In the online world, the best tool we have to defend this right is end-to-end encryption.
Politicians across Europe attempted to undermine encryption, seeking to access and scan our private messages and pictures.
EFF spent this year fighting hard against an EU proposal that, if it became law, would have been a disaster for online privacy in the EU and throughout the world.
In the name of fighting online child abuse, the European Commission, the EU's executive body, put forward a draft bill that would allow EU authorities to compel online services to scan user data and check it against law enforcement databases.
The proposal would have pressured online services to abandon end-to-end encryption.
EFF has been opposed to this proposal since it was unveiled last year.
We lobbied EU lawmakers and urged them to protect their constituents' human right to have a private conversation-backed up by strong encryption.
In November, a key EU committee adopted a position that bars mass scanning of messages and protects end-to-end encryption.
It also bars mandatory age verification, which would have amounted to a mandate to show ID before you get online; age verification can erode a free and anonymous internet for both kids and adults.
We'll continue to monitor the EU proposal as attention shifts to the Council of the EU, the second decision-making body of the EU. Despite several Member States still supporting widespread surveillance of citizens, there are promising signs that such a measure won't get majority support in the Council.
Make no mistake-the hard-fought compromise in the European Parliament is a big victory for EFF and our supporters.
The governments of the world should understand clearly: mass scanning of peoples' messages is wrong, and at odds with human rights.
A Wrong Turn in the U.K. EFF also opposed the U.K.'s Online Safety Bill, which passed and became the Online Safety Act this October, after more than four years on the British legislative agenda.
The OSA requires platforms to take action to prevent individuals from encountering certain illegal content, which will likely mandate the use of intrusive scanning systems.
Even worse, it empowers the British government, in certain situations, to demand that online platforms use government-approved software to scan for illegal content.
The U.K. government said that content will only be scanned to check for specific categories of content.
Either all content is scanned and all actors-including authoritarian governments and rogue criminals-have access, or no one does.
Despite our opposition, working closely with civil society groups in the UK, the bill passed in September, with anti-encryption measures intact.
Ofcom must now take the OSA and, over the coming year, draft regulations to operationalize the legislation.
EFF will monitor Ofcom's drafting of the regulation, and we will continue to hold the UK government accountable to the international and European human rights protections that they are signatories to.
This Cyber News was published on www.eff.org. Publication date: Sat, 30 Dec 2023 15:43:05 +0000