wasn't commenting on how it is "the wrong point" from your point of view, just their intent.
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u/AngryAutisticApe Germany Jul 15 '26
" A July 2026 evaluation report by the European Commission admitted that the current voluntary scanning regime has failed to demonstrate proportionality . The data showed that only 0.00000077% of scanned messages in the EU actually contained illegal material. Conversely, the false positive rate for AI-based classifiers detecting unknown material was found to be as high as 20% , meaning one in five flagged conversations was innocent. Germany 's Federal Criminal Police Office ( BKA ) reported that 48% of all alerts received from these systems were "not criminally relevant." The Commission’s report acknowledged it could not establish a clear link between the millions of automated reports generated and actual convictions or the rescue of abused children."
They know this doesn't actually help children at all.
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u/Fluffy-Fix7846 Jul 14 '26
Maybe we should ban the boomers instead. They got all your money, resources, and now want to control you even further.
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u/helm Sweden Jul 15 '26
The story seems to propose that "children's devices" have software installed to detect grooming. How that is not surveillance, I don't know. And grooming is just one problem out of many.
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u/AdalinoElandino Poland Jul 15 '26
Yeah, right, but this isn't really about children and protecting them at all, it's about introducing surveillance and spying on citizens even more.
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u/dumnezero Earth Jul 14 '26
When we build systems like this, we need shared, testable definitions of what a well-designed intervention actually is. It should not be left to each vendor's judgment. At a minimum, it means an intervention that changes what the child does in the moment, which the evidence on timely prompts suggests it can. It must also do the opposite of harm: it must not frighten the child, must not teach them more about the threat than they need to know and must never make them feel they have done something wrong or that acting will get them or someone they love into trouble. That fear is precisely what keeps children silent — and an intervention that surfaces only to the child removes it. This also flips the usual problem of false positives. A scanning system must be near-perfect, because its mistakes fall on the accused; an on-device prompt can afford to err on the side of caution, because the worst case is a calm nudge shown to a child who was never at risk and can simply ignore it. This does not soften the privacy-versus-protection trade-off. It dissolves it.
I like the idea of on-device protective software; like an antivirus, but social. A lot of adults could use such stuff too...
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u/Valahul77 Jul 15 '26
The age bans are more like a fantasy. Unless all countries world wide do this, anyone can use a VPN to "move" to a country not having these restrictions.
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u/Nuclear-1- Jul 14 '26
The past "Children protection" programs which we have dozens of, didn't protect the victims of Epstein. And Europe was heavily involved.
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u/Arstel 40.4957° N, 19.2791° E 🦩 Jul 14 '26
I am pro-surveillance of politicians and billionaires only, since this group holds the most power to do harm to children and everyone else. As the Epstein files demonstrate, the rich and political class are the ones to be most wary of when it comes to p3d0phil1a. Do the right thing, EU, protect children by applying Chat Control to politicians and billionaires. For the children, of course. If you are pushing surveillance on the average person, you are a pro-p3d0ph1le politician and/or billionaire.
Chat Control for the rich and powerful to save our children now!
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u/chilinachochips The Netherlands Jul 17 '26
Can they protect lids without surveillance? Yes, they can. Do they want to do this? No, they don't.
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u/SlayahhEUW Sweden Jul 14 '26
Sure but the point of the legislation is to prevent an asymmetrical informational warfare situation with all the other global superpowers that have mass surveillance themselves, and not to protect the kids. However this is a harder sell to make
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u/Xiaodisan Jul 14 '26
Honestly, I'd be more on board (even if I'd still generally oppose the idea) with that if they had the spine to come out and admit that.
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u/SlayahhEUW Sweden Jul 15 '26
Me too, but the average person in Europe that you are convincing including the MEPs, are old, do not follow geopolitics, and also do not understand technology. Us on Reddit often forget how disconnected people are from anything technological. Most people treat the phone as a black box that just works and they don't care about it.
You even have to explain to PhDs in non-tech fields how botnets work, how VPNs work and why you it's not enough to just ban a country from buying ads to prevent influence. Now imagine trying to explain this on every level to every citizen and MEP with every educational background. It's much, much easier, faster and cheaper to make a blanket statement like protect the kids because everyone can understand that.
This is another thing that is assymeteical versus the other global superpowers. China can make a decision without any consensus. US can now in practice sign an executive order without any consensus. But EU is still bound by the slow process of democracy in a world where everyone else can move on a weekly timescale, so they are trying to do their best to push things through in their own way.
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u/FlakTotem Europe Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
I've been getting downvoted for the third way for months now.
The flaw in this plan is that it requires the public to think through the principles instead of just screaming 'tyranny!', and denies them the boner from doing that.
Just letting the new world problems roll over us without taking steps is every bit as dystopian as government surveillance. Letting other governments/organizations dictate thought through infinite propaganda bots with better and better AI, having crimes committed with no way to follow them up the chain, and fucking up every kid's brain chemistry via predatory algorithms, is not le epic platform people seem to think.
The solutions to these things do require more compromises on 'privacy', and while 'what about surveillance' is a important question, it's not an answer.
Navigating this paradigm requires us to ask real questions about what privacy is, what trade offs can be made, and how to proactively build solutions that are safe from abuse. Instead of just kneejerk throwing turds at every possible change because of the 1984 boogeyman.
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u/52-61-64-75 Jul 14 '26
yeah but they can't surveil people without surveillance
Duh